It's strange how you wake sometimes in the middle of the night in the middle of sleep someone has knocked on a door
And in the extraordinary city of midnight of half-waking and half-memory heavy gates clang from street to street

Who is this nocturnal visitor with an unknown face
what does he seek what does he spy
Is he a poor man demanding bread and shelter
Is he a thief is he a bird
Is he a reflection of ourselves in the mirror
Back from a transparent abyss
Trying to re-enter us

Then he realizes that we've changed
that the key no longer turns in the lock
Of the mysterious door of bodies
Even if he's only left us for a few minutes
at the troublesome moment when we put out the light

What does he become then
Where does he wander? does he suffer?
Is this the origin of ghosts?
the origin of dreams?
the birth of regrets?

No longer knock at my door visitor
There's no room on my hearth or in my heart
For the old images of myself
Perhaps you recognize me
I'll never know how do you recognize yourself

Basic Set-Up:

This is a complete poem by Robert Desnos.

This poem is all about the unconscious. First of all, it describes a moment when "you wake… in the middle of the night in the middle of sleep." It's often in this state between half-waking and half-sleeping that we are closest to our unconscious minds.

"The nocturnal visitor" who visits this speaker is shadowy. It's quite possible that this visitor is the speaker, that he is us: "Is he a reflection of ourselves in the mirror/ Back from a transparent abyss/ Trying to re-enter us."

The idea of a deeper, darker self that lives within us evokes the unconscious. After all, there's our conscious self—the one that's always talking at us in our heads—and then there is our unconscious self: the one that makes us do crazy things that we ourselves can't explain.

This poem reflects automatic writing. There's very little punctuation (except for a few question marks here and there), so the sentences run into each other.

There's also a preoccupation with dreams and fantasy. The speaker wonders if the "nocturnal visitor" is a ghost, or whether he is a dream. So the poem evokes the unconscious as well as the idea of dreams. The unconscious, according to Freud's psychoanalytic theory, is the source of dreams, and this poem connects dreaming and fantasy with the unconscious.