Elizabeth Bishop, "Insomnia"

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.


By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well


into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.






The rhythm of those first four lines is beautiful. And then the shift in the final two lines of the second stanza, enjambed into the third, as the poem gathers momentum, down to that awful climax in the final four words--truly grievous and sublime. That final line hits me so hard, every time I read it. Somehow it always seems to come out of nowhere and surprise me. I think the antepenultimate line foreshadows the ending: suddenly the narrator is discussing her relationship with another person. 


Still, that line suggests a relationship of love, so we are all the more pained when we discover, in the last line, that this unnamed person does not love the narrator at all.