Edward Hirsch's "For the Sleepwalker," applauds sleepwalkers for their blind faith in the many elements that keep them from harms way while they prowl through the night and also serves as an encouragement for all people to take chances with the hope that all will be right. The speaker starts the poem with a vivid description of the elements that guide a walker through the darkness, how they must depend on their legs, and trust in the path to safety. They are the ones willing to take the chance and step out into the darkness, and they only embrace the adventure. They don't see the world with their eyes, but instead, feel it with knowledgeable hands. Learning and growing all the while, but always able to return to the solemn comfort of who they really are.
After this description the speaker says "something astonishing.Our hearts are leaving our bodies." The hearts he refers to are the dreaming hearts. The hearts that soar above the surface of the world and absorb all contained in it. The hearts that embrace the darkness of dreams and the future, and find excitement in it. The hearts constancy challenging the world to throw curves at them, or get in their way. He says they are "thick black fists" that can break through any number of challenges, so they are the ones able to fly on without fear. .
"We have to learn to trust our hearts like that," the speaker exclaims, demanding the reader to come out of the warm comfort of sleep and into the living darkness, the unknown, the future. It is time to go into the future, to live in it and dream big. To consume some overwhelming unknown and to wake again, as ourselves, "nourished and surprised." .
