I am thoroughly delighted that my poems ‘Wild Grapes’, ‘North Country’ and ‘Sleep’ have been successful. I do not write these poems for fame or money, but as an enjoyable use of my leisure time. It is an extra bonus that others enjoy reading them and become engulfed in the imaginary world I am able to create through poetic licence. Many of my ideas and images are conveyed through the use of poetic techniques and language.
I have intentionally written the poem ‘Sleep’ in a specific manner to convey different meanings and to provide an opportunity for the reader to interpretate this poem in their own way.
Within this poem I have included two voices to replace the traditional role of a narrator. One of these voices sustains the poem, being the voice of ‘sleep’, and the other one answers ‘sleep’ within the first stanza. I have purposely italicised the words ‘yes, utterly’, to isolate the response from the question. Sleep is asking the subject, ‘Do you give yourself’, meaning do you surrender yourself and utterly give yourself to me on your own free will. I have also intentionally used a pun with the phrase ‘body and no-body’, as it represents the physical and non-physical world; the conscious and the unconscious. Throughout the poem I have included the use of specific language and poetic techniques to describe the journey of the surrendered person(?) from their engulfing sleep until their awakening. Though, there are many other underlying concepts I have attempted to convey. The main interpretation of the world ‘Sleep’, is that it is personified as a mother, and when the subject surrenders itself to sleep it is figuratively embarking on its journey to the womb from the ovaries as a foetus, through growth and development, and eventually to its birth. Other interpretations of this poem are of lovers and plainly of sleep, though my main purpose was to represent the journey of the foetus. I am particularly fond of creating water imagery within my poems, and have...