A sleepless man talks to Sleep as if it were a powerful official who might be flattered, bribed, or both. That is the comic and painful energy of Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet, which comes from his sequence *Astrophil and Stella*. The speaker is exhausted and under attack from his own feelings, and he wants Sleep to end the fighting. Only in the last line does the poem show what is keeping him awake.
The opening is a run of compliments. Sleep is the "certain knot of peace," a phrase that pictures rest as something that ties a frayed mind back together. It is also the "baiting-place of wit," a baiting-place being a roadside stop where travellers and horses halt to feed. The restless intelligence is allowed to stop and recover. The next lines turn political: Sleep is "the poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release," and an "indifferent judge between the high and low." Here "indifferent" means impartial. Sleep ignores rank, and it asks nothing of the people it favours. Because Sleep is so fair, the speaker's need to persuade it becomes faintly funny.
Then the metaphors turn to war. Despair throws "fierce darts," and the speaker asks for a "shield of proof," meaning armour that has been tested. He hides from "the press," the crowd of battle. The deepest wound is internal, since he wants the "civil wars" inside him to stop. Civil war is the worst kind of conflict because the enemy and the battlefield are both oneself. Sidney never says outright that love causes it, but the ending strongly suggests so.
At the volta, the poem shifts from begging to trading. "I will good tribute pay if thou do so," the speaker promises, and he lists what he can offer. These are mostly things Sleep already owns: "smooth pillows, sweetest bed," and a chamber "deaf of noise and blind of light." That last phrase gives the room the senses of a sleeper, as though the walls themselves had closed their eyes and ears. The "rosy garland" is a pretty touch, and then comes the least glamorous gift on the list, "a weary head." The speaker offers himself, worn out, as payment.
The final couplet is the cleverest part. If these gifts don't move Sleep's "heavy grace" (a lovely phrase, since grace is a favour and heaviness is exactly what sleep feels like), then Sleep will find in him, "livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image." The bribe is a dream. Stella, who seems to torment him awake, appears more vividly in sleep. The poem therefore ends by undercutting its own request. He begs Sleep to quiet his inner war, then tempts Sleep with the very thing likely to keep it going. Judging by the imagery, the poem suggests that he cannot truly separate peace from longing.
The sound of the poem supports this tension. It is in iambic pentameter, but the first line piles up stresses on "Come, Sleep! O Sleep," so the name is almost sighed twice. The octave uses only two rhyme sounds in an *abab abab* pattern: *peace, release, press, cease* against *woe, low, throw, so*. To a modern ear "press" fits the first group only loosely. The tight, repeating pattern feels like a mind circling the same worries. The sestet loosens into *cdcd* and ends with the *ee* couplet *me / see*, which lands with the click of a decision, or a confession.
The poem matters because it takes an old, familiar situation, a lover who cannot sleep, and makes it fresh through wit and psychological honesty. It praises Sleep, argues with it, and then lets slip the real subject. The poem is about rest, but its closing image shows a speaker who would rather dream of Stella than be free of her.