How do you sleep? - To Sleep Questions

1.      The speaker in Keats’ poem is addressing sleep, the ‘soft embalmer of the still midnight.’  As sleep doesn’t really embalm anyone, and the speaker refers to sleep as if it’s a person, Keats used personification.

2.      Sleep is called the ‘soft embalmer of the still midnight’.  Sleep acts as an embalmer as it makes people appear if observed from afar as dead, while it preserves a person, with their thoughts, hopes, worries, and other things for the next day of life.

3.      The speaker seems to think the forgetfulness of sleep is divine, as it saves people from ‘curious Conscience, that still lords/Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;’.  Thus, when people sleep they forget about everything that’s happened in their lives and are free for once and just sleep.

4.      Sleep saves the speaker from the various worries that come with being alive with responsibilities, along with the previously stated conscience every person has that’s ever present in reminding people of things, especially when people aren’t particularly doing that much.

5.      The speaker describes their conscience as ‘curious Conscience, that still lords/Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;’.  In this simile is used when comparing conscience to a mole, alliteration is used in the term ‘curious Conscience’, and personification is used when describing it as lording its strength to use in darkness, though conscience isn’t a person that chooses when to ask or what to do.

6.      The speaker describes his soul as a hushed casket.  This seems to mean that their soul, or inner them, for lack or a way to describe it, is locked away from the rest of the world while they’re asleep, as opposed to the way that it’s going out, interacting, being probed by others, and otherwise active when you’re awake.

7.      People don’t move that much when sleeping or dead.  On the metaphoric side, sleep and death are viewed as times when you’re cut off from the rest of life that’s going on for the rest of the world.

8.      You can’t tell for sure, since he doesn’t comment on it.  Though death and sleep are related, predicting someone’s feelings on one based on the other makes as much sense as predicting someone’s favorite flavor of ice cream based on their favorite cookie.  There may be correlation, but it is mostly random.

9.      See previous comment.  However, the speaker seems to not fear death, but to be more at peace with it than the speaker in “Death be Not Proud”, as they aren’t really putting up a fuss.