The Full Text of “Sleep”
The Full Text of “Sleep”
-
“Sleep” Introduction
-
"Sleep" is a free verse poem by Australian poet Kenneth Slessor, collected in his 1939 book Five Bells: XX Poems. Told from the point of view of a personified sleep itself, the poem depicts sleep as a soothing but temporary reprieve from the harsh realities of waking life. The poem compares sleeping to being back in the womb, a place of nourishment and comfort to which the listener must surrender themselves over entirely. In addition to describing the experience of sleep itself (and, read literally, pregnancy and birth), the poem has also been read as metaphorically depicting both sex and death.
-
-
“Sleep” Summary
-
The poem's speaker asks: will you hand yourself over to me entirely, both your body and spirit, your skin and what lies beneath it—not like a refugee, in desperation or resentment, but like a child who wants nothing else than to do this?
Another voice replies, "Yes, absolutely."
The speaker continues: in that case, I will carry you through the mouth of my river, lift you up and transport you to a grave in a way that is difficult to explain or understand. I will grasp you and hold you, devour you, and then flood you in the massive cavern of my stomach, wash you with bigger and bigger ripples of water repeatedly.
And you will hold on awkwardly there, and doze there, in that soundless room; you will move to the rhythm of my blood pulsing through my body and you will hear my heart operating wildly through the bones of my skeleton that sit above you. You will reach inside my tissue, liquified and arranged in layers, through invisible faucets.
You will do this until dawn, at which point you will be ejected and wokeng up, split apart and pushed out. The merciless pliers of life will call you forward, and you will feel the pain and treachery that comes with being born.
-
-
“Sleep” Themes
-
The Comfort and Escape of Sleep
The speaker of “Sleep” is sleep itself. Addressing a nameless “you,” the speaker describes—in a mix of comforting and disturbing language—what will happen when a person gives themselves over to sleep’s power, comparing this experience to that of a baby in its mother's womb. The poem thus portrays sleep (and/or death and sex, depending on how metaphorically readers interpret the poem) as a comforting force, which nevertheless “betray[s]” sleepers by expelling them from its sanctuary. Waking to consciousness, here, is as “harsh” as being born. And by casting sleep as a longed-for, yet temporary and unreliable protector, the poem ultimately comments on the painful difficulty of waking life.
The poem depicts sleep as a nurturing, parental force, but one that demands complete trust and dependency from the sleeper. The speaker (again, sleep personified) asks if the person they’re addressing is ready to “give [themselves] to [sleep] utterly.” The word “utterly” suggests that a person must completely surrender themselves, without reservation, in order for sleep to overcome them. This surrender shouldn’t be like the desperation of a “fugitive,” but should rather resemble the purity of a child’s trust in its parent, a child who has “no other wish” than to be in its parent’s arms. In this way, the poem suggests sleep is nurturing but also rather ominously overbearing, like a religious leader demanding total faith.
Sleep then tells this person what falling asleep will feel like, comparing it to being carried in the womb. Sleep says that it will “consume” and “engulf” this person. In other words, this person will lose all sense of who they are for a little while—like a fetus growing into a child, the sleeper will be incubated inside sleep’s protective “belly.” The sleeper won’t be alone and separate as they are in the waking world, but rather joined with sleep as if their very being has been “dissolved,” immune to outside cares.
But sleep’s womblike protection can only be temporary, the poem continues, adding that waking is like being born all over again. In this way, sleep “betray[s]” the complete trust demanded of the sleeper. With the coming of “daylight,” the sleeper is subjected to “expulsion and awakening.” Just as a baby is suddenly pushed into the “harsh” world outside of the womb, the sleeper is ejected into waking and struck with “pangs” of reality.
Going to sleep is comforting because it feels like becoming an anonymous, protected baby again, safe inside a warm, enveloping womb. That’s why waking is so difficult; the sleeper is “riv[ed]” (split apart from) this sense of wholeness and “driv[en] forth” into the “harsh,” waking world, where one is again separate and responsible for oneself.
The poem thus ends up commenting both on sleep and waking life, depicting the one as a brief, inadequate refuge from the painful necessity of the other. The speaker describes “Life” as brandishing “remorseless forceps”—or merciless pliers. Basically, like a doctor getting ready to deliver a baby, the waking world forcefully removes the sleeper from the temporary reprieve of sleep.
The speaker even compares “awakening” with a kind of “expulsion”—perhaps suggesting that exiting sleep is similar to being cast out of paradise. And if sleep is a kind of “mysterious[] burial” in which the speaker is temporarily, mercifully dead to the world, then waking is a bit like being resurrected back into the unpleasant realities of life.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-21
-
-
Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Sleep”
-
Lines 1-5
Do you give ...
... Yes, utterly.The poem kicks off with a mysterious speaker who asks a listener whether they'll "give" themselves over to the speaker "utterly" (that is, absolutely). Based on the poem's title, readers can assume that the speaker is a personified version of sleep. That is, the poem is trying to describe the act of falling asleep by treating sleep itself like a figure that's alluring, seductive, nurturing, parental, and overbearing all at once.
Sleep doesn't just want this person to hand over their body. Sleep says the sleeper should surrender both their "body and no-body," their "flesh and no-flesh." The implication is that sleep dissolves the barrier between one's body and mind.
The poet could have chosen to write this line a little differently—"body and soul, flesh and spirit," for example. But the choice to repeat the word "no" adds some rhythm to the line, as does the asyndeton (or lack of conjunction) between these parallel phrases (and throughout the poem's first four lines, for that matter). The language moves smoothly forward, evoking the pull of sleep.
Sleep goes on to say that this surrender shouldn't be like a fugitive running away from something "blindly and bitterly," with alliteration adding emphasis to sleep's point. Instead, sleep says, the sleeper should give themselves up to sleep "as a child might, with no other wish."
By using a simile to compare the sleeper to a child, the poem casts sleep as a kind of parental figure taking the sleeper into its arms. There is something soothing in this comparison, although there is also a hint of something a little more ominous, as sleep demands complete, unquestioning trust from the sleeper.
The first stanza then concludes with a second voice—the voice of the person sleep is addressing—answering that they will indeed surrender themselves to sleep. They respond using the same language that sleep used: they will trust themselves to sleep's care "utterly." The repetition of the word "utterly" cements the absolute control that sleep will have over the sleeper; the sleeper becomes entirely passive in sleep's care.
-
Lines 6-7
Then I shall ...
... to burial mysteriously, -
Lines 8-11
Take you and ...
... huger waves continually. -
Lines 12-15
And you shall ...
... ride above you, -
Lines 16-17
Delve in my ...
... embodied so – -
Lines 18-21
Till daylight, the ...
... of harsh birth.
-
-
“Sleep” Symbols
-
Water and Rivers
Water and rivers in the poem symbolize unconsciousness, oblivion, and surrender.
In lines 6-7, the speaker says, "Then I shall bear you down my estuary, / Carry you and ferry you to burial mysteriously." An estuary is the mouth of a river, into which other, smaller rivers flow. Falling asleep, these lines suggests, feels a bit like being transported across water—perhaps indicating how weightless and passive the sleeper feels.
At the same time, the mention of being ferried across a river calls to mind the rivers Styx and Lethe from ancient Greek mythology:
- Styx stands as a barrier between the world of the living and the dead, and newly dead souls must enlist the help of the ferryman Charon to cross it. In saying that sleep carries and ferries the sleeper to burial, the poem is suggesting that going to sleep is like dying or like crossing from one world to the next.
- Lethe, meanwhile, is a river in the underworld whose waters cause total forgetfulness or oblivion. Sleep, the poem thus suggests, results in being totally cut off from the waking world.
When the speaker says that the sleeper is "continually" washed in "huger waves," this again builds on the aforementioned water symbolism. The sleeper is washed in unconsciousness.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 6-7: “Then I shall bear you down my estuary, / Carry you and ferry you to burial mysteriously,”
- Lines 10-11: “In the huge cave, my belly, lave you / With huger waves continually.”
-
-
“Sleep” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
-
Personification
The poem personifies sleep, in fact making sleep the speaker of the poem! Sleep is addressing someone who, ostensibly, wishes to fall asleep, asking this person if they will trust in sleep "utterly," or absolutely. It is only through the sleeper's surrender that sleep is able to take hold and "ferry" the sleeper to a state that is compared by turns to death and birth. In this way, sleep is both soothing and a little bit sinister; it requires the sleeper's permission to take hold, but also demands a complete and total surrender of the self.
By personifying sleep, the poem gives sleep authority: sleep has a forcefulness, mysteriousness, and even a "heart," "blood," and "bones." By depicting sleep as something with a body that can hold and nurture the sleeper, the poem suggests that the relationship between sleep and the sleeper is similar to the relationship between a pregnant person and the baby growing inside them.
This points not only to the nourishing, comforting nature of sleep, but also to the eventual "betrayal" that must occur upon waking. Just as pregnancy doesn't last forever and a baby is eventually pushed screaming into the world, so too must sleep end with the sleeper experiencing "pangs" of "expulsion" as they return to consciousness.
Where personification appears in the poem:- Lines 1-4
- Lines 6-21
-
Repetition
-
Alliteration
-
Consonance
-
Assonance
-
Imagery
-
Simile
-
Extended Metaphor
-
-
"Sleep" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Utterly
- Fugitive
- Estuary
- Ferry
- Engulf
- Lave
- Clamber
- Dumb
- Delve
- Dissolved
- Viewless
- Valves
- Embodied
- Expulsion
- Riving
- Forceps
- Remorseless
- Pangs
-
(Location in poem: Line 1: “Do you give yourself to me utterly,”; Line 5: “Yes, utterly.”)
Completely; without qualification.
-
Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Sleep”
-
Form
"Sleep" is made up of four stanzas of varying lengths. It doesn't have a traditional form, such as a sonnet or a villanelle, but instead unfolds loosely, organically, unpredictably—fitting for a poem describing how it feels to sleep. Each stanza also consists of a single sentence (with the exception of the first, which has two). These long, windy sentences pull readers down the page, perhaps evoking the pull of sleepiness.
-
Meter
The poem is written in free verse, meaning it does not follow a set meter. This keeps the poem feeling smooth and organic. That said, many lines don't stray too far from pentameter. For instance, lines 1, 2, and 4 in the first stanza are all 10 syllables long, and the third stanza contains lines that are mostly 9 syllables long.
What's more, the majority of the poem's lines (though certainly not all of them) feature four stressed beats, with varying numbers of unstressed beats in between. As such, the meter might be thought of as a very loose accentual tetrameter.
Take lines 3 and 7, which both feature a clear falling rhythm—that is, a rhythm that moves from stressed beats to unstressed beats. Both lines have four stresses apiece; line 3 is made up specifically of dactyls (poetic feet consisting of one stressed beat followed by two unstressed beats), while line 7 features three unstressed beats after each stress:
Not as a | fugitive, | blindly or | bitterly,
[...]
Carry you and | ferry you to | burial mys- | teriously,These lines feel smooth and hypnotic, evoking the pull of sleep. And that same pattern of four stresses per line in a falling rhythm pops up again and again in the poem. Take lines 15-16, which feature a mixture of trochees (stressed-unstressed) and more dactyls:
Blindly in | bones that | ride a- | bove you,
Delve in my | flesh, dis- | solved and | bedded,Later, lines 20-21 again mix trochees and dactyls (plus a final spondee, two stressed beats in a row, to add emphasis to the phrase "harsh birth"):
Life with re- | morseless | forceps | beckoning –
Pangs and be- | trayal of | harsh birth.While not every line has the same falling pattern, many others still feature the same number of stressed beats. Take line 10:
In the | huge cave, | my bel- | ly, lave | you
Nearly the entirety of the third stanza (including lines 15-16, mentioned above) also features four stressed beats per line:
And you | shall cling | and clamb- | er there
And slumb- | er there, | in that | dumb cham- | ber,
[...]
Blindly in | bones that | ride a- | bove you,
Delve in my | flesh, dis- | solved and | bedded,
Through view- | less valves | embo- | died so –The poem thus feels rhythmic and musical but never overly strict or predictable. It might bring to mind the gentle, soothing rhythms of sleep—and the way that those rhythms get disrupted by the "harsh birth" of awakening.
-
Rhyme Scheme
The poem doesn't follow a regular rhyme scheme. However, its first and last stanzas do feature an alternating pattern of slant end rhymes. The rhymes in the first stanza can be thought of as following the pattern ABABA:
[...] utterly, A
[...] flesh, B
[...] bitterly, A
[...] wish? B
[...] utterly. AStanza 2 breaks with this pattern; lines 6, 7, and 11 contain slant rhymes ("estuary," "mysteriously," "continually"), while lines 8-10 simply repeat the same word ("you") at the end of each line. In stanza 3, end rhyme disappears altogether.
Then in the last stanza, the alternating ABAB rhyme pattern returns, perhaps suggesting that such regimented order is tied to the waking world, while sleep is a more disorganized and intuitive state:
[...] awakening, A
[...] forth, B
[...] beckoning – A
[...] birth. B
-
-
“Sleep” Speaker
-
The speaker of this poem is sleep itself, personified. Sleep is addressing a person, asking them if they are willing to completely surrender themselves with total, childlike trust. When the person responds with a "yes," sleep goes on to describe what the experience of sleep will feel like.
The language sleep uses to describe itself is both comforting and a little disturbing. For instance, sleep says that it will "carry" the speaker in its "huge [...] belly" and also to a metaphorical "burial," imagery that is at once nurturing and sinister. Sleep also says that it will "lave" (or wash) the sleeper with "huger waves continually." While washing in itself feels parental, the idea of the "waves" getting bigger and bigger—and the sleeper "cling[ing]" and "clamber[ing]" while the waves "engulf" them—feels dangerous, almost as if the sleeper's very essence will be eroded or washed away.
Note that it's also possible to interpret the speaker as an actual mother speaking to a baby in her womb or as someone speaking to a lover during intercourse. This is because sleep, here, is presented as being metaphorically like both sex and pregnancy. In any case, the speaker remains at once a nurturing and overwhelming force that protects the listener from the harsh light of waking life—for a while.
-
-
“Sleep” Setting
-
The poem is mostly a description of what it feels like to sleep, so the setting is an imagined (and largely metaphorical) one. The speaker (who, again, is sleep personified) first describes falling asleep as being carried "down [an] estuary" (or the mouth of a river) where the sleeper will be "ferr[ied]" to "burial." In other words, sleeping is a little like floating along a river, and it's also like dying.
Following this sleeper down the river, the poem's setting transitions into a "huge cave" that is also a "belly." This is a pretty surreal atmosphere, and sleep is being compared to many things at once: death, a sea cave, a womb. Sleep seems both terrifying and comforting, a place of warmth and protection but also a place that's suffocating and difficult to escape.
In the third stanza, the speaker expands on the metaphor of sleep as a womb—which here becomes a "dumb," or silent, windowless "chamber" surrounded by the beating of blood and a heart pounding in a ribcage above. This dark, muffled space contrasts sharply with the brightness of the "daylight" that emerges in the poem's final stanza, as the sleeper is eventually "birth[ed]" back into the waking world.
-
-
Literary and Historical Context of “Sleep”
-
Literary Context
Kenneth Slessor (1901-1971) was one of Australia’s most influential poets as well as a journalist and war correspondent during World War II. He is well known for steering Australian poetry away from the “bush ballads” (a genre of poetry that depicted life in undeveloped parts of Australia in simple, rhyming verse) and towards the more complex and experimental tenets of Modernism.
Modernism, which arose in response to the rapidly shifting landscape of the early 20th century, celebrated artistic experimentation and a rejection of rigid formal constraints like rhyme and meter. Slessor’s evocative imagery and experimental techniques (such as the purposefully inconsistent use of end rhyme in this poem) are in keeping with Modernism’s mantra to “make it new.” He was equally at home writing about world-weariness and disillusionment as he was about the beauty of living in the moment, and even his heaviest subject matter is often tempered by irony and an insistent love of life.
Slessor's poems frequently focus on time and memory and feature sea-related imagery—a reflection of having spent most of his life in Sydney, Australia. His best-known poems include “Beach Burial,” an homage to Australian troops in World War II, and “Five Bells,” an elegy for his friend Joe Lynch.
Historical Context
The early 20th century was a time of massive societal change. Technological advancements meant that more people had access to cars, telephones, and radios, and it also led to the increasing urbanization of society and the mechanization of labor. But shifting social norms and the horrific violence of World War I left many disillusioned with so-called modern "progress"—a feeling compounded by the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II in the 1930s.
Slessor himself was a teenager when World War I began and ended, and he went on to become an official war correspondent during World War II. "Sleep," published in 1939, doesn't reference any of these events explicitly. But its depiction of the waking world as a "harsh" place into which sleepers are unwillingly pulled by "remorseless forceps"—and of the desire to give oneself “utterly” to sleep (or sex, or death)—seems to reflect a distinctly Modernist attitude.
One might also argue the poem contains a subtle allusion to the death of Slessor's friend Joe Lynch, who died by drowning in Sydney Harbor in 1927. The metaphorical watery "burial" and the imagery of "waves" "consum[ing]" and "engulf[ing]" the sleeper may explain why sleep isn't a strictly soothing presence in this poem; after all, dreams are often the site of unprocessed trauma and grief.
-
-
More “Sleep” Resources
-
External Resources
-
Slessor's Life and Work — Explore a biography of Slessor and additional poems via the Poetry Foundation.
-
More About the Poet — A more in-depth look at Slessor's life.
-
In Slessor's Own Hand — A collection of Slessor's handwritten poetry drafts hosted by the National Library of Australia.
-
A Slessor Documentary — Listen to an ABC radio documentary about Slessor's life and literary contributions.
-
-
LitCharts on Other Poems by Kenneth Slessor
-
