Here's more Edward Hirsch, the title poem of his first collection, which won the Yale Younger Poets prize. I wonder if we might see "For the Sleepwalkers" as a secular poem about faith, mystery, and compassion.
What a shame that organized religions so drift so far from simple statements like this about the desire to bridge the empirical and the spiritual. People really do sleepwalk; that much can be verified. But the poem sidesteps dogma, prescription, or formulas about the precise ways sleepwalking is or isn't a religious event. Mystery and mysticism inform the poem, but Hirsch is wise and kind enough to avoid creeds over which we should judge or hate or go to war.
So I hope "For the Sleepwalkers" offers one more way to think about experience that seems to transcend the rational and to be entirely good.
(There's a typo in this, the only online version I found, where two of the three-line stanzas [tercets] got jammed together in the poem's middle. Also, two stanzas toward the end are italicized, which you may not have noticed in this font).
For the Sleepwalkers -- Edward Hirsch
I hear "For the Sleepwalkers" as a companion piece to Theodore Roethke's magnificent villanelle, "The Waking," another poem about un-dogmatic faith.
The Waking by Theodore Roethke : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.
Surely you hear in everyday chit chat, as I do, the notion that literature and art offer themselves as alternatives to religion as we normally define and think about it. If that seems odd, you might revisit these poems, along with other writing and art that's beyond your power to explain, illustrating why the whole is, yea verily, more than the sum of its parts.
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