February 18th, 2025

My Keats is better than your Keats.

David Lehman, writing in the foreword to the 2024 edition of “The Best American Poetry,” relates that “some readers” have found Keats’s 1818 poem “When I Have Fears” to be the first poem to truly move them. “No other poem treats the fear of death … in so noble a fashion,” Lehman explains. He offers us a thoroughly diligent account of the poem’s structural pleasures. We will not dispute his elucidation, but it must be stated clearly that “When I Have Fears” is not a superlative contribution to the genre of death poems. Readers impressed by the sentimental melancholy of “When I Have Fears” will undoubtedly be overjoyed to learn of a far superior work, one that does not simply treat death with noble resignation but improves upon it with effortless grace. That poem, of course, is “To Sleep”:

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 passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,—
      Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
      Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.

To take up the simile of sleep as death (or its corollary) is to confront a strange intersection, for sleep and death are of a kind. The metaphor is manifest: how deep does our embalming go? Perhaps even this is a superfluous question. As we are lulled to sleep, we allow ourselves to dissolve. We are pulled into sleep, first by desire, then by need. Is insomnia not a greater curse? It is akin to medieval torture—when sleep is too long delayed, the daylight is abomination and terror. Blake protests when night has eluded him: “Light doth seize my brain with frantic pain.” We know that once the sun breaches the east, he can only turn west and imagine the deep dark.

Blake may be doomed, but Keats still sings to us. Our “gloom-pleas’d eyes” close, “embower’d from the light,” and we are enraptured in a hymn that demands nothing of us except our entire being. We may admit that it is not a fair trade, yet we are still happy to lend ourselves to oblivion. This is the only resolution and respite we know: Our “lulling charities” are narcotic; when sleep has us, the past day cannot breed our woes. Our “curious conscience” digs into the remnants of the day just passed, but in sleep—true and deep sleep—we are taken below the reach of heavy memories. If every misdeed revisits us in the dark, it is sleep that drives our bad conscience into remission; deep sleep is the only thing that terrifies the dark, for it denies fear access to our hearts.

Every goodnight is a form of goodbye. After all, isn’t the passing of fear also the passing of life? We see so clearly that life is anxiety, frisson; we react and scamper and become vital forces. If we are to have agency, if we are to push back against the void, we must concede to exhaustion. At the end of motion we find, of all life’s pleasures, deep sleep is the most sublime. The abyss accepts us as we are; the abyss is final, and final means whole. So Keats implores the subtle night, “seal the hushèd casket of my soul.”

What could be more noble than to stand before one’s corpse and wish it well?

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