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Poem Of The Week: Pretending Not To Sleep By Ian Hamilton (1938-2001)

Pretending not to Sleep

The waiting rooms are full of ‘characters’
Pretending not to sleep.
Your eyes are open
But you’re far away
At home, am Rhein, with mother and the cats.
Your hair grazes my wrist.
My cold hand surprises you.

The porters yawn against the slot-machines
And watch contentedly; they know I’ve lost.
The last train
is simmering outside, and overhead
Steam flowers in the station rafters.
Soft flecks of soot begin to settle
On your suddenly outstretched palms.
Your mouth is dry, excited, going home:

The velvet curtains,
Father dead, the road up to the village,
Your hands tightening in the thick fur
Of your mother’s Persian, your dreams
Moving through Belgium now, full of your trip.

A poem of hope and of unsettlement, of loss and of benediction, 'Pretending not to Sleep' is a finely balanced contemplation whose only actuation is conceived in the languid interior of a railway station.

Any resonance, in this desultory setting, consists in suggestion: Ian Hamilton's realisation seeks corroboration of mood and tone in highly persuasive signifiers - the blossoming sibilance of steam and soot begins to resemble the anticipatory, dream-like reverie of the narrator's addressee, as the similarly somnambulant porters look on in abstraction.

The reverie is a contagion whose narcosis infects the anonymised figures in the waiting room, as if they, too, were daytime dreamers. The atmospheric 'opiate' enables a kind of deflection: the gentle rhythmical pace of the stanzas, and the pauses for observation, focus the attention on a scene of apparent inertia whose margin yet redounds with inference, giving rise to apparitions of meaning in the skeins of smoke.

The figure is alone in her dream of Germany and family, of grief and expectation; the station and its humdrum purlieus are conduits to other imaginings, as invested with significance as the indifferent platform of Edward Thomas' 'Adlestrop'.

'Pretending not to Sleep' is taken from The New Poetry: Selected and Introduced by A. Alvarez, published by Penguin Books (1966)

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