Poem Of The Week: A Child Half-Asleep By Tony Connor

A Child Half-Asleep

Stealthily parting the small-hours silence,
a hardly-embodied figment of his brain
comes down to sit with me
as I work late.
Flat-footed, as though his legs and feet
were still asleep.

On a stool,
staring into the fire,
his dummy dangling.

Fire ignites the small coals of his eyes;
it stares back through the holes
into his head, into the darkness.

I ask what woke him?

‘A wolf dreamed me.’ he says.

Tony Connor’s fine, closely-observed reflection marks our two hundredth Poem of the Week, though any connection between this week’s selection and the anniversary is purely coincidental.

Connor’s short and contemplative piece describing the strange ‘otherness’ of a young child half-emerged from sleep harbours a studied stillness rendered the more solemn by the naturalness of the narrator’s language. From the soporific sibilance of the opening lines to the alliterated clumsiness of the little boy’s later demeanour as he is eased gently into the nocturnal tableau, the poet is witnessing the appearance of a disembodied apparition, a ‘figment’ dissociated from the ‘host’, who bears the ghost downstairs.

The solemnity of ‘A Child Half-Asleep’ reminds of Coleridge’s ‘thin blue flame’ in ‘Frost at Midnight’ in its exquisite realisation of silence, of the sense of nothing existing outside of the immediate room and the present. Here, the conduit to introspection is the hearth, whose fire the child’s eye reflects, and in whose flames we find the reverse possibility of a figurative darkness.

The child’s final answer occupies a landscape to which adults are not privy, as though the transference of dream states was a facility unique to the juvenile imagination.

‘

A Child Half-Asleep’ is taken from British Poetry Since 1945 – Edited with an Introduction by Edward Lucie-Smith, published by Penguin Books (1970).