Enid Derham: Verses about Sleep

When the impatient spirit leaves behind
The clogging hours and makes no dear delay
To drop this Nessus-shirt of night and day,
To cast the flesh that bound and could not bind
The heart untamable, the tireless mind,
In equal dissolution shall the clay
That once was seer or singer flee away--
It shall be fire and blown upon the wind.
Not us befits such change in radiance dressed,
Not us, O Earth, for whom thou biddest cease
Our grey endurance of the dark and cold.
These eyes have watched with grief, and now would rest;
Rest we desire, and on thy bosom's peace
The long slow change to unremembering mould.

The Soul, of late a lovely sleeping child,
Spreads sudden wings and stands in radiant guise,
Eyed like the morn and bent upon the skies;
Her the blue gulf dismays not, nor the wild
Horizons with the wrecks of thunder piled;
Storm has she known, and how its murmur dies
Starlike through stainless heavens she would rise
And be no more with cloudy dreams beguiled.
Was sleep not sweet?--sweet till on sleeping ears
Earth's voices broke in discord. Now she hears
Far, far away diviner music move;
Nor shall her wing be sated of its flight,
Nor shall her eyes be weary of the night,
While round her sweep the singing stars of Love.

MY FOLK’S the wind-folk, it’s there I belong,
I tread the earth below them, and the earth does me wrong,
Before my spirit knew itself, before this frame unfurled,
I was a little wandering breeze and blew about the world.
The winds of the morning that breathe against my cheek
Are kisses of comfort from a love too great to speak;
The whimpering airs that cry by night and never find their rest
Are sobbing to be taken in and soothed upon my breast.
The storm through the mountains, the tempest from the sea,
That ride their cloudy horses and take no thought of me,
They are my noble brothers that hasten to the fight,
They fill my heart with singing, they fill my eyes with light,
They’re a shield upon my shoulder, a sword by my side,
A battle cry for weariness,—and a plume of pride.
But sometimes in the moonlight, when the moon is in the west,
Young and strange and virginal and dropping to her rest,
There comes a wind from out the south, a little chill and thin,
And draws me from the human warmth that houses it within.
My soul streams forth to follow a soul that lures it on,
The sleepy flesh calls kin to it, and murmurs to be gone;
Across the dreaming dewy flowers and through the shadowy trees
The sweet insistent whisper comes, and I am ill at ease.
How, they have not told me, and where, I do not know,
But the wind-folk is my folk, and some day I’ll go.