Night Sweat

Work-table, litter, books and standing lamp, plain things, my stalled equipment, the old broom--- but I am living in a tidied room, for ten nights now I've felt the creeping damp float over my pajamas' wilted white . . . Sweet salt embalms me and my head is wet, everything streams and tells me this is right; my life's fever is soaking in night sweat--- one life, one writing! But the downward glide and bias of existing wrings us dry--- always inside me is the child who died, always inside me is his will to die--- one universe, one body . . . in this urn the animal night sweats of the spirit burn. Behind me! You! Again I feel the light lighten my leaded eyelids, while the gray skulled horses whinny for the soot of night. I dabble in the dapple of the day, a heap of wet clothes, seamy, shivering, I see my flesh and bedding washed with light, my child exploding into dynamite, my wife . . . your lightness alters everything, and tears the black web from the spider's sack, as your heart hops and flutters like a hare. Poor turtle, tortoise, if I cannot clear the surface of these troubled waters here, absolve me, help me, Dear Heart, as you bear this world's dead weight and cycle on your back.

death loss sonnet

Night Sweat - form Summary

Two Sonnets, One Crisis

The poem is built as two linked fourteen-line sections, using a sonnet-like framework to contain a speaker's physical illness and emotional crisis. The first section turns night sweating into an image of depression, guilt, and the wish for death. The second shifts toward daylight and the speaker's wife, whose presence offers possible relief without fully removing the burden he feels.

Read Complete Analyses