Four short lines, three commands and a consequence: Dave Bonta's "Somnambulist" is small enough to memorise in a minute, yet it keeps unfolding afterwards. The speaker is a sleepwalker who hands over all control. "Lock me to sleep, / discharge me numb, / set me in writing." The person or power being addressed is never named. It could be a muse, a god, the blank page, or the poem itself. What matters is the idea underneath: a self does not simply exist and then get written down. It comes into being through the writing. Only in the last line, "and so to be," does the speaker arrive.
The three verbs do most of the work, and each carries more than one meaning. To "lock" suggests a door, but the speaker is locked "to" sleep, as if sleep were a post or a fixed point, not a room. "Discharge" is stranger still. A patient is discharged from hospital, a soldier from service, a battery of its charge, a gun of its bullet. All of these mean release, yet the speaker is released "numb," so the freedom comes without feeling. Then "set" brings in the printer's setting of type, but also the setting of a bone, a jewel or concrete, all cases where something loose becomes fixed. Read in order, the verbs follow the sleepwalk itself: the sleeper is held in sleep, sent walking without sensation, then pinned down on the page. The poem never says "I am a sleepwalker." The title says it, and the three lines act it out.
The shape of the poem is deliberately spare. The lines run to four, four, five and four syllables, each with roughly two strong beats: LOCK me to SLEEP, disCHARGE me NUMB. There is no conventional end rhyme, but the poem plays a quieter trick with "me" and "be," which are a perfect rhyme. "Me" appears at the same point in each of the first three lines, so the pattern becomes a drumbeat of passivity, with the speaker as the object of every verb. In line four, "me" turns into "be." The pronoun drops out and only the bare verb of existence is left. The self that was acted upon becomes pure being. The sounds support this: "sleep" and "be" share a long, open vowel that frames the poem, while "numb" ends on a closed-lip thud, as though the word itself had gone dead.
The last line also seems to echo a familiar phrase, "and so to bed," which Samuel Pepys used in his diary. If the echo is intended, changing "bed" to "be" turns an ending into a beginning. The day's writing no longer closes with sleep. Writing becomes the place where existence starts. It is hard, too, not to hear Hamlet's "to be" behind the line, though Bonta's version is far calmer. Nothing is weighed or agonised over. The speaker simply asks to be made real.
What gives the poem its tension is the paradox in its grammar. These are imperatives, the language of orders, yet they come from the person with the least power in the sentence. The speaker is asleep, numb, and the object of every action. Is this a plea, a surrender, or a kind of confidence? The dash after "writing" gives a small pause before the result arrives, as if the speaker were waiting to see whether it works. There is a quiet unease as well. To be "set" in writing is to be fixed like a pressed flower, and the sleepwalker who could wander is now settled in place. Being, the poem implies, may cost some freedom.
This is why such a small poem matters. It works as a miniature account of how writing happens, as something that seems to come from outside conscious effort, from a half-awake state where the writer is more channel than author. It also makes a claim that students can test against their own experience: once something is written down, a version of you has been made that can outlast the moment. In just seventeen syllables or so, the poem makes the page both the place where you go quiet and the place where you start to exist.