Poems of Sleep and Dreams

by Peter Washington (Editor)

Poets have always drawn inspiration from the wild fancies of dream life. We spend a third of our lives asleep, and throughout history our nocturnal visions have engaged the interpretive talents of our greatest writers.

This treasury of poets–Sidney, Donne, Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, Whitman, Rilke, Plath, Graves, Roethke, Bishop, Moore, Updike, and many more–encompasses lullabies, invocations, aubades, songs, epigrams, and stories, in every conceivable mood from the broadly comic to the tragic. It includes poems about daydreams and nightmares, about falling asleep and about waking up, about insomnia, night thoughts, monsters of the dark, twilight, dawn, and the rebirth of morning. From Auden’s “Lullaby” to Rossetti’s “Nuptial Sleep,” from Salvatore Quasimodo’s “Insomnia” to Thom Gunn’s “Annihilation of Nothing,” Poems of Sleep and Dreams evokes the whole haunting, magical spectrum of sleep and dream.

Genres: Poetry

256 pages, Hardcover

First published April 6, 2004

Reviews

[Benita · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a good collection, but reading it I realized that I enjoy when poems are put together in one book because of their style, not their theme. People who have a broader taste in poetry will definitely enjoy it more than I did as I have a very specific taste in poetry style. Overall, I found something I really liked too, so give it a go!

[Stephanie Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The heart shall still remember Christ in its very sleep.” 💖

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

After death and love, sleep is probably the most common theme of poetry. One could make the argument that sleep, death, and love, aren't even discrete themes, as one can dream of lovers or even die in their sleep (they say it's the best way to go).

"Poems of Sleep and Dreams" accepts this bleed between concepts, and that the concept of "sleep" encompasses a heck of a lot more than literal shuteye. If the reader comes to the book with expectations to the contrary, they're bound to be disappointed. If their idea of dreams includes daydreams, and their concept of "sleep" includes the eternal kind, then this collections probably fits the bill.

A good mix of schools, styles, and centuries is on display. There are aubades by romantics bidding adieu to their loves as the moon gives way to the morning sun; doggerel ditties about counting sheep, and of course there are nightmares and insomniacs to be found, sometimes within the span of the same poem.

Standouts for me include a couple entries by Oxford Don Robert Graves, whose humanity and morbid wit compliment each other rather than jarring, and a lighter entry from Ogden Nash, which acts like ginger on the palate to cleanse things between the heavier offerings. The "Berceuse" section is obviously the most soporific, and its best entries needn't be set to music for the reader to enjoy the euphonic quality of the lullabies. I would have liked to see some more of the German expressionists included, a la Georg Trakl and Heym, especially in the "Nightmares" section, but that's more owing to a personal bias than to any oversight on the part of the anthologizers. The lack of drawings also seems like a missed opportunity. I hate to sound like a philistine lamenting the absence of "purty pitchers" but all those engravings and woodcuts on the frontispieces of old books of lullabies really tend to linger in the imagination at least as long as the words printed on the page.

Recommended nevertheless, notwithstanding the absence of etching, engravings, and Germans subject to melancholia.

[Maria Tander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished this book, I'm slow reading these days. It's an anthology of poems in relation to sleep, from poets in different historical eras. Since each poem is stand alone and it's not really a narrative book; each other is stand alone, I was reading this as a bedtime book every night before bed. So all the poems are squished around in my head, I don't remember them all 😅
One of those books that are good as a literary reference if you need a poem for something artistic.