The Full Text of “The Pains of Sleep”
1Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
2It hath not been my use to pray
3With moving lips or bended knees;
4But silently, by slow degrees,
5My spirit I to Love compose,
6In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
7With reverential resignation,
8No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
9Only a sense of supplication;
10A sense o'er all my soul imprest
11That I am weak, yet not unblest,
12Since in me, round me, every where
13Eternal strength and Wisdom are.
14But yester-night I prayed aloud
15In anguish and in agony,
16Up-starting from the fiendish crowd
17Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
18A lurid light, a trampling throng,
19Sense of intolerable wrong,
20And whom I scorned, those only strong!
21Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
22Still baffled, and yet burning still!
23Desire with loathing strangely mixed
24On wild or hateful objects fixed.
25Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
26And shame and terror over all!
27Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
28Which all confused I could not know
29Whether I suffered, or I did:
30For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe,
31My own or others still the same
32Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.
33So two nights passed: the night's dismay
34Saddened and stunned the coming day.
35Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me
36Distemper's worst calamity.
37The third night, when my own loud scream
38Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
39O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild,
40I wept as I had been a child;
41And having thus by tears subdued
42My anguish to a milder mood,
43Such punishments, I said, were due
44To natures deepliest stained with sin,—
45For aye entempesting anew
46The unfathomable hell within,
47The horror of their deeds to view,
48To know and loathe, yet wish and do!
49Such griefs with such men well agree,
50But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
51To be beloved is all I need,
52And whom I love, I love indeed.
The Full Text of “The Pains of Sleep”
1Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
2It hath not been my use to pray
3With moving lips or bended knees;
4But silently, by slow degrees,
5My spirit I to Love compose,
6In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
7With reverential resignation,
8No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
9Only a sense of supplication;
10A sense o'er all my soul imprest
11That I am weak, yet not unblest,
12Since in me, round me, every where
13Eternal strength and Wisdom are.
14But yester-night I prayed aloud
15In anguish and in agony,
16Up-starting from the fiendish crowd
17Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
18A lurid light, a trampling throng,
19Sense of intolerable wrong,
20And whom I scorned, those only strong!
21Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
22Still baffled, and yet burning still!
23Desire with loathing strangely mixed
24On wild or hateful objects fixed.
25Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
26And shame and terror over all!
27Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
28Which all confused I could not know
29Whether I suffered, or I did:
30For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe,
31My own or others still the same
32Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.
33So two nights passed: the night's dismay
34Saddened and stunned the coming day.
35Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me
36Distemper's worst calamity.
37The third night, when my own loud scream
38Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
39O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild,
40I wept as I had been a child;
41And having thus by tears subdued
42My anguish to a milder mood,
43Such punishments, I said, were due
44To natures deepliest stained with sin,—
45For aye entempesting anew
46The unfathomable hell within,
47The horror of their deeds to view,
48To know and loathe, yet wish and do!
49Such griefs with such men well agree,
50But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
51To be beloved is all I need,
52And whom I love, I love indeed.
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“The Pains of Sleep” Introduction
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The English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote "The Pains of Sleep" in 1803. The poem's speaker, a version of Coleridge himself, describes a series of agonizing nightmares and wonders why he has to go through this torment. His pain leads him to muse not just on the terrible power of the subconscious, but also on his own faith: it's hard, he reflects, to understand why a loving God would put him through this misery. The poem was inspired by Coleridge's own suffering during a bout of opium withdrawal. He didn't publish this all-too-personal nightmare vision until 1816, when it appeared in a pamphlet alongside his famous poems "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan."
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“The Pains of Sleep” Summary
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Before I lie down in bed, I don't usually say my prayers out loud or get down on my knees. Instead, I slowly attune my soul to Love and close my eyes, full of simple trust in God—feeling a worshipful willingness to accept whatever comes my way. My prayers aren't wishes for anything in particular, or thoughts about anything special: I just ask for whatever God wants to give me. This always makes me feel, deep in my soul, that though I'm not perfect I'm still blessed—for I can count on finding God's power and wisdom wherever I look, inside me or around me.
But last night, I found myself praying out loud in awful pain, waking up with a jolt from a demonic mob of visions and ideas that tormented me in my sleep. I saw an ugly light, a swarming crowd—and felt that something was unbearably wrong. Only the people who I despise most had power in this dream! I dreamed of vengeance, but found I had no power to do anything about it—only to passionately long to act. In my dream, I both longed for and despised all kinds of loathsome things. Oh, the crazed emotions I felt! Oh, the tormenting battles I fought! And spread over all this was a persistent feeling of shame and fear. I saw terrible acts that should have been secrets committed right out in the open—and felt so dazed that I couldn't tell whether I was the victim or the perpetrator. Everything around me reminded me of guilt, regret, or sorrow, whether I felt them about my own behavior or about the behavior of others: my life seemed choked by fear, my soul seemed choked by shame.
I spent two nights like this, and both times, the misery of my nightmares left me sad and dazed the next day. The everyday blessings of sleep felt more like the worst symptom of an awful illness. On the third night, after I woke screaming from my nightmares, I was so overwhelmed by my misery that I cried like a little kid. Once I'd wept out the worst of my pain and found myself a little calmer, I reflected that punishments like these nightmares would be the right ones for the very worst and most sinful people. They'd have to take a fresh look at the storms of their hellish souls, confronting their crimes, understanding that these acts were awful, but that they'd freely chosen to do them. Sufferings like these would be justice, for evil men—but why oh why must I go through them? All I need is to be loved—and the people I love, I love truly.
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“The Pains of Sleep” Themes
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The Helplessness of Sleep and the Power of the Unconscious
The speaker of “The Pains of Sleep” is having terrible nightmares. Every time he goes to bed, he’s confronted by visions of evil deeds. Worst of all, his dreams give him the sense that he’s both the victim and the perpetrator of the crimes he sees. His dreams reflect deep guilt and fear, suggesting that, with his conscious guard down, he’s unwillingly meeting the scariest parts of his own mind. The poem illustrates how sleep puts the speaker at the mercy of his darkest feelings, memories, and desires—and how that sense of helplessness can be the most nightmarish thing of all.
Sleep, the speaker reflects, demands that people give up all kinds of conscious power, from the control of their bodies to the control of their thoughts. The speaker thus usually gets ready for bed by praying for “resignation”—that is, the ability and willingness to accept whatever God brings his way, knowing that God’s “Eternal Strength and Wisdom” will guide whatever happens in both his waking and his dreaming life. In the past, this surrender has given the speaker a gentle sense of safety and protection, making him feel that he’s “not unblest” in spite of his own “weak[ness].” That is, though he can’t control what happens to him, he can take comfort in his trust in God.
The problem is, surrendering control this way also leaves the speaker at the mercy of his unconscious mind. When he sleeps, he finds himself tormented by dreams of misery and guilt, in which shameful “deeds to be hid” are done right out in the open, and he “desire[s]” the very things that he “loath[es]” (or despises).
Perhaps the worst part of these dreams is that he can never tell whether he “suffer[s]” the crimes he sees or commits them—or both. A crushing sense of “shame and terror” pervades these dreams, suggesting that the speaker is being forced to face his own fear that he’s done something awful or is himself something awful. In sleep, he has no choice but to accept the agony of these visions.
The speaker even seems to dream about his helplessness. His “will” to act, in these nightmares, is destroyed: he’s “powerless” to affect anything he sees. His nightmares, in other words, are also partly about his nightmares!
The surrender of sleep, the poem thus suggests, is a double-edged sword. The same helplessness that can feel like a comforting “blessing” and expression of trust can just as easily feel like “distemper’s worst calamity” (that is, the most terrible symptom of an illness): an out-of-control encounter with the sickest parts of one’s own soul.
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Faith, Punishment, and Divine Justice
The speaker of “The Pains of Sleep” has always taken comfort in the thought of a loving God watching out for him. But now, as he endures awful nightmares, he can’t help but feel that God might be sleeping on the job: he just doesn’t deserve this much suffering. The agonies he’s going through, he reflects, would be a fit punishment for truly terrible men, but they feel out of proportion to his own bad behavior. His agonized questions about the reasons for his suffering suggest that it can be difficult to maintain one’s faith in God in the face of apparently senseless pain—and that there are some kinds of suffering that no human being can find reasons for.
The speaker’s usual bedtime ritual suggests that he places great faith in a God who has a plan for him. Saying his prayers, he doesn’t ask for anything in particular: he just silently closes his eyes with “humble trust,” believing that God’s “Eternal Strength and Wisdom” always surround him. Faith, to this speaker, means believing that God knows what’s right much better than he, the speaker, does. And there’s comfort in this “resignation” to God’s will: feeling himself to be “weak” and error-prone, the speaker is relieved to be able to trust in a higher power.
But the speaker’s nightmares shake this faithful “resignation.” His nightly dreams of “shame and terror” are so unendurable that he finds himself praying out loud “in anguish and in agony,” begging God to put an end to his torments; he just can’t resign himself to pain like this, and he can’t figure out why God would put him through it.
This question leads the speaker to thoughts of divine justice: perhaps, he reasons, nightmares like these are God’s punishment for sin. But that idea just doesn’t hold up. Even though the speaker’s dreams fill him with “shame,” suggesting he feels he might deserve to suffer, his pain seems disproportionately severe to him.
Such bad nightmares (including those deep feelings of shame!) strike him as a fitting medicine for “natures deepliest stained with sin”—that is, the most unapologetically sinful souls. Though the speaker knows he’s sinned in his time, he doesn’t feel that his own nature is so bad as all that; his suffering feels way out of proportion to his crimes. He’s thus left to helplessly wonder “wherefore, wherefore” (that is, “why, why”) he has to go through this.
The speaker’s feeling that his sufferings are unfair leaves him in a theological bind. If he believes in a just and kind God, then he has to accept that these nightmares somehow fit into God’s plan. But his suffering feels so disproportionately deep that he just can’t see how that could be true. Pain, the poem suggests, can’t be explained away as a reasonable punishment for the sinful. But it can still feel like a punishment—and enduring terrible pain can thus shake one’s faith in a just and benevolent God.
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Addiction, Desire, and Shame
“The Pains of Sleep” describes not just nightmares in general, but the nightmare of addiction in particular. Coleridge wrote this autobiographical poem during a time when he was trying to wean himself off opiates, and he enclosed it in a letter to a friend in which he described his own withdrawal nightmares. While the poem doesn’t directly say so, this speaker’s exploration of nightmarish helplessness is also a portrait of the mingled “desire” and “shame” of addiction: the horror and guilt of craving something that hurts you.
One of the worst parts of the speaker’s nightmares is his sense that he’s both the victim and the perpetrator of some terrible crime. It’s impossible for him to tell whether he “suffered” or “did” the awful things he sees in his dreams: he’s at war against himself. Worse still, some part of him wants to hurt himself. With his “desire and loathing” (that is, longing and disgust) “strangely mixed,” his dream-self craves the very experiences that horrify him. “To know and loathe, but wish and do” seems to be a central feature of his pain: part of what’s so agonizing about his nightmares is his sense that, in them, he repeats the same awful acts over and over in spite of the fact that he knows they’re deeply “wrong.”
That feeling of helplessly doing something harmful was all too familiar to Coleridge, who, as noted above, suffered from a severe opium addiction. Part of the pain of addiction, the poem suggests, is the shame of being out of control: addicts are often well aware that their addiction is hurting them, but still can’t resist their cravings. The speaker’s dream-self feels choking “guilt” and “fear” over this inner conflict. Continually doing something that he knows he shouldn’t do, he feels humiliated by his loss of control, and by the terrifying sense that his better self is always losing a battle against his worst instincts.
The nightmare of addiction, the poem thus suggests, is built on a self-destructive cycle of helplessness and shame—one that only spins faster as addiction strengthens its grip.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Pains of Sleep”
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Lines 1-5
Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,"The Pains of Sleep" begins with a bedtime routine that doesn't sound painful at all: the speaker describes the way he usually says his prayers before he goes to sleep.
Or, rather, he describes how he doesn't pray. "It hath not been my use," he says, to pray "with moving lips or bended knees." In other words, it's not his custom to get down on his knees or say a formal prayer, as many people would.
Instead, he performs a quiet little ritual of his own. Listen to his sibilance in these lines:
[...] silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,The mixture of hushed /s/ and /z/ sounds here suggests both his outer silence—no "moving lips" here—and his inner stillness. All he has to do to pray, he says, is to "compose" himself, to quiet his "spirit" down. Noiselessly, gradually, he orients his soul toward "Love." The capital "L" there suggests that this speaker is thinking of Love, not as an abstract principle, but as a name for God.
In these lines, the speaker presents himself as a man with a deep, quiet, and personal faith in a loving deity. He doesn't need to make any special gestures or mouth any particular words to feel as if God is right there with him; all he has to do is open his mind to the spirit of "Love."
But the poem's title, with its "Pains," foreshadows a change: all will not remain well for this faithful speaker. His trust in God, he'll discover, can't save him from suffering. Coleridge knew this all too well: this autobiographical poem will reflect on his own experiences.
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Lines 6-9
In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation,
No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only a sense of supplication; -
Lines 10-13
A sense o'er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, every where
Eternal strength and Wisdom are. -
Lines 14-17
But yester-night I prayed aloud
In anguish and in agony,
Up-starting from the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me: -
Lines 18-20
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only strong! -
Lines 21-22
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still! -
Lines 23-26
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
And shame and terror over all! -
Lines 27-30
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which all confused I could not know
Whether I suffered, or I did:
For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe, -
Lines 31-32
My own or others still the same
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame. -
Lines 33-36
So two nights passed: the night's dismay
Saddened and stunned the coming day.
Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me
Distemper's worst calamity. -
Lines 37-40
The third night, when my own loud scream
Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild,
I wept as I had been a child; -
Lines 41-44
And having thus by tears subdued
My anguish to a milder mood,
Such punishments, I said, were due
To natures deepliest stained with sin,— -
Lines 45-48
For aye entempesting anew
The unfathomable hell within,
The horror of their deeds to view,
To know and loathe, yet wish and do! -
Lines 49-50
Such griefs with such men well agree,
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me? -
Lines 51-52
To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.
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“The Pains of Sleep” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Imagery
Perhaps what's most important about the imagery in "The Pains of Sleep" is how little of it there is. In a poem about nightmares, readers might expect to find plenty of sensory details, descriptions of all the horrors that visit the speaker every night. But by holding back on the imagery, the speaker cleverly suggests that the things he sees are too awful even to describe, leaving many of his visions up to the reader's imagination.
Of course, he does introduce just enough detail to help make readers uneasy. Remembering how he startled awake to flee from a "fiendish crowd" of mingled "shapes and thoughts," he recalls seeing:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
That "lurid light"—ugly, cruel, and glaring—seems to glow sullenly over all the rest of the feelings and experiences the speaker describes. And the "trampling throng" evokes the thunderous sounds of an out-of-control mob, rushing thoughtlessly here and there like a herd of wild animals. In short, these four words alone create what sounds an awful lot like a vision of Hell itself: a place lit by the flicker of evil-smelling fires and populated by senseless, suffering, howling crowds.
No wonder that the whole scene gives the speaker a "sense of intolerable wrong"—or that his "own loud scream" wakes him from these visions. The fact that this "loud scream" crosses from the speaker's dream life to his waking life makes one of the poem's central tragedies clear: the "pains of sleep" never stay confined to the speaker's bed, but follow him into his days.
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Simile
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Metaphor
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Allusion
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Rhetorical Question
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Repetition
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Parallelism
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Sibilance
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"The Pains of 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.
- Ere
- Hath
- Use
- Reverential resignation
- Exprest
- Supplication
- O'er
- Imprest
- Unblest
- Yester-night
- Up-starting
- Lurid
- Throng
- Baffled
- Fixed
- Fantastic
- Brawl
- Woe
- Stifling
- So
- Distemper
- Calamity
- O'ercome
- As I had been
- Subdued
- Deepliest
- For aye
- Entempesting
- Loathe
- Wherefore
- Indeed
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Before.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Pains of Sleep”
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Form
"The Pains of Sleep" has 52 lines broken into three irregular stanzas:
- The first has 13 lines
- The second has 19 lines
- The third has 20 lines
This wild, unpredictable, and unusual form—especially the first two stanzas, with their awkward numbers of lines—make the poem feel as if it's spinning out of control, just like the speaker's nightmarish visions. There's little neat order or comfort in this poem's shape, any more than there is in the speaker's dreams.
Note, too, that the poem's three stanzas mirror the speaker's three nights of terrible dreams—and that each stanza gets a little longer. The longer these nightmares go on, the form suggests, the more consuming and inescapable they feel.
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Meter
"The Pains of Sleep" is written in iambic tetrameter. That means that each line uses four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in the poem's closing lines:
To be | beloved | is all | I need,
And whom | I love, | I love | indeed.This pulsing rhythm helps to conjure up both the speaker's terror and his efforts to calm himself: depending on the speaker's tone, the same meter can sound like a pounding heartbeat or a soothing rocking motion.
The poem sometimes plays around with this meter for emphasis. For example, listen to the difference in the haunting line 32:
Life-stif- | ling fear, | soul-stif- | ling shame.
Here, the speaker introduces two strong spondees, metrical feet with a DUM-DUM rhythm. Those pounding stresses emphasize the speaker's utter agony.
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Rhyme Scheme
The rhyme scheme of "The Pains of Sleep" switches back and forth between two patterns: couplets, and alternating rhymes. For instance, the first stanza runs like this:
AABBCCDEDEEFF
In other words:
- The first six lines use couplets, pairs of matching rhymes (AABBCC).
- Lines 7-10 use alternating rhymes: every other line rhymes (DEDE).
- But line 10 also becomes the first rhyme in a new couplet (EE), and the stanza ends with another (FF). It's as if the rhyme in line 10 is getting dragged in two directions at once.
The poem goes back and forth between couplets (and once even a triplet, in lines 18-20) and alternating rhyme throughout. But no two stanzas use exactly the same pattern.
Lurching unpredictably from one kind of rhyme to another, this off-kilter scheme reflects the speaker's desperation, confusion, and fear. His rhymes are as wild and overpowering as his nightmares.
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“The Pains of Sleep” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a version of Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself. Coleridge enclosed an early draft of this poem in a letter to his friend Robert Southey, explaining that this tale of awful nightmares was a record of his own experiences. Coleridge was trying to break an addiction to opiates at the time, and his visions here tally with the accounts of other people who have been through opiate withdrawal.
The speaker feels a complex mixture of bewilderment and anxiety over his tormenting nightmares. On the one hand, he believes that he couldn't possibly be so "stained with sin" as to deserve this agony. On the other, some part of him asks: "wherefore" ("why"), then, does God put him through these sufferings? Torn between anxious guilt and self-pity, this speaker suffers at least as much from his own anxieties about his nightmares as he does from the nightmares themselves.
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“The Pains of Sleep” Setting
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The poem is set somewhere between the speaker's bedroom and his nightmares. Unfortunately for the speaker, the distance between the real world and his dream world seems to have collapsed: his awful dreams have gotten so bad that they spill over into his waking life, "sadden[ing] and stunn[ing] the coming day."
In fact, the speaker is so caught up in the "fiendish" agony of his dreams that he never gives a very clear picture of either his physical surroundings or his nightmares themselves. He's distracted enough by the feelings of the nightmares, from "shame and terror" to a "sense of intolerable wrong," that he doesn't even tell readers what symbolic shapes those feelings take in his visions. By not describing what he sees, the speaker leaves readers to imagine what they'd see if they were suffering such tormenting nightmares—or to imagine that the speaker's visions are too fearful even to describe.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Pains of Sleep”
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Literary Context
A visionary poet, a huge personality, and a legendary talker, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was one of the foremost figures of the Romantic movement. He's often said to have launched English Romanticism with the 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads, a collaboration with his friend William Wordsworth.
This groundbreaking book moved away from the sharp satire of 18th-century of writers like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift to pursue a new kind of imaginative, inward-looking art. Wordsworth's poems focused on the lives of humble people in the countryside, while Coleridge's explored wild and magical visions. Both writers, though, were committed to using down-to-earth language and old folk forms like the ballad.
But "The Pains of Sleep" was written in 1803, after the Lyrical Ballads glory days. At the time he wrote this poem, Coleridge was struggling with opiate addiction—a much less inspiring part of the Romantic legacy. Coleridge was only one of the era's writers to fall prey to such an addiction and to explore the visions and miseries it produced in art; his friend Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is another famous example. This poem's descriptions of awful nightmares were inspired by Coleridge's withdrawal pains.
Perhaps because this poem was so personal, Coleridge didn't publish it until 1816, when it appeared in a pamphlet alongside "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan"—poems that also deal with dreams, visions, and nightmares.
Today, Coleridge's work remains so influential that some of it has become proverbial: his great poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is the origin of the saying "to carry an albatross around one's neck."
Historical Context
In the 19th century, it was pretty easy to become an opium addict by accident: doctors prescribed the drug (usually in the form of laudanum, a solution of opium and alcohol) as a remedy for everything from pain to low spirits.
Coleridge, a lifelong hypochondriac and depressive, was particularly vulnerable to accidental addiction. Once he started taking laudanum for his aches and pains, it didn't take long for him to develop a serious and compounding dependency: he ended up using laudanum to treat the side effects of laudanum.
Addiction drove a wedge between Coleridge and many of the people who loved him, leaving him lonely and depressed. Though he tried to quit, he never fully recovered. He ended his life under the constant care of James Gillman, a doctor with an unusually sympathetic view of addiction (and of Coleridge, whom he practically adopted).
But Coleridge's addiction also made its mark on literature. Besides working as an anesthetic, opiates can cause vivid dreams and hallucinations. Much of Coleridge's best-known poetry has a wild visionary quality that could well have been influenced by his drug use. He even prefaced his famous "Kubla Khan" with a story describing how the poem came to him in a waking dream (only for him to forget how it ended when some darn "person from Porlock" knocked on his door and startled him back to his senses).
While Coleridge's life fed later stereotypes of the dreamy, drug-addled Romantic poet, the real story is much sadder and more complicated than that. "The Pains of Sleep" records some of the consequences of an all-too-common 19th-century affliction.
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More “The Pains of Sleep” Resources
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External Resources
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Friends of Coleridge — Visit the Friends of Coleridge, a society dedicated to Coleridge's work.
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A Short Biography — Learn more about Coleridge's life and work via the British Library.
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Opium and the Romantics — Read an essay about how opium, a commonly prescribed drug in the 19th century, influenced Romantic writers like Coleridge, whose own withdrawal pains inspired this poem.
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Coleridge's Legacy — Read biographer Richard Holmes's discussion of what makes Coleridge's poetry special.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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