Wither are you Pillow Theme revealed

Here is a little background of the poem. I find that I do some of my most creative thinking either while in the shower or in the moments right before I go to sleep. My explanation for this phenomenon is, after much deliberation, because a person’s mind is most relaxed at these times. At these times, I am not trying to concentrate on any one thing; rather, if I try to concentrate on anything, I generally end up thinking about something completely different. One night, I was in the shower at one in the morning and I was inspired to write a story, so I wrote for an hour. I was really tired that night so the shower added to my sleep-induced creativity and created a story. This example is just one of many of what showers and sleep do to a person. The poem came to fruition at one in the morning on a different night when I was chatting with my best friend over Facebook. I was extremely tired a very close to falling asleep on my desk. As we were about to say goodnight, I thought of some interesting words that explained how tired I was and I (misspelling “whither” as “wither”) typed “wither are you pillow/ I search for you this night”. After I wrote those words, I kept thinking of lines to add and I ended up typing almost a page of lines to my friend. I copied and pasted all of the lines onto a document and went promptly to bed. It wasn’t until recently that I again found the poem and realized that somehow I had written what I perceive as the state of mind for a person who is unable to sleep. Everything about the poem, from the visual aspects to the sentence structure and context, fit the strange theme of a man’s raging mind as he is unable to fall asleep.
The first way I made the poem signify the theme of a man’s struggle to go to sleep lies in the overall visuals of the piece. As the poem progresses, the literal width of the lines gradually shorten. This decrease of size is to show that as the man’s mind continues to lament his inability to sleep, his thoughts shorten and he gets closer and closer to sleep as time wastes away. The effect emulates the peculiar way that right before sleep, people start thinking less and less until they find themselves waking up with no clue what the last thought was that they had the night before. While the poem does have a gradual decrease of width, it also has little valleys in the lines that increase the similarities that the poem has to actual sleep. The valleys represent the brief periods during the process of going to sleep that men drift off for a few moments before being abruptly pulled back to full consciousness. At the end, the poem hits a set of lines that reach a certain length and stop shortening. This visual aspect shows how the thoughts before finally sleeping don’t actually dwindle all the way to nothing; rather, they suddenly cut off at a certain point when sleep takes over.
Another visual aspect that contributes to the overall theme is the number of large words that the poem contains throughout its length. As the poem progresses, multi-syllable words slowly get less abundant and the words in general get shorter and simpler until the end of the poem when the words are mostly one-syllable each. The effect this dwindling word pattern causes emulates the complexity of thoughts as a person tries to sleep. Early on in the poem, words such as “fallow” and “disillusionment” appear. Towards the end, however, the only difficult words appearing are either repeats of words previously said in the poem such as “impudence” or words that seem randomly placed within the poem such as “spinning” or “existence”. When a man first goes to bed, his mind is a roiling mass of thoughts about his day or his problems. When he gets closer to sleep, his mind isn’t as coherent and his thoughts tend to shorten. Unbidden and random thoughts start to pop up until he finally gives out to sleep at the end.
Along with the complexity of the words, the complexity of the sentences dies down as the poem progresses. In the beginning of the poem almost every line is a metaphor or requires some thought to figure out. Towards the end, however, the lines become less complex and more confusing. The reader still has to try to think about what the lines mean, but they will find that the lines make sense only to a small degree towards the end. Early in the poem the reader can figure out that the line, “Yet in the dark it shall keep me wasting till I find truth in the eyes of my sheets” means that the man will lay there while his mind and body get more tired and that there is nothing he can do about it until he finally sleeps. In contrast however, finding meaning in the line, “Will you continue your deadly existence in my years” becomes significantly harder and just seems to be a jumble of thoughts. This line structure relates directly with the coherence that a man’s mind holds in the time before he finally sleeps.
The train of thoughts that the poem follows provides the most valuable insight to the overall theme of the poem. In the beginning of the poem, a very coherent string of thoughts contain the information that the speaker is unable to fall asleep. The speaker is very metaphorical in his sleep-related observations. He talks about looking for his pillow to counter his soul’s wish to “take flight” and keep the man awake. He tells the reader that his soul will keep him awake all night (“fallow the fields of night’s everlasting soil”) until his body can’t hold out and falls asleep (“lazily dead”) for a few hours until “morning’s light brings to life those it has seen unmoving in bed” and his day has to begin. Then the change from coherence to non-coherence starts to take place and the man’s thoughts turn to more abstract ideas of “dreams” and “regrets”. After the first large valley in the poem when the man calls out to his pillow again, he has a jolt back to wakefulness but with a slightly foggier mind. At this point, he addresses the pillow to tell it that he finds the pillow a “portal” to fitful sleep and then proceeds to go off on a tangent and discuss the nature of his sleep as hounded by strange dreams and fantasies. The lines here paint a confusing picture with their somewhat metaphorical nature. When the man says that he “hears the flowing honey of the whispering trees rattle and shake”, he is describing his fitful dreams as sweet bliss (honey) that is marred by the discordant rattling and shaking of his vision. The line immediately after shows the man slipping further into sleep when he says, “I see your wisdom flow like goats down the hills of Gilead”. This line is not a direct quote, but it does paint the same picture that a similar line in the Song of Songs book from the Bible paints about a flock of goats from Gilead. The sleepier the man becomes the more random thoughts he pulls into his mind from outside sources. This point is ever more apparent in a later line when he says, “But when you come over and see tips of the ice crashing on the deck”. While the line does not immediately reveal its hidden secrets, after some thought, faint conclusions that the line is alluding to Titanic and its fateful journey can be drawn. The ice crashing on the deck is from the iceberg that the ship hit on its maiden journey and the line is meant to symbolize ultimate downfall and ruin. At this point in his thoughts, the man stops himself with, “No more, no more” and continues on to ask his pillow if it will allow him to finally sleep. The man jolts from this second valley and again finds he is unable to sleep. The poem takes a turn towards the more abstract here and the man begins to rave at his condition. He speaks of someone or something that will help him. He doesn’t know who or what, but he gives it hope that he will be able to sleep before revealing that he is giving up his fight with the words, “Shall I allow or allow such impudence”. He is not even thinking that he has a choice to rein in his thoughts at this point. He then hits another valley and doesn’t pull out of it as far as the last three times and instead is half-asleep while he starts spouting nonsense. At the end he finds himself drifting to sleep and says, “you will not allow such impudence” to signify that he realizes that he is finally able to find sleep and echoes the words, “no more” one after another to show that he has finally gone to sleep.
Through the content and context of the poem, I set up a passage through which the theme of a man’s struggle to sleep could be realized. I then added the visualization and sentence structure to fully bring out the theme. The poem does not rhyme, nor does it follow any regular template that poems usually do follow. Instead, I made it a mixture of words and metaphorical pictures that would also attribute to its theme. Although reading the poem might not yield the facts and observations presented, even a basic reading can bring out the poem’s theme. Additionally, once the observations presented are found, the theme is only further emphasized. Having been written at one in the morning, the poem is based on my own thoughts and is a direct representation of my own state of mind from that night. Shortly after the poem was finished, I found my pillow and it gave me sweet refuge among its feathers.