Good Night

(In Front of Mestre’s, Paris, 1947, by Willy
Ronis, 1910-2009, French photographer)

One form of poetry is the pantoum, or pantum, composed of quatrains with internal rhyming and the repetition of lines according to an established pattern. The poet here has created a variation of that, involving the repetition of lines that he first rearranges. Read the poem out loud and you’ll note that this double-repetition begins to resemble an incantation.

GOOD NIGHT

Sleep softly my old love
my beauty in the dark
night is a dream we have
as you know as you know

night is a dream you know
an old love in the dark
around you as you go
without end as you know

in the night where you go
sleep softly my old love
without end in the dark
in the love that you know

~ W. S. Merwin, born in 1927, American poet, essayist, and translator