Love is, not surprisingly, one of the most frequent themes in all literary creations and especially in poetry. As such, throughout the centuries, love has been represented in many different ways in poetry, according to the specific aspect that the poets were trying to communicate. The two chosen poems, Variation on the Word Sleep by Margaret Atwood and Alive or Not by Al Purdy appear to be dissimilar at a first glance. Upon a profounder examination though, the poems reveal a few common elements. While love is certainly the theme of both poems, it somehow seems to elude the reader at first. This is because the poems are somehow atypical: they seem to avoid the intensity of the actual feeling of love and focus on the representation of two dream sequences instead. Atwood's poem translates the author's wish to plunge into the dream of her lover, while Purdy's text relates a bizarre dream in which he is trying to save his wife from an accident. Both poems offer thus different a perspective on love from inside the dream which focuses on its haunting power and the way the feeling travels to the subconscious.
             Thus, neither of the two poems seems to target the feeling as such and its effect on the person who experiences it. Rather, they both emphasize the deeper aspects of love, those that begin in the human subconscious and are not usually experienced in a waking state. The familiar aspects of love are usually either elation or despair, according to the particular circumstances of the story. But the poems under discussion focus rather on a general quieting of the sense and an immersion into the subconscious instead. The rapture that is usually associated with love is missing here, being substituted by stolid heaviness of the dream.
             Margaret Atwood's poem states from the title itself that the text is intended as a "variation on the word sleep". It is evident though that the poem is not merely about sleeping ...