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Poem Of The Week: To Sleep By John Keats (1795-1821)

To Sleep

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
      Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower'd from the light,
      Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! 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.
Then save me, or the passèd 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 hushèd casket of my Soul.

It is difficult to doubt John Keats’ sincerity as he transcribes a near existential longing for the comfort of sleep into the languid acquiescence of a poem. Perfectly pitched in form and rhythm, this sonnet almost submits to the narrator’s desire, tempering the soft machine of its apparatus towards ‘forgetfulness’, as it is subdued, like the 'o'er brimm'd' bees in ‘Ode to Autumn’, by an opiate-infused narcosis.

Beautifully contrived, at a pace that seems to slow as the poem progresses in supine silence, the state of sleep offers a kind of salvation – the promise of release from the earworm-calling of ‘Conscience’ and daily care, realised here in the apt metaphor of a burrowing mole.

The equation of death and sleep – Keats’ final lines usher in a dark, secured underworld from which there is no retreat – is fitting in a poet for whom considerations of mortality must have shadowed his waking hours: written, probably, in 1819, ‘To Sleep’ may be an early intimation of Keats’ own fears. Within two years, the poet had died of tuberculosis in Rome.

‘To Sleep’ is taken from John Keats: A New Selection Edited with an Introduction by John Barnard, published by Penguin Books (1988)

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