Merciful is Sleep—with such Ancient
Harm taking constant place all around us.²
The waking have one Common world but the
Sleeping turn aside each into a world of its Own.³
Tired children placid Sleep—
Thro’ centuries of Noon!⁴
Before we’re Emptied for sleep, what are we?
And when we’re Emptied for sleep, we are not—
And when we’re Filled with sleep, we never were—⁵
Sleep is no longer a recuperation of vital forces—
But an Oblivion: a nightly brush with Annihilation—⁶
Returning from the vaulted domes of our Colossal Sleep,
We come home to find a tall metropolis of Catacombs
Erected in the gangways of our mind.⁷
Let stil Silence trew night-watches keepe,
That sacred Peace may in its assurance rayne,
And tymely Sleep, when it is tyme to sleepe, may
Poure his limbs forth on your pleasant playne:⁸
Let placid Slumbers soothe each weary mind—
At morn to wake more Heav’nly, more Refin’d.⁹
Charm me Asleep, and melt me so
That Ravish’d hence I go:
Away in easy Slumbers!¹⁰
¹ C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
² Joanna Klink, The Graves
³ Heraclitus tr. John Burnet, quoted in Early Greek Philosophy
⁴ Emily Dickinson, Where Bells No More Affright the Morn
⁵ William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
⁶ J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
⁷ Sylvia Plath, Dooms of Exile
⁸ Edmund Spencer, Epithalamion
⁹ Phillis Wheatley, An Hymn to the Evening
¹⁰ Robert Herrick, To Music, to Becalm His Fever