Poetry · Theme
Mortality and Sleep
How Poetry develops Mortality and Sleep.
Death, sleep, and the idea of rest as a release from sorrow are recurring motifs, with love and death often intertwined as sources of peace or finality.
Where it surfaces
- XXII: Of That So Sweet Imprisonment
The imagery of sleep giving way to dreamier sleep suggests a merging of souls that borders on the eternal or deathlike.
- XXVIII: Gentle Lady, Do Not Sing
Love is depicted as weary and destined for the grave, merging the themes of death and rest.
- Sleep Now, O Sleep Now
The entire poem centers on sleep as a metaphor for death, with winter's cry and a kiss promising eternal peace.
- XXXVI: I Hear an Army Charging Upon the Land
The dream vision of a charging army blurs the boundary between sleep and death, with the narrator moaning in sleep.
- On the Beach at Fontana
The senile sea and descending darkness evoke mortality and the fragility of life.
- Nightpiece
The lost hosts awaken to service, then lapse muted and dim, while a starknell tolls, evoking death and the final sleep.
- A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight
The imagery of 'stark skin and bone' and 'saltblood, a fruit of tears' evokes the inescapable presence of death and decay.
- A Prayer
The plea for a 'slow life' to be drawn out and the imagery of 'cold touch' evoke a merging of love with death.