Sleep or Die

Like the speaker in Keats's Sonnet to Sleep, we all have bouts with our

conscience. Unfortunately for the speaker, his conscience is causing him to suffer from

a terrible case of insomnia. He finds that not only does his conscience never sleep, but if

he cannot subdue his conscience he will not sleep either. So, as our speaker struggles

with guilt, he finds himself unable to sleep and is so desperate for rest that he sees death

as a viable alternative.

Exhausted, our speaker in the sonnet's octet, prays for sleep to bless him with its
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divine forgetfulness. He personifies sleep as a divine being of sorts, and feels that

this being is overlooking him do to the fact that he has sinned too greatly to be blessed

with the forgetfulness that sleep offers. Our first example of this personification comes

in the first line, when he calls sleep the "soft embalmer of the still midnight". When one

thinks of an embalmer, one thinks of someone that fills a dead body with a preserving

fluid that prevents that decay of said body. So in a sense, the speaker ...

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