To Sleep Flashcards
Form
Shakespearean sonnet
- experimental, no rhyming couplet finalising poem
(Typically Romantic to be innovative)
“O soft embalmer of the still midnight”
- Personification of sleep as caring, addressing sleep, poetic apostrophe
“Soft embalmer” - Sleep presented as a dream like state (mimicking death, not frightening)
“Still midnight” - Preservation of peace
“Shutting, with careful fingers and benign, our gloom pleas’d eyes”
- Sleep personified as caring
- Association of sleep with death, pease/comfort - pleasurable and appealing darkness
“Embower’d from the light”
- Reader presented a being protected from remembering - forgetfulness in sleep
- Sleep presented as respite/ refuge - state of oblivion
“Light” - presented as an oppressive figure, juxtaposes traditional views of light
“Enshaded in forgetfulness divine”
- Portrayal of sleep as blissful, religious connotations, “divine” - heavenly state, spiritual
- Speaker protected from remembrance in sleep, state of oblivion
“O smoothest sleep! If so it please thee”
“hymn my willing eyes”
“Amen”
- Apostrophe, addresses sleep
“If so it please” - Very respectful address, addressing it as though it is a spiritual figure - Speaker longing for sleep
“poppy throws”
- Reference to opium
- Portrayal of sleep as a numbing drug that can bring about sleep and visions
- Romantic
“Lulling charities”
- Sleep as generous
“Then save me, or the passes day will shine”
“Save me” - imperative, highlights the speaker’s desperation and urgency for sleep
- repetition of save me
“Will shine” - Oppressive imagery of light
“burrowing like a mole”
Metaphor representing the speaker’s consciousness
- Negative image
- Image of speakers deep rooted thoughts, pain + suffering - contradicts the typical portrayal of nature (Negative Capabilities)
- Image of the brain
“Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards”
- Image of a lock - protection and safety
- Symbolic of when the speaker finally falls asleep
- “Deftly” - gentle, portrays sleep as a refuge/ respite
“And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul”
Image of a coffin
- Protection and safety
- Enhances description of sleep as a death like state
Image of chest
Lack of rhyming couplet finalising poem
- Conveys a sense of irresolution and openness
- Mimics how you aren’t aware when you fall asleep
- Keats doesn’t want to suggest sleep as being a permanent state and its only temporary
