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Kenneth Slessor's Poem, 'Sleep' And The Concept Of Change
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TEXT: ‘SLEEP’ – KENNETH SLESSOR 1. The Context in which the piece was composed and the intended Purpose and Audience. It has been said that Kenneth Slessor’s work basically falls into three consecutive periods, beginning with the first in pre 20th century Australia where poetry was dominated by images taken directly from the convict experience and from the struggles of pioneers carving out their lives in the Australian bush. It was at this time that Slessor’s poetry was dominantly concerned with legend, history and fantasy. The second period of work was a transitional stage where Slessor developed a more modernist approach to expressing his ideas, and started to concentrate his work on topics that his readers could relate to more easily. In the third period of Slessor’s poetic career Sleep was created. Sleep uses Slessor’s fully developed themes and techniques to create contemporary and vivid images with change, the passing of time and impermanence referred to throughout it. Historically, Sleep was written at a time when Kenneth Slessor had turned his vision from the bush to the city for inspiration. Slessor aimed Sleep at an audience longing for sensual images out of ordinary things they could relate to. Australia had become almost accustomed to reading celebrations of the Australian landscape. Slessor knew that post-war Australia in the 1950s and 1960s was in need of a heightened consciousness that focused on a new reality. Poets turned away from the social forces, which consumed Australian society in a post-war reconstruction boom that emphasised consumerism and conformity. Kenneth Slessor found an answer in the poetic expression of a personal vision. The truth of the individual was now the focus of his work. Slessor wrote Sleep at the time he realised this truth was to be found in a fresh examination of the link between man and woman and their environment and between themselves. From this link came a special harmony, an understanding of life that took poetry away from the mere documentation of society and war to a plane, which saw social structure and historical events as a part of a broader dimension. Human history, not just social history became a new focus for Slessor and all of this he placed in the context of time and the cycles of birth and death, of creation and chaos, which were its essence. 2. The different aspects of Change that are explored in the text. The poem Sleep is explained to a point by its title – it is a re-creation of the attractiveness and pleasurableness of a central human mystery, our giving up of consciousness of factual reality in favour of the unconsciousness of sleep, the state of complete selflessness. The giving up of oneself to sleep is likened to the willing subjection of self to a human lover. The state reached through this process is that of the unborn child held securely in its mother’s womb in a state of unconsciousness of self and of the world. The act of birth – the gaining of consciousness on the part of the newly born child and the regaining of consciousness in the case of the sleeper – is a harsh crossing of a boundary, changing from a world blissfully free of awareness of pain to one in which fear and pain are commonplace.
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