Analysis of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Pains of Sleep Essays

The third stanza is the inevitable ?fall from grace? as our speaker has finally ?taken off the gloves? and resorts to the vengeance of cold steel. The speaker utters one last phrase of motivation as he/she eerily takes pleasure in holding the tool of his nemesis? destruction. ?The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling to the feel of the .22, the bullets? neat noses.? The killer now takes a moment to lament on his/her course of action, acknowledging that her pacifism is a thing of the past; that he/she was once comparable to Darwin and his pension for non-violence. However, this does little to dissuade he/she from swiftly taking the life of the pests. ?I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing, now drew a bead on the little woodchuck?s face. He died down in the everbearing roses.? This stanza marked the turning point of the narrative as our speaker has been pushed beyond their boundaries into an unfamiliar realm of pleasure. A side of them has been exposed that has remained dormant for what appears to be the duration of their life. It is now a newfound sensation that has thrilled them beyond

Coleridge uses a wonderful section of continuous alliteration from lines 17-20 in order to give depth to the Harp:And now its stringsBoldlier swept, the long sequacious notesOver delicious surges sink and rise,Such a soft floating witchery of sound' (emphasis added) (l.17-19)The effect of this continuous use of the s sound creates the effect of a gentle, flowing and moving sound much like the long, delicious, floating sound that Coleridge tries to describe the harp as having. The actual effect of this alliteration is to create a sensual, relaxing tone at this point in the poem.

The poem is separated into two parts, each with sixteen lines, and is loosely based on an iambic pentameter metre. The rhyme scheme is ABAB throughout the poem, with the noticeable exception of the last four lines of part II, in which it changes to

The poem also uses end rhyme to add a certain rhythm to the poem as a whole. And the scheme he employs: aabbc, aabd, aabbad. End rhyme, in this poem, serves to effectively pull the reader through to the end of the poem. By pairing it with lines restricted to eight syllables. The narrator creates an almost nursery-rhyme like rhythm. In his third stanza however, his last line, cutting short of eight syllables, stands with an emphatic four syllables. Again, in the last stanza, he utilizes the same technique for the last line of the poem. The narrator’s awareness of rhyme and syllable structure provides the perfect bone structure for his poem’s rhythm.

The last effect of this unusual stanza is to create a turning point within the poem. The turning point starts in the final rhyming couplet of the fifth stanza where the pace is reduced by the use of alliteration and the trimetric line.

There is alliteration in the stanzas of 3 and 6 “blade beak” and claws clutching”. This poem also has a rhythm to it; the stanzas are not constructed in that unbalanced way in which it’s hard to keep flowing feel to the literature.

Quotation 9: “Ay, sir, but she will none, she gives you thanks./ I would the fool were married to her grave.” (Rom. 3. 5. 144-145) Translation: I did (inform her that we decided she is going to be married). But she is having none of it.

The poem progresses from mourning of the deceased to praising of his achievements and fate to die before his glory withered. Therefore, the tone shifts from somber and quiet to upbeat and positive. Such shift of tone is achieved by Housman’s use of sounds. In first two stanzas, Housman describes the funeral procession as he remembers the time when the young athlete was proudly brought home after he won a race. Then, he solaces the mourners by reminding them it is better that the athlete “slip betimes away from fields where glory does not stay” (lines 9 and 10) because the laurel “withers quicker than the rose” (line 12). The soft “s” sound stands out especially in second and third stanza and it creates a sense of calm and quiet tone and evokes an image of townspeople mourning the death of their “hero”; Consonance of “s” sounds is present in words “shoulder, set, threshold, townsman, stiller, smart, slip, betimes, fields, does, stay, grows, withers, and rose.” In addition to consonance, soft sound alliteration in “road all runners” (line 5) helps to create a quiet tone. As the poem progresses into praising of the young athlete in stanzas four through seven, the consonance of hard “c”, “t”, and “f” sound become prominent. Readers can immediately detect

Finally the poem has an emotional appeal. The poems tone is positive in a negative way it is sort of uplifting even though there is nothing encouraging about the situation. This is shown tough the use of words such as " I am the thousand winds that blow/ I am the diamond glints on the snow" these phrases have positive connotation saying that he will always be with us

Macbeth   Sleep is a time when our minds are at rest and the subconscious comes out to play.  Sleep is oftentimes considered the place where we are able to see into our future and perhaps figure out how to solve our problems.  Sleep is also what heals and cures our minds and bodies.  Without sleep we slowly begin to disintegrate.  Mind and body no longer cooperate without the healing force sleep brings with it.  Shakespeare uses sleep both as a reward and as a consequence in his plays.  If a character is innocent and pure, he is allowed restful, fulfilling sleep.  If the character lacks these traits of goodness, he is condemned to a lifetime

Because the poem is long, it won’t be quoted extensively here, but it is attached at the end of the paper for ease of reference. Instead, the paper will analyze the poetic elements in the work, stanza by stanza. First, because the poem is being read on-line, it’s not possible to say for certain that each stanza is a particular number of lines long. Each of several versions looks different on the screen; that is, there is no pattern to the number of lines in each stanza. However, the stanzas are more like paragraphs in a letter than

The poem begins with two lines which are repeated throughout the poem which convey what the narrator is thinking, they represent the voice in

The poem has many different hidden meanings but they are all based around a common theme of faith.

The poem begins with the narrator's describing the poem as a 'dream' that ''was not at all a dream'', which already causes doubt and tension within the reader. The narrator then goes on to talk about

Again this piece by Coleridge is a demonstration of this principle. The lyrics flow up to a moment of clear recollection of the scenery, leaving the poem incomplete so that the faculty of imagination would not be diluted. Coleridge in the 3 stanzas which he relived captured the sublime, and the striking feature of this poem is in its deconstructed syntax which eagerly captured the scenery. “But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted/ Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! / A savage place!”. This is a scene that Coleridge experienced in a dream, and its recollection in reality must express the resplendence of what he felt. We can see that grammatical requirements were not fulfilled since they would merely limit the true