Summary Poem Analysis of 'Sleep' by Kenneth Slessor
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Here’s a full analysis of the poem “Sleep” by Kenneth Slessor, tailored towards A-Level students, but also suitable for those studying at a higher level.
Includes:
Poem
Vocabulary
Story/Summary
Speaker/Voice
Language features
Structure/Form
Context
Attitudes
Themes
(Full poem unable to be reproduced due to copyright restrictions)
Kenneth Slessor
VOCABULARY
Utterly - totally, completely
Fugitive - someone who has run away or escaped captivity, such as an escaped
prisoner
Estuary - a channel of a river which meets the ocean
To ferry someone - to transport them using a ferry (a ship that crosses rivers or
oceans, carrying people and cargo)
Engulf - completely surround, as in the way liquid will fill around a shape
Delve - dive deeply into something
Expulsion - being expelled / pushed out of something
Riving - to split, crack or tear apart
Remorseless - without guilt or regret
Forceps - a pair of pincers or tweezers, a large pair of forceps are sometimes used in
childbirth to help deliver the baby
Pangs - sharp, sudden pains
, STORY/SUMMARY
In the first stanza, the speaker asks if the addressee gives himself completely to her
- do they entirely devote themselves to him? The speaker wants him to devote both
his body and mind; not out of panic, blindness or resentment like a fugitive but like a
child, full of innocence and enthusiasm. This is answered with a ‘yes’.
Next, the speaker replies that she will carry the addressee down her river, into the
land of sleep. This process is like a mysterious, and temporary, burial. Sleep takes
and receives the addressee, down into her huge belly, providing love, care and
attention that feel as though they arrive in waves.
In Stanza 3, Sleep says that the addressee will cling to her belly, clambering before
falling to sleep. Her heartbeat and his heartbeat will become one, as they dissolve into
one entity while he sleeps.
Stanza 4 says that he will remain there, away from the world, until daylight breaks
and he is expelled back into the waking world. They separate and split off, as he
wakes up. Life pulls him forwards and out of the clutches of sleep, and the process is
harsh and painful as he feels like he wants to stay in the comfort of sleep.
SPEAKER/VOICE
The poem is quite complex in its approach to voice - Slessor uses second person to
demonstrate the voice of ‘Sleep’ itself, which is personified as a female presence
similar to a deity or the concept of ‘mother nature’/’mother earth’. Sleep has a maternal,
nurturing personality and for this reason an extended metaphor of childbirth is used
to imply that the process of sleeping and waking up is a cyclical process similar to that
of death and rebirth (reincarnation). The addressee of the poem - the person to whom
Sleep is talking - seems to be a male persona, perhaps Slessor himself. The addressee
is cradled and nurtured by the speaker, and then when it is time for him to wake up he is
painfully forced back into the waking world.
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