Variations on the Word "Sleep" -- Margaret Atwood

(Poem #1093) Variations on the Word "Sleep" I would like to watch you sleeping, which may not happen. I would like to watch you, sleeping. I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head and walk with you through that lucent wavering forest of bluegreen leaves with its watery sun & three moons towards the cave where you must descend, towards your worst fear I would like to give you the silver branch, the small white flower, the one word that will protect you from the grief at the center of your dream, from the grief at the center. I would like to follow you up the long stairway again & become the boat that would row you back carefully, a flame in two cupped hands to where your body lies beside me, and you enter it as easily as breathing in I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed & that necessary. -- Margaret Atwood

I loved today's poem for the way it drew me in, for the almost palpable
sense that I was accompanying the narrator on her journey into the still
centre of her lover's subconscious. I was strongly reminded of Orpheus, and
his descent into hell to rescue Eurydice (very likely a deliberate
resonance, with the poem's underworld imagery of staircases and boats),
and somewhat, too, of C. L. Moore's "Jirel of Joiry" (nice '30s fantasy
novel).

As always, Atwood's imagery is vivid and immersive - astonishingly
immersive, when you consider how nondescriptive it is. The way the little
images - the wavering, lucent forest, the flame in two cupped hands, the
watery sun - weave together into a delicate, fantastic whole is nothing
short of magical.

And then, having drawn us down into the depths and back again, Atwood leaves
with the unexpected and beautiful image in the last verse. It is worth
noting how well the verse works both as a conclusion to the longer poem and
as an almost self-contained poem in its own right. Structurewise, too it
balances the first two lines, providing the 'reality' from which the poem
descends into a dreamscape, and to which it returns, enriched. Note the
change from the semidetached "I would like to watch you sleeping" to the
wholly involved "I would like to be the air that inhabits you".

On a deeper level, the poem is not so much about journey as about rhythm -
the visceral troughs and crests of breathing and sex and dreaming and sleep
cycles, the longer rhythms of relationships and life, and through it all,
the simultaneous suggestion of constancy, the calm still point through which
cycles pass, departing but always returning, unnoticed and necessary.

martin