For The Sleepwalkers Poem Analysis

Edward Hirsch’s poem, For the Sleepwalkers, explores the issue of admiration for sleepwalkers and their faith in themselves. Hirsch uses literary techniques to illuminate how the speaker’s view of sleepwalkers develops throughout the poem.
At the beginning of the poem, Hirsch uses an evident parallel structure recurring in the first stanza is the phrase “so much faith in.” This repetition emphasizes the amount of faith that the sleepwalkers have, and by showing that the speaker acknowledges the sleepwalkers’ faith, it develops a relationship between him and the sleepwalkers. In the third stanza, Hirsch reveals how he feels about the sleepwalkers in his claim, “I love,” and this gives the sleepwalkers a sense of relatability? Hirsch also shows that they are “willing to step out of their bodies into the night” and “welcome the darkness,” which presents the issue of irony. Since darkness typically signifies negativity and the unknown, stating that
Hirsch uses this change in perspective to help the poem become more relatable, and to mark a development of the relationship between the speaker and the sleepwalkers. After this shift occurs, Hirsch relates back to the beginning of the process of sleepwalking, “leaving our bodies.” The restarting of the process shows that the speaker has another way of looking at these sleepwalkers, and that this process in a never ending cycle. Hirsch uses the metaphor of hearts being “black handkerchiefs” soaring through the woods at night, ending the metaphor with “flying back.” This illustrates the entire journey of sleepwalking as blind faith and that the sleepwalkers are swayed throughout the journey in the darkness wherever they are blown by outside forces, but no matter where the heart goes it always ends up, “back in the glove of our