Second Sleep
The second sleep is when nightmares awaken. The ungrateful dead are resurrected and set off to gallop through the graveyard at night, pulling the battered soul along its broken hurdle through narrow cobbled streets, marshy fields, and rocky shores where lurks a dark nastiness. Your arms are outstretched and your feet are pinioned by unforgiving heels. With his silver thread, the robin stitches the hem of the new morning. These unstable steeds are still half a beat ahead of your heartbeat. You can recall that someone died yesterday: they overslept the dawn. This is the first day that you have no bridle, no bit or bridle holding you back, and no reins to direct your journey.
Note: Second Sleep is printed with the margin right-hand justification that is typical for prose poems, but it is impossible to reproduce here. The italics have been added for this online text with the author’s permission.)
I came across this week’s poem in the anthology Seconds (Ings Poetry), published last summer to celebrate the 50th open mic poetry gig at The Triangle in Shipley, West Yorkshire. These poets are both familiar and unknown to me, but they’re a vibrant mix of old favorites and newer names. Alongside this week’s poem, I’ve admired contributions from Carole Bromley, Matt Nicholson, Rachel Bower, Nick Allen, Andrew Lambeth, Ian Humphreys, Gaia Holmes, Mark Connors, Harry Man, William Coniston and Suzannah Evans. The poems are all worth reading. To buy a copy of the book, see Mike Farren’s website here.
Hannah Stone is a poet-theologian who loves prose poetry. Her passion for the genre is reflected in previous anthology publications, a chapter in the essay collection Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice and three unpublished pamphlets in preparation – among them, the enticingly named Twenty-Nine Volumes.
Stone’s prompt, the editorial call-out for poems on “seconds”, coincided with her interest in a concept that apparently preceded the introduction of street lighting. She explains: “I was aware from a poem I wrote about Pepys that in the 18th century it was common for people to conduct all sorts of business, in and out of the bedroom, in the intervals between sleeps. As an experienced insomniac, my experience with night-time vision has been extensive. I’ve noticed that my vividest dreams are usually in the predawn hours of somnolence. I wrote this poem in the aftermath of my mother dying, just after Christmas 2021, which coincided with me getting Covid, which is still with me in its postviral state, and produces a lot of very weird mental processes and sleep issues, among other things.”
Second Sleep is an emotive phrase. It can refer to death, the pre-death sleep that some religions believe happens before resurrection, or uncanny, possibly magical, daylight dozes. Hannah’s explanation chimed with my own experience: I often “sleep off” my first tiredness for a couple of hours, then feel fresh enough to start a mini-day. The most fascinating dreams are in the second sleep. For me, they often dramatise a long-term fear, and have a mysteriously shadowy public setting – railway station, airport, concert hall, classroom. These spaces are my domain, but I am simultaneously in control and lost. You may see corridors, stairs and even a giant computer screen.
For Hannah Stone’s narrator, the second sleep is a haunt of deeper nightmare, and the dream she recounts evokes an involuntary dash at an uncontrollable and fatal pace. The “bruised psyche” is strapped on a hurdle, being dragged along by galloping horses driven by the dead. One of the definitions of “hurdle”, and the most relevant to this nightmare, is “a frame or sled formerly used in England for dragging traitors to execution”.
The specification of the dead as “ungrateful” is potent. This is powerful. It reminds readers (of certain ages) of the sometimes psychedelic band Grateful Dead. And it alludes to the menace that many cultures have where the dead, feeling betrayed and acting in a hostile manner towards the still living. These phantoms will drag their prisoner through a poetic landscape that promises more damage. Adjectives work hard, and increase the reader’s sensation of being jolted bodily from one obstacle to another. The ginnels (a ginnel is “a narrow entrance between houses”) are “narrow” and “cobbled” (indicating danger underfoot and on both sides); the fields, “marshy”, the shores, “rocky”. While we might not be living in hell, we feel like we are racing through its hostile, unpredictable outskirts. Of course, the terrain is also that of the psyche, the “shadowy nastiness” a place in the human mind we might identify as evil.
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Having judiciously skirted the use of the first person, the narrative shifts to the vocative and addresses a “you”. Waking, this “you” remains in a state of near-sleep, “pinioned by unforgiving hooves”. The nightmare is going on somewhere, the heart still races, though the robin’s song suggests a new day, a newly stitched garment ready for the bruised psyche to wear. There’s a sort of distancing effect in the half-punning phrase “unstabled steeds”. But waking up latches the nightmare to the new reality it has deflected: “someone died yesterday … they overslept the dawn”. Now the full weight of the term “second sleep” is felt. And the “you”, like another nightmare horse, lacks bit, bridle or reins: lacks the guidance of a rider. That turn is quietly achieved and all the more haunting as apocalyptic fantasy fades, and the protagonist enters what might be called, in a suitably horrible phrase, the “new normal”, directionless and lost.
Perhaps the term “second sleep” is the old name for what more recently became known as REM sleep. It’s the period when most, though not all, dreaming occurs, and is essential to brain health. The late poet Derek Mahon alluded to it memorably in his villanelle The Dawn Chorus, which concludes: “Awaiting still our metamorphosis, / We hoard the fragments of what once we knew. It is not the sleep we have missed, but it is not actually sleep. / We yearn for that reality in this”.