"The Pains of Sleep"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Pains of Sleep" deals with an internal struggle expressed in a nightmare affecting the following days. It looks at its poetic form and the language used in order to analyse how they contribute to the meaning and effect of the poem.

From the Paper:

"The third stanza gets back to a more casual, narrative tone with, again, the stabilised, reassuring scheme of aabbccddee over the first half of it (lines 33-42). The tone, however, is neither that of peaceful bliss as in the first stanza nor that of escalating chaos as in the second, but of a person profoundly "saddened" and "stunned ". A certain distance from the nightmare seems to have been found, as would indicate the matter-of-fact, quasi incidental informing that there were 2 more such nights and the choice of the word "seem" (instead of 'was' or 'became') in lines 35-36: "Sleep...seemed to me/ Distemper's worst calamity". The explanation to Coleridge's sudden ability to relate to these nightmares in such an emotionally remote way is given immediately: his childlike (i.e. pure) tears "subdued" the "anguish to a milder mood". "

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