“To Sleep” begins with a reverent apostrophe to "Sleep" itself. The speaker addresses the personified figure of Sleep as if it were a patient, gentle goddess, calling it “soothest Sleep” (a very Keatsian turn of phrase meaning something along the lines of “smoothest, sweetest, most soothing Sleep”). In the speaker’s vision, Sleep gently closes people’s eyes with “careful fingers and benign”—careful, kindly hands.
Under Sleep’s care, in the darkness behind their eyelids, sleepers are “embower’d from the light,” the speaker says. In other words, they’re sheltered from the daylight as if they were lying under the pleasant shade of trees. Sleep is a shapeshifter, then, at once a person and a place. First Sleep visits like a deity, tenderly shutting people’s eyes with its “benign” fingers; then it becomes a safe and sheltered glade where people can rest. Readers here might envision a summer grove, a place to nap secure from the burning sun.
Sleep’s shady refuge protects people from the “light” of day, but also the metaphorical “light” of consciousness. “Enshaded” in Sleep’s groves, sleepers partake of one of Sleep’s great gifts: “forgetfulness divine." The speaker here seems to value sleep not for the rest it offers or the dreams it might bring, but for its offer of sheer blissful oblivion, the chance not to have to think about anything for a while. Already, readers might wonder: just what is it that this sleeper is so keen to forget?
The speaker’s longing for forgetfulness might even make them hope for a deeper and more serious unconsciousness. When the speaker addresses Sleep as the “soft embalmer of the still midnight,” their language calls up sweet, balmy scents, like night-blooming jasmine. But it also evokes—well—embalming, the preservation of a dead body. This speaker, the poem's imagery hints, wants sleep to make them dead to the world, to preserve them in total oblivion until a new day comes.
Over the course of this poem, the speaker will make a hushed plea that Sleep might save them from the torments of a busy, anxious mind. In form, the poem is both a sonnet and an ode:
- As a sonnet, the poem uses a classic shape and meter: 14 lines of iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “And seal | the hush- | ed cask- | et of | my soul.” Note that Keats uses an old-fashioned pronunciation for words ending in “-ed” here: “hushed” is pronounced HUSH-ed, not hushd).
- As an ode, the poem addresses and honors a particular subject. This poem shows Keats experimenting with a mode that he would perfect in some of his greatest and most famous poems (like “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn”).