1O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
2 Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
3Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light,
4 Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
5O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
6 In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
7Or wait the "Amen," ere thy poppy throws
8 Around my bed its lulling charities.
9Then save me, or the passed day will shine
10Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,—
11 Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
12Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
13 Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
14And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.
In John Keats's sonnet "To Sleep," a speaker fervently prays to the personified figure of Sleep itself, begging for Sleep to bestow blissful unconsciousness on them—and quickly, before all the speaker's daytime worries can swoop in and spoil their rest. The poem's sensuous vision of drowsiness carries an undercurrent of anxiety: sometimes, the poem suggests, sleep is the only available escape from one's troubles. Keats composed the poem in 1819 but it didn't appear in print until 1838, when it was published posthumously in the Plymouth and Devenport Weekly Journal.
Oh, you perfumer and preserver of the quiet midnight, you who closes our dark-loving eyes with careful, loving fingers, sheltering us from the light and granting us sacred oblivion: oh, sweetest, smoothest Sleep! Please, if it's your wish, close my eager eyes even as I sing this reverent song to you—or, if you prefer, wait until I say a final "Amen" before you lull me to sleep like the kindly juice of an opium poppy. Then, please save me from consciousness. If you don't, all the day's worries and problems will glare on my pillow like bright sunlight, making me miserable. Please rescue me from my conscience, which saves up all its strength for the nighttime, then digs into me like a burrowing mole. Skillfully turn the key in the oiled lock and shut the quiet treasure box of my soul.
John Keats’s sonnet depicts sleep as the best (and perhaps only) reprieve from the torments and struggles of everyday life. At first glance a peaceful hymn to sleep, this poem slowly reveals itself as an insomniac's nervous prayer for unconsciousness and forgetfulness. Addressing a personified Sleep itself, the speaker sings the praises of this goddess-like figure’s comforts and consolations. Sleep, the speaker says, is gentle, protective, and kind. Through its “lulling charities,” Sleep has the power to shelter the sleeper’s soul, much as a grove of leafy trees might shade them from the summer sun.
But these sensuous images of shady peace invite the question: what does sleep shield the sleeper from? The speaker’s answer is: just about anything one might not be able to avoid thinking about in the daytime. Sleep’s offer of “forgetfulness” strikes the speaker as the only available rescue from “curious Conscience,” a persecutor the speaker imagines as a relentless “mole” burrowing into their brains and "breeding many woes." Sleep, in other words, is the speaker’s only respite from their daytime anxieties and responsibilities. (And it’s not a guarantee, either: the speaker’s “hymn” to sleep here starts to read a lot like a fervent prayer that the speaker will be able to sleep at all!)
In this poem, then, sleep isn’t so much a healer and a soother as a guard, a warden “turn[ing] the key” to the speaker’s soul and thus keeping them safe from their own thoughts. Sleep’s oblivion offers the speaker escape. That escape, alas, can only be temporary—but it’s the best the sleeper can do. Perhaps sometimes, the poem hints, such a temporary escape from the relentless troubles of the day is the most anyone can hope for.
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep!
“To Sleep” begins with a reverent apostrophe to "Sleep" itself. The speaker addresses the personified figure of Sleep as if it were a patient, gentle goddess, calling it “soothest Sleep” (a very Keatsian turn of phrase meaning something along the lines of “smoothest, sweetest, most soothing Sleep”). In the speaker’s vision, Sleep gently closes people’s eyes with “careful fingers and benign”—careful, kindly hands.
Under Sleep’s care, in the darkness behind their eyelids, sleepers are “embower’d from the light,” the speaker says. In other words, they’re sheltered from the daylight as if they were lying under the pleasant shade of trees. Sleep is a shapeshifter, then, at once a person and a place. First Sleep visits like a deity, tenderly shutting people’s eyes with its “benign” fingers; then it becomes a safe and sheltered glade where people can rest. Readers here might envision a summer grove, a place to nap secure from the burning sun.
Sleep’s shady refuge protects people from the “light” of day, but also the metaphorical “light” of consciousness. “Enshaded” in Sleep’s groves, sleepers partake of one of Sleep’s great gifts: “forgetfulness divine." The speaker here seems to value sleep not for the rest it offers or the dreams it might bring, but for its offer of sheer blissful oblivion, the chance not to have to think about anything for a while. Already, readers might wonder: just what is it that this sleeper is so keen to forget?
The speaker’s longing for forgetfulness might even make them hope for a deeper and more serious unconsciousness. When the speaker addresses Sleep as the “soft embalmer of the still midnight,” their language calls up sweet, balmy scents, like night-blooming jasmine. But it also evokes—well—embalming, the preservation of a dead body. This speaker, the poem's imagery hints, wants sleep to make them dead to the world, to preserve them in total oblivion until a new day comes.
Over the course of this poem, the speaker will make a hushed plea that Sleep might save them from the torments of a busy, anxious mind. In form, the poem is both a sonnet and an ode:
if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the "Amen," ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
Unlock all 270 words of this analysis of Lines 5-8 of “To Sleep,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
Plus so much more...
Get LitCharts A+Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,—
Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.
Darkness and light, in this poem, symbolize blissful “forgetfulness” and painful consciousness, respectively:
These uses of darkness and light play against their more common symbolic meanings. Darkness is often used as an image of ignorance, confusion, the unconscious, and evil; light, as an image of wisdom, the intellect, understanding, and goodness. The reversal here suggests that this poem’s speaker really just wants not to have to think about anything for a few hours—and hints that their “Conscience” is troubling them.
The speaker addresses this sonnet to the personified figure of Sleep itself, and this use of apostrophe turns this poem into both an ode and a prayer.
As an ode, this poem sings the praises of Sleep—or “soothest Sleep,” as the speaker names it. (That means, roughly, “sweetest, smoothest, most soothing Sleep!”) Sleep is here a gentle and protective force, a being that can “embower[]” the speaker’s sleeping mind as an arbor might shelter a summer wanderer. The speaker’s first apostrophes to Sleep feel celebratory, almost worshipful.
But as the poem goes on, that reverent tone starts to suggest desperate prayer as much as it does an awestruck “hymn.” The speaker repeatedly begs Sleep to “save [them]” from their own mind and their own “Conscience,” which burrows through their thoughts like some sort of horrible “mole,” rooting up the turnips of regret and the carrots of dismay. Only through Sleep’s “lulling charities” can the speaker escape another night tossing and turning and thinking about everything they’ve done wrong and everything that went wrong in the “passed day.”
The speaker’s apostrophe isn’t just about singing Sleep’s praises, then: it’s about getting Sleep’s attention. Perhaps the apostrophe even suggests that Sleep hasn’t been visiting the speaker quite as often as the speaker would like lately!
Unlock all 263 words of this analysis of Metaphor in “To Sleep,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
Plus so much more...
Get LitCharts A+Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
"Embalmer" here doesn't mean "one who preserves the dead" so much as it means "one who scents the air." But there's still a hint of preservation here. The idea is that sleep at once beautifies the "still midnight" and holds it in place, pausing ordinary thought and consciousness for a while.
“To Sleep” is a sonnet, but a rather innovative one. While Keats sticks to two traditional aspects of the sonnet form—this poem is 14 lines long and written in iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "Then save | me, or | the pass- | ed day | will shine")—he also introduces a rhyme scheme of his own design.
When he wrote this poem in 1819, Keats had been experimenting with sonnets for a while, trying to “see what may be gain’d” by introducing new rhyme schemes to this old old form. (Another of Keats’s experimental sonnets from around the same time, “If by dull rhymes our English must be chain’d,” addresses this question directly!)
Here, besides using experimental rhymes, Keats combines aspects of the traditional English sonnet with aspects of the traditional Italian sonnet:
As an address to the personification of Sleep itself, “To Sleep” is also an example of another form important to Keats around 1819: the ode, a poem in praise of a particular subject. 1819 was the year that Keats began writing a sequence of six odes now remembered as some of the greatest and most famous poems in the English language. “To Sleep” shows him playing with the ode form’s possibilities, and perhaps exploring ideas he’d develop later. As in the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the twilit speaker here longs for a moment for plain old delicious unconsciousness, a respite from all the day’s sufferings and anxieties.
Like nearly all sonnets, “To Sleep” is written in iambic pentameter. That means it uses lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here’s how that sounds in line 4:
Ensha- | ded in | forget- | fulness | divine:
Of course, as in most iambic pentameter poems, there are lots of little variations here. The very first line provides a good example:
O soft | embalm- | er of | the still | midnight,
The final foot here, “midnight,” is a trochee, the opposite foot of an iamb (with a DUM-da rhythm). That choice slows the line down a little bit at the end, a choice that feels just right for a description of the quiet, tranquil, still midnight.
Readers might notice that Keats’s meter here often depends on reading words that end in “-ed” with an old-fashioned extra syllable: the “hushed casket,” for example, should be read as a “HUSH-ed casket,” not a “hushd” one, and the "passed day" is a "PASS-ed day," not a "passd" one. When Keats wants to omit that extra syllable, he contracts the word with an apostrophe, as in “embower’d.”
"To Sleep" uses an experimental rhyme scheme of Keats's own design. Rather than sticking to the ABBA ABBA CDECDE of a traditional Italian sonnet or the ABAB CDCD EFEF GG of an English sonnet, "To Sleep" rhymes like so:
ABAB CDCD BC EFEF
This melodious but elusive pattern reflects Keats's interest in finding new ways to use the sonnet form. (He once even wrote a whole sonnet about finding new and better patterns of sonnet rhyme, "If by dull rhymes our English must be chain'd").
This rhyme scheme's patterns also mirror its subject matter. The odd BC rhyme in lines 9-10 breaks in at just the moment that the speaker anxiously begs Sleep to "save [them]" from the worries of the day; then, the poem drifts back into its regular alternating scheme, just as the speaker hopes they might drift off into sleepy oblivion.
The poem’s speaker, readers gather, might not be the best sleeper. In this ode, the speaker sings sleep’s praises, in particular hymning its ability to offer blissful “forgetfulness”—a rescue from the struggles and sufferings of the day. The speaker’s sensuous longing for sleep’s “lulling charities” is all the more striking juxtaposed against their fear of the “passed day” and its many anxieties. This speaker values sleep not just because it’s delicious in itself, but because it’s their only possible escape from a host of worries, including the relentless torments of their “Conscience.”
In many of Keats’s sonnets, the speaker seems likely to be a voice for Keats himself, and this speaker is no exception. A longing for blissful drowsy forgetfulness and escape is a common Keatsian theme—and considering that Keats’s struggles in 1819 (the year he wrote this poem) included bereavement, lovesickness, and money troubles, what reader could blame him?
The setting here is fittingly vague and dreamy. Readers can infer that the speaker is in bed at night, sending up a prayer for Sleep to do right by them and give them the restful "forgetfulness" they crave. But the poem’s real setting is the speaker’s imagination, a twilit place in which sleep grows up like trees to “embower[]” and “enshad[e]” the sleeper. The poem’s imagery suggests that sleep is a leafy grove, a restful and sheltered place of reprieve—whereas consciousness is harsh, glaring sunlight.
Here as in many of Keats's poems, the imagination itself seems to become a landscape. Even before this speaker is asleep, their mind makes its way to a cool and shadowy dreamworld.
John Keats (1795-1821) is often seen as an archetypal Romantic poet: a dreamy, sensuous soul who died tragically young. But Keats was also a vigorous, funny writer, a working-class kid making inroads into a literary scene dominated by aristocratic figures like Lord Byron. He died obscure and poor, never knowing that he would become one of the world's best-loved poets. But he had a quiet faith in his own genius. Once, in an early letter, he declared, "I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death."
This poem was one of many that didn't see the light until after Keats died. While he drafted it in early 1819—the momentous year when he composed most of his great Odes, including the "Ode to a Nightingale" and the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"—it wasn't published until 1838, years after his death, when it appeared in a newspaper, the Plymouth and Devenport Weekly Journal. Keats scribbled the first 12 lines on the flyleaf of his copy of Milton's Paradise Lost, one of the works that had the deepest influence on him (and a hint that he may have had the guilty consciences of some of Milton's characters on his mind as he wrote).
Reacting against the crystalline logic of the 18th-century Enlightenment, English Romantic poets like Keats honored mystery, magic, and the unknown. In its vision of Sleep as a kind of goddess conjuring up shady groves for the speaker to rest in, the poem provides an example of some classic Romantic preoccupations: the force of the imagination and the healing power of nature.
Keats met or corresponded with most of his fellow Romantics, but never got too close to any of them. As a young writer, for instance, he was inspired by William Wordsworth, the grandfather of English Romanticism—but was dismayed to find him pompous and conservative in person. ("Mr. Wordsworth," Wordsworth's wife Mary reprimanded the enthusiastic young Keats, "is never interrupted.") He had just one conversation with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (which seems to have felt more like a whirlwind than a friendly chat). And while Percy Shelley admired Keats's work, Keats never quite fell in with him and his elite clique; Byron, Shelley's close friend, was actively contemptuous of Keats. Keats's real circle was instead built from earthier London artists like Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and Benjamin Haydon.
Despite being something of an outsider in his time, Keats has indeed landed "among the English Poets" since his death. Ever since Victorian writers like Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning rediscovered him, he's been one of the most beloved and influential of poets.
Keats drafted "To Sleep" in 1819, the year that marked the major turning point in his life and his artistic career. This was the year he would embark upon the works that would secure his place "among the English poets": a series of six odes that many consider to be the world's greatest.
The winter before he began writing the odes, Keats nursed his younger brother Tom through the last months of a fatal case of consumption, a deadly disease we now know as tuberculosis. Consumption was familiar to Keats already, not just from his medical training (he studied to become a surgeon) but from his childhood: the disease claimed his mother when he and his siblings were still small. It would claim Keats, too. He was only 24 when he began writing his odes in 1819; he would die little more than a year after he completed them.
Alongside grief, Keats was grappling with complicated feelings about the literal girl next door, a young woman named Fanny Brawne whose family rented the other half of the house where he lived. Though Keats fell head over heels for her, he also felt more than a little uncomfortable with how completely his love absorbed him, as well as worried that a penniless poet wouldn't make an appealing prospective husband (at least in Fanny's family's eyes).
This poem's vision of a speaker anxiously praying for sleepy oblivion might hint at some of Keats's own struggles during this intense time.
A Brief Biography — Read the Poetry Foundation's biography of Keats.
The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
Portraits of Keats — See some images of Keats from the collection of London's National Portrait Gallery.
Keats's Legacy — Visit the Keats Letters Project to find lively recent commentary on Keats's letters and poems.