Given Sugar, Given Salt

A repeating theme in Given Sugar, Given Salt is the idea of sleep being a type of death and rebirth. In the “Dream Notebook,” Hirshfield introduces us to the concept that we experience different lives during dreams: “What will become of these / my many lives, / abandoned each morning abruptly to their own fates?” (18). The scribblings she wrote during the night to capture her thoughts and ideas she feels are someone else’s. The writings, like her memories, she cannot attribute to herself, only “to a woman who / looks faintly like me and whom I wish well” (18).

This concept of forgetting your identity or experiencing a rebirth after sleep is revealed again in “Moment.” The speaker claims that everyone has had the experience of amnesia after sleep, “not knowing for a time / who she is, who he is” (59). People react differently, panicking or sighing with pleasure, no doubt depending on the circumstances of their actual life. Everyone, however, “envies the other, / who must so love their lives” (59).

Sleep is also tied to death in “Pillow.” After visiting with a dying friend, the speaker returns home to sleep well, “without dismay or turning, / though he would continue dying, though I would live” (41). She credits this to what she puts under her pillow that night because she “could not eat them” (40). What this is, I’m not sure, it could be the “words like river pebbles” from the stanza before. In the second to last stanza she creates a simile between the releasing of hands with her friend to go about their separate tasks—perhaps living and dying—and a person “arranging the blankets and pillow / just so before sleeping, / setting the one day in order to enter the next” (41).

The poem “Sleep” doesn’t just describe the feelings upon waking like “Dream Notebook” and “Moment,” though it does reiterate the occasions of buoyant awakenings and the occasional inexplicable grief-filled awakenings similar to those in “Moments” (80). Sleep is personified in the poem as the speaker tries to talk to their sleep, “ask it politely for this or that, / but it only averts its gaze” (79). Sleep then talks, saying “Go away” and “Leave me along” and the author recognizes who is master and who is slave because she lavishes it with comfortable bedding, milk or wine (79). The speaker then clarifies that sleep actively enters us, we don’t enter seep, and that it tills and waters in a simile that compares sleep to a farmer (79-80). Sleep is finally portrayed as inescapable. The child in the poem refuses sleeps, begs for more time, but the speaker notes that the child too will succumb to sleep and join all those “who, drifting, / distal, quilt the drowsy night-song of the mortal” (80).