Insomnia

The poem’s main thematic concern is inversion. Almost everything in the poem is inverted from its normal self, either explicitly or through suggestion. Even the title introduces the concept, as insomnia is, by definition, at least partially an inversion of a normal sleep schedule. When a person has insomnia, they cannot sleep at night; they either have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. If the disorder is significant enough, the sleep cycle inversion can become a full inversion where the person eventually stays awake through the night and sleeps during the day. There are biological consequences to this, but the social consequences might be more apropos to this poem. Insomnia can lead to social isolation, as insomniacs might find it difficult to socialize when most everybody is asleep while the insomniac is awake (this was even more true in Bishop’s time, as there was no Internet to connect people across the world at all hours of the day).

The poem then opens with another inversion as the speaker is looking not at the moon itself but “[t]he moon in the bureau mirror” (Line 1). So the speaker is speaking about an object seen through a mirror—and mirrors present inverted images of the things they reflect. What the speaker sees is the real world flipped. The moon is also an insomniac, as the speaker describes “her” as a “daytime sleeper” (Line 6) because “she” lights up the night sky and disappears during the day.

The final stanza really hammers the inversions. Each line presents images of an inverted world. In this inverted world, “left is always right” (Line 14), “shadows are really the body” (Line 15), people “stay awake all night” (Line 16), and “the heavens are as shallow as the sea / is now deep” (Lines 17-18). Each inversion here demonstrates the feeling of an insomniac. When day is night and night is day, everything in the world feels upside down, and the insomniac can develop feelings of loneliness, confusion, and depression. Notice how the inversions here tend to have negative connotations, principally of unreality or insubstantiality: The body is just a shadow; the heavens are just shallow seas.

The final inversion comes in the last line when, in the inverted world where reality is no longer real, the speaker’s unrequited lover loves the speaker back; in other words, because this “love” exists only in the reflection, it is not real. This final inversion, delivered after so many other inversions, packs a thematic punch, shifting the poem from one about the upside-down world of insomnia to a poem about unrequited love.