William Wordsworth was a poet of unifying sensibility. His short poem ‘To Sleep’ is about the complementarity between sleep and awakening, between day and night, light and shade. However, the poem, addressing the personified sleep in a sonnet style, emphasizes the primacy of leisure and sleep over the complementary other halves- awakening and work
Emily Dickinson wrote some time later in the same century: “Success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed”. Anticipating the idea, in Wordsworth’s poem, the value of sleep is perceived from the point of view of an insomniac, who has not been able to sleep for the last two nights
The lyric is spoken by a man for whom sleep is the pursued secret love. The first four lines of the octave give us a series leisure images-both visual and auditory- from the animate and mineral world of nature. The man is lying on his bed, trying to ‘win’ sleep. He imagines all the soothing things of a pastoral life – ambling sheep, the sound of rain, and murmuring bees, the fall of rivers, winds and seas, smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky. These are all delicate things of things of nature that have a cooling effect. Still, thinking about them does not enable him to achieve sleep. The time is nearing dawn and he is expecting the melodies of birds, the melancholy strain of cuckoo, soon from his orchard. He has been sleepless in the last couple of nights and remains so far this night too. He says he has been unsuccessful in having the sleep ‘by any stealth’. The speaker pauses a rhetorical question “Without thee what is all the morning's wealth?” He addresses the sleep as in an alliterated phrase the ‘blessed barrier between day and day’ and ‘dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health’ and prays her to come near him
One significant point about the poem is its central image of a man going after sleep as a man trying to win his secret love. This is not a passive waiting, but an active pursuit. Sleep is passive and is probably waiting elsewhere and it is for him to reach her. Thus the passive centre activates the periphery and the primacy of sleep as the determining prerequisite for the wealth if the morning is established neatly
To Sleep is a poem that shares many sonnet features, though not a typical one in its claim. It has fourteen lines and consists of an octave and sestet. The octave is in enclosed rhyme ‘abba’. These features are modelled on Petrarchan sonnet. The sestet rhymes ‘cdcdcd’, which retains a Sicilian variant of sonnet. However, the thought of the poem does not develop in a clean sonnet fashion- the octave pausing a question and the sestet resolving it. Here, the problem sustains.
To conclude, the poem uses the sonnet conventions to address and praise sleep as the predisposing secret of the wealth of awakening.
