To Sleep
A sonnet of fourteen lines in iambic pentameter, spoken directly to sleep, which it addresses in the opening line as a “soft embalmer of the still midnight.”[1] It opens with two calls to Sleep, turns on the repeated plea “Save me,” and closes on a single image of a key turned in a lock. Its rhymes weave across the usual divisions of the form and do not settle into the neat quatrains and closing couplet of the English sonnet.
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the “Amen,” ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passèd day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,—
Save me from curious Conscience, that still hoards
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards,
And seal the hushèd casket of my soul.
John Keats was an English Romantic poet, born in London in 1795 and dead of tuberculosis in Rome in 1821, at twenty-five.[2] In a working life of only a few years he wrote the odes and sonnets on which his reputation rests, among them “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”[2] He composed “To Sleep” in 1819, during a year of intense work on the sonnet form, and it was first published after his death.[2]
Flaming June
A young woman sleeps curled on her side, her knees drawn up and one arm folded beneath her head. She wears a translucent orange gown that falls in broad folds and fills most of the nearly square canvas. Behind her a low marble ledge opens onto a narrow band of sea and sky, and a sprig of dark foliage sits at the upper right. The picture is built almost entirely from warm oranges and golds.
_-_Museo_de_Arte_de_Ponce.jpg?width=1200)
Frederic Leighton (1830–1896) was a British painter and sculptor and a leading figure of the Victorian classical tradition.[2] He served as President of the Royal Academy from 1878 until his death, and was made a baron the day before he died, the only British artist raised to the peerage.[2] He painted Flaming June in 1895, and it was shown at the Royal Academy that year.[1] The work is oil on canvas, about 119 centimetres square, and belongs to the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico.[1]
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
A man has fallen asleep at a table, slumped forward with his arms folded on the tabletop and his head resting on them. Owls and bats rise out of the darkness behind and above him, filling the top of the sheet. A cat crouches at the lower right, and a pair of eyes shows at the left. The front of the table carries the printed words El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. It is a black-and-white print, the sleeping figure lit in the foreground and the animals emerging from a dark ground above.[1]
,_from_Los_Caprichos_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg?width=1200)
Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) was a Spanish painter and printmaker and court painter to the Spanish crown.[1] This print is plate 43 of Los Caprichos, a series of eighty etchings he published in Madrid in 1799.[1] It is made by etching and aquatint, and the plate was first conceived as a title image for the series.[2] Impressions are held by several museums; the one reproduced here belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which offers its image as open access.[1]
- The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (plate 43 from Los Caprichos), object page, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The holding museum for the impression reproduced here; source of the accession number 18.64(43), the medium, and the open-access status.
- “Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” Smarthistory. Source for the series and date context and the plate’s original role as a title image.