Page 45

By Jack Joseph Smith

Sleep To invoke a dream, slight at first She is there, asking you how you can stay Little and young and questioning Beautiful yet careful she grows Then stops and runs, changes and Right of a distance you want And there she is back Saying you can't have me now Until we once more change and do away with age again Time took me out of that beauty But I am telling you, I remember what she said

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A dream woman returns with conditions the speaker cannot meet, leaving remembered speech after beauty recedes.

The woman grows, withdraws and returns before asking for another change and the removal of age. Time separates the speaker from the dream's beauty, but her words remain. The revised verb after changes and is omitted because the scan does not establish its spelling.

Claude

In 'Sleep' the speaker invokes a dream in which a woman appears, 'Little and young and questioning', grows 'Beautiful yet careful', then 'stops and runs' and returns, 'Saying you can't have me now / Until we once more change / and do away with age again'. The poem ends with the speaker insisting, 'I remember what she said'.

The dream-woman is desirable and unreachable, and her condition ties love to undoing age, which time has already made impossible. The flat, evenly paced lines keep the tone quiet and elegiac, and the closing address makes memory an act of testimony. One handwritten revision of a typed word is not legible and is left out of this reading.