Have you ever thought of life when you are asleep and vulnerable? Have you ever thought of universal harmony and balance when the worls is asleep? Read this poem to re-discover the peaceful truth of life. When reading, do not make haste, take your time to feel the quiet of slumber and joy of silence.
Walter de la Mare
SLEEP
When all, and birds, and creeping beasts, When the dark of night is deep, From the moving wonder of their lives Commit themselves to sleep. Without a thought, or fear, they shut The narrow gates of sense; Heedless and quiet, in slumber turn Their strength to impotence. The transient strangeness of the earth Their spirits no more see: Within a silent gloom withdrawn, They slumber in secrecy. Two worlds they have--a globe forgot, Wheeling from dark to light; And all the enchanted realm of dream That burgeons out of night.
Another thing that strikes me, and you were right to have noticed it, is a kind of humanization of the eartly process expressed through the verb "wheeling". A wheel is a human invention. Can it be stopped, broken or repaired? Or is it just a metaphor of eternal life? Another thing is the metaphor "burgeon" - a realm of dream is born by a night sleep.
Two worlds they have - a globe forgot, Wheeling from dark to light; And all the enchanted realm of dream That burgeons out of night.
These are the lines that hit my fancy. Walter de la Mare seems to have been a master of metaphor. His 'globe' is not simply turning round but wheeling - the verb used makes one feel our planet is eternal, and we are only visitors on it. The Night is haloed with mystique, and a dream is kin to a fabulous flower coming into bloom at night. We spend almost one third of our life sleeping, but isn't it another world of our reality?
