A Symposium on Sleepiness

I was inspired to write the following poem (which is not a particularly good poem) by a real-life experience I had in a classroom. It was a philosophy class on Plato's Syposium. I was very sleepy and struggling to stay awake. It was a stuffy room.

Then, suddenly (or perhaps I only remember it as suddenly) everything the lecturer was talking about seemed real to me: present, vivid, timeless.

I wrote this poem many, many years after the experience. I sent it to the lecturer in question, who had moved onto another institution by then. I never got a response. I'm baffled by that kind of reaction (or non-reaction). If someone wrote a poem in which I featured in some way, and it wasn't downright insulting, I'd be delighted.

I also sent it to a fellow poet and he said: "I don't think of you as much of a classicist". This response delighted me. I'm really not a classicist in any sense. But I got the vibe at that moment, you dig?

The Symposium

The class-room was stuffy and nothing seemed sweeter than sleep.
The lecturer’s voice drifted in and out of my mind.
Plato and Socrates, Eros, names from the deep
Of the ocean of time, from fathoms too distant to find.

Then suddenly, strangely, and out of nowhere at all
The centuries vanished like vapour, and I was awake.
I thrilled to the siren of beauty, Eternity’s call,
The thirst of the artist, the lover, to make and remake.

The Golden Age hovered around me, and Athens was there
In the dim, dusky classroom. The stretching horizon of time
Was lit with broad sunlight, and I could see plain from my chair
Aristophanes, Alcibiades, and the sublime.