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Hypnos

Wraiths of twilight-conjured mist:
At last, a prospect of release.
Come child, keep our nightly tryst.
To you, the wakeful weariest,
_I bring unconscious peace.

Steal softly past your unlaid ghosts,
Ignore the creaking of your stair,
Embrace the nightmares you dread most;
Your time has come to know the worst.
_Surrender, and prepare.

Rehearse the epilogue of day,
Snuff the candle, dowse the light.
Let me bear your thoughts away,
Let your abandoned psyche stray
_Where truth dissolves in night.

Believe you rule those wanton deeps,
But sovereignty comes at a cost.
Beside your bed, while shadows creep,
My arch twin brother never sleeps.
_You’ll meet him: Thanatos.

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Helios

You’ve travelled far and widely while you slept,
inhabited some dark disturbing dreams.
Now, refugee from otherness, you’ve stepped
into the hour when Helios redeems
the innocence of shadow from the dark.
The amnesty of reason has begun.

A star is nothing but a dying spark
struck from oblivion by the very sun
now probing all those dreadful holes and corners.
Each is empty. Wake to lambent light,
revel in the greenwood’s dawning chorus:
birds never heard of such a thing as night.

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Martin Briggs lives in Suffolk, England. He only began writing in earnest after retiring from a career in public administration, since when he has been published in various publications on both sides of the Atlantic.

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3 Responses

  1. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Those are two wildly enchanting and entertaining poems from different perspectives regarding sleep. You prove to have an adept and creative mind that conjures up imaginative images.

    Reply
  2. Joseph S. Salemi

    This is a sophisticated pair of poems, almost like Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” It’s interesting that the first poem has the title “Hypnos” (sleep), and is clearly in the voice of sleep speaking to a child. “Thanatos” (death) is mentioned at the finish of the poem, as if that name closed the circle. This would be a common trope in Western poetry, where “The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures” (Shakespeare), and where sleep and death are considered as complementary, or as parallels.

    But the second poem is about “Helios” (the sun), and concerns awakening from sleep. The speaker is unknown, or might simply be the authorial voice. It celebrates light, morning, waking, brightness. What we have here is an escape from sleep and from death, with a strong rhetorical push against both of them. Consider the language:

    “dark disturbing dreams”
    “refugee from otherness”
    “dreadful holes and corners”
    “Helios redeems”
    “Wake to lambent light”
    “revel in the dawning… chorus”

    Strongest of all are the lines “The amnesty of reason has begun” and “birds never heard of such a thing as night.” These two lines are jam-packed with meaning: the first is a powerful metaphor of the conscious human mind’s release from the dark obscurity of the unconscious, and the renewed freedom that rationality gives us; the second uses the flight of birds to describe, figuratively, the human release from earthbound, dark, nocturnal, mortal chains. Helios — the god of light, civilization, order, reason, consciousness, art, and achievement — is here expressing his triumph over the sleep and death of the first poem.

    The waking sleeper is a “refugee from otherness.” What an image! He has escaped from the dark pit of that which is NOT himself, and come at last into the bright light of his real birthright. Is that not what we in the West have before us as an urgent task? We must slough off the sick worship of “The Other” and “The Alien,” and awaken to the bright light of of Western cultural identity.

    Reply
  3. Cynthia L Erlandson

    These are both fascinating and beautifully written descriptions of things that are hard to describe. One thing I love about “Hypnos” is your stanza form, composed of four lines of tetrameter, followed by a fifth line of trimeter — the trimeter line seems to add an emphasis that strengthens the mood by drawing the reader up short (especially “You’ll meet him: Thanatos”). After that one, there’s a nice sense of relief in “Helios” — I feel like a “refugee from otherness.” I think the last line of each of the two stanzas is particularly insightful.

    Reply

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