Now Sleeping Now Awake - Analysis

A love that won’t stay in one state

The poem’s central claim is that the speaker’s relationship to the divine beloved is a kind of holy agitation: it refuses stable categories like sleep and waking, speech and silence, wrath and kindness. The opening line, Now sleeping, now awake, makes the mind flicker between states, as if ordinary consciousness can’t hold what’s happening. The speaker’s heart (spelled hart here, which also slyly evokes an animal being hunted) is in constant fervour, not because it lacks peace, but because love itself is a furnace. The tone is fervent, slightly breathless, and intimate—addressing O you! directly—yet it keeps insisting that the truest story can’t be told in straightforward speech.

The covered saucepan: pressure as devotion

The image of the covered saucepan placed on fire is domestic and alarming at once. A pot with a lid implies containment: heat is applied, but release is restrained, so pressure builds. That pressure becomes a metaphor for the speaker’s spiritual condition—intensity that cannot simply vent in words. The poem’s contradiction is already here: devotion is not portrayed as calm contemplation; it is more like being cooked. Yet the saucepan is not an accident; it is placed on the fire, suggesting deliberate transformation. The speaker’s passion is not random emotion but a process the beloved has initiated.

Silencing wine and the paradox of loud quiet

When the speaker says the beloved has offered a silencing wine, the poem turns from heat to intoxication. Wine should loosen the tongue, but this wine does the opposite: it makes the speaker quiet. Still, that quiet is not empty. Each moment a new tale is shouting to be told in silence. The tension between shouting and silence is the poem’s engine: the speaker has more and more to say, but the proper mode is wordless. This is not simple repression; it’s the suggestion that ordinary speech would cheapen what’s being experienced. Silence becomes a higher register—one in which stories are real without being narrated.

Wrath that contains kindness, ignorance that contains gnosis

The poem intensifies its logic through deliberate reversals: In his wrath are a hundred kindnesses; in his meanness, a hundred generosities. The beloved (or God, implied by the scale of these claims) can’t be judged by surface appearances. What looks harsh might be care; what looks withholding might be a different form of giving. The sharpest inversion is In his ignorance, immeasurable gnosis. It’s almost a provocation: if the divine seems ignorant to us, that may only show the poverty of our measures. The phrase silently speaking like the mind pushes the idea further—thought can be vivid without being audible, and the divine can communicate in that inward way. The tone here is confident, even insistent, as if the speaker is defending the beloved against simplistic moral accounting.

Unconsciousness as the only way to hear

The poem’s strangest claim is that the words of the silenced cannot hear—but those made unconscious can. This sounds like a riddle until you read it alongside the earlier images. To be unconscious is to be removed from the waking ego that insists on controlling meaning. The beloved’s silencing wine doesn’t destroy language so much as disable the part of us that wants mastery through language. Hearing becomes possible only after a kind of surrender—like falling asleep, or passing out, or being absorbed in love so completely that self-monitoring stops.

The sea of Aden: contained pressure becomes vastness

The closing line gathers all the previous tensions into one expansive image: I am both silent and fermenting like the sea of Aden. Fermentation echoes the saucepan’s pressure and the wine’s transformation, but now the scale is oceanic. The speaker is not just simmering in a small pot; he is a sea that works invisibly, churning and ripening beneath the surface. The ending feels like a turn from confinement to magnitude: silence is no longer a lid clamped down; it is an immense, living medium. The final tone is exultant—still restless, but now that restlessness feels less like suffering and more like a chosen, sacred abundance.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If the beloved’s gift is to make the speaker unconscious, what kind of freedom is being offered? The poem seems to argue that the self’s usual wakefulness is a narrower prison than surrender is—yet it never fully denies the danger in heat, intoxication, and pressure. The beloved’s power is so total that even wrath is redefined as kindness, leaving the reader to ask where discernment lives when love insists on such absolute trust.