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Why have you woken me up?
Why have you woken me up?
To see the stars
Why
To savor the sunrise
Why
To smell the flowers
Why
What have the stars done for me
What has the sun given me
What comfort have the flowers offered me
Life is a dream
And you have woken me.
Background & Analysis
This poem was written in 1991 in
La Tuna, Uruguay during my senior year of high school.
It is important, as it is the first poem I ever
wrote worth recording. It also got me started on
this whole poetry thing. La Tuna is a camp about
a quarter mile from the beach, and our school had
organized a short, weekend retreat there. We were
split up into teams, and one of the competitions
included reciting a poem, singing a song, and performing
a skit, all of our own making. Naturally, we got
no sleep and found ourselves staring a poem in the
face with only two hours sleep. When I asked what
we should write about, one girl, Suzy Pizarro, said
"Why did you wake me up?" A fitting beginning.
From there, I developed what you see now.
To me, the poem has several meanings.
One is simply the age old question, as to why there
never seems to be enough hours in the night, and
no matter how much sleep we get, a little more would
have been nice. On another level, the poem is talking
about the worlds that we create while we sleep,
yet once we awake they slip from our grasp and are
hard recall at all within a few hours. A great poem
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla
Khan", fell victim to this. He awoke from
an opium dream with the poem in his mind. He began
to write it down, but was interrupted by a knock
at his door. When he went back to writing, the poem
was no longer in his mind. "Why have you woken
me up" alludes to the tenuous nature of our
bond with the dream world.
Along the same lines, but on a
deeper level, the poem makes allusion to Calderon
de la Barca. Although I have never actually read
de la Barca (a Spanish Renassaissance author), I
am familiar with his ideas and other authors who
were influenced by them. De la Barca wrote a book,
Life is a Dream (La Vida Es un Sueno),
in which God dreams of reality, and as long as he
is dreaming of someone, they live; When he stops
dreaming of them, they die. Later authors, such
as Jorge Luis Borges, developed this idea further
and created worlds within worlds, so that each reality
was the creation or imagination of a person who
in turn was the product of some higher being's dream.
So the poem makes allusion to that.
That's it until next time.
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