Sleep
Sleep - form Summary
A Sonnet of Interrupted Sleep
This poem is an explicit sonnet that uses the form s compact argument to probe the disturbance between sleep and waking. The opening eight lines pose rhetorical questions about why awakening feels like theft and why dawn is sad. The poem then shifts into a reflective middle that treats dreams as a "timeless world" whose images fragment under daylight, and closes with a tightly contained, personal question about who one becomes in sleep. The sonnet structure—question, poetic explanation, concluding turn—concentrates the tension between loss on waking and the mysterious continuity of dream life.
Read Complete AnalysesIf sleep is truce, as it is sometimes said, a pure time for the mind to rest and heal, why, when they suddenly wake you, do you feel that they have stolen everything you had? Why is it so sad to be awake at dawn? It strips us of a gift so strange, so deep, it can be remembered only in half-sleep, moments of drowsiness that gild and adorn. The waking mind with dreams, which may well be but broken images of the night’s treasure, a timeless world that has no name or measure and breaks up in the mirrors of the day. Who will you be tonight, in the dark thrall of sleep, when you have slipped across its wall?
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