Edgar Allan Poe's "The Sleeper" Poe's "The Sleeper" takes as its subject a beautiful woman in death, the subject that Poe claimed in his essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," to be the most poetic. Edgar Allan Poe remarked about his poem, "The Sleeper," "[i]n the higher qualities of poetry, it is better than 'The Raven'--but there is not one man in a million who could be brought to agree with me in this opinion" ("Poe as a Poet"). The poem, which symbolically refers to death as "sleep," consists of movements, constructed primarily of rimed couplets and tercets. First Movement: "At midnight, in the month of June" The speaker begins by elucidating the confines of his immediate environment: he is standing in a cemetery at midnight in June …show more content…
Poe is jingling as usual! Wrapping up the movement, the speaker introduces the beautiful, dead woman whom he will portray, who "lies / With casement open to the skies, / Irene with her …show more content…
If he gets such a basic fact so wrong, what other misinformation might he be asserting? This error alone would cause those millions to disagree with Poe's estimation that this poem is superior to "The Raven." The remainder of the movement summons "ghosts" of shadows swept in by the wind that continues to rustle through the tomb. He asks the beautiful, dead lady, "O, lady dear, hast thou no fear?" And he wants to determine what she is dreaming. He oddly claims that she has arrived from "o'er far-off seas." Being a stranger to the area, she is "a wonder to these garden-trees!" Her "pallor," her style of clothing, the length of her hair, plus the sustained "all-solemn silentness," all make her an anomalous intruder. Third Movement: "The lady sleeps. O, may her sleep" The speaker pushes his symbol of "sleep" for death to the limit in the third movement; he claims that the lady "sleeps," and he wishes for her a sleep, that "be deep!" But he also introduces an unusual wish as he asserts, "I pray to GOD that she may lie / Forever with unclosed