William Shakespeare Personification Of Sleep

In this excerpt, Shakespeare speaks through the voice of a King who seeks to find some comfort in his sleep, yet is unable to do so. The speaker uses an accusatory pleading tone to ask for his sleep and beseech nature for respite. Shakespeare employs many literary devices such as personification, apostrophe, alliteration, and juxtaposition throughout this piece to cement this idea.

To begin with, Shakespeare’s personification of sleep as a “soft nurse” at the beginning of the excerpt serves to enforce the speaker’s belief that something or someone seeks to take his rest from him. By making sleep a person it ceases to be some mere presence, but rather something he can face on a human level and whom he can bend to his will as it it were one of his subjects. As the poem progresses and the author questions why sleep goes to who the speaker sees as lesser men than him his accusations and frustration become more apparent. The knowledge that this occurs clearly irritates the speaker and seems to violate the societal codes and laws of the time, with the King seeing himself as being

Whereas the first half is much more relaxed, with the alliteration playing a large role in this, the second is sharply different. Instead of speaking of the stillness of the night, Shakespeare is discussing action and loud sounds. He speaks of waves and rough winds and storms, yet also of a boy sleeping. This contrasted with the calmness of the night where the King is, yet the King’s inability to sleep helps to create the powerful message about the King’s mind. Whereas the first half had soothing diction, the second uses words such as “rude”, “ruffian”, and “monstrous”. This is highly important in creating the contrast between the King and the ship-boy, as it emphasises how even though the ship-boy is in a much worse position than the speaker, he is at the moment contented and