“Variation on the Word Sleep” by Margaret Atwood

In her poem “Variation on the Word Sleep“, well-loved Canadian poet Margaret Atwood (1939-) uses sleep as a metaphor for the highly personal, often isolating and poorly rehearsed journey of loss and transformation that is generally called grief in the modern industrial world. The poet finds herself laying next to her bedmate, wishing to journey with them to the “grief at the center of your dream,” and imagining herself doing so, yet knowing that she remains unable to support her companion as functionally and profoundly as she’d like to.

Credit: tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com

The poem begins with Atwood articulating the nature of her voyeuristic position, looking at grief from the outside. There is a sense of feeling separate, yet wishing to penetrate and participate in the experience:

“I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head”

The poet goes on to imagine travelling through a dreamscape with her companion, ultimately arriving at “the cave where you must descend,/towards your worst fear.” Powerless to help navigate that cave, and knowing that it is not her journey to take, she  imagines offering a talisman-like a spell of protection:

“I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me”

Credit: franceslivings.com

While this imagery is quite beautiful and in the spirit of compassionate service, it is tragically underscored by the fact that it is a flight of fancy — a failure to relate. The last few lines bring this home in a spare and effective flourish:

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

To be unnoticed and yet performing the necessary, basic human art of companionship is indeed the discretion required to hold space for another to grieve. That the poet “would” like to be this way is saying, in effect, that she is not that way currently. “Variation on the Word Sleep” can, in this sense, be understood to reflect the good-hearted desire that many people feel to help their loved ones through hard times, as well as the profound hole in mainstream culture where the skillfulness of grieving together should be.