The married couple sleep calmly in their bed, he with his palm on the hip of the wife, and she with her palm on the hip of the husband,
The sisters sleep lovingly side by side in their bed,
The men sleep lovingly side by side in theirs,
And the mother sleeps with her little child carefully wrapt.
The blind sleep, and the deaf and dumb sleep,
The prisoner sleeps well in the prison, the runaway son sleeps,
The murderer that is to be hung next day, how does he sleep?
And the murder’d person, how does he sleep?
The female that loves unrequited sleeps,
And the male that loves unrequited sleeps,
The head of the money-maker that plotted all day sleeps,
And the enraged and treacherous dispositions, all, all sleep.
This is from Walt Whitman’s “The Sleepers,” and if he is going to write a poem about anything, it’s going to take a while. Whitman wrote many poems, and they vary in quality, but this one is Peak Whitman for sure. Sleeping is something that unites us all. This whole business of being conscious is only part of the day, and that liminal patch in between is often where the muse lives. Bob Dylan called it “the sound of 3 am” and sang about a tambourine man who he follows in the “jingle jangle morning.” Across the pond, John Keats, in his brief poetic career—he died at of t.b. at 25 and in his final year his doctors told him his -poetry was killing him, so his late period was at 23—wrote not one but two poems on sleep.
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the ‘Amen,’ ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
The people who have the greatest appreciation for sleep are the ones who know what it’s like to be deprived of it. Generally, those of us who write are on alert to remember things an alarming amount of time. The perfect sentence just appeared in your head, and all you can do is approximate it? Cheat it? Unacceptable. We have to add extra worry to our worries or we haven’t worried enough. And writing, like all of the arts, is a place for people who know how to worry. And the things that ease the worries cause worries of their own. All of this does not always bring in the sandman.