The speaker here is desperate not for rest or death, but for complete erasure. He wants the bright, lively world—sunshine, white houses, red flowers, mountains—to be crushed out and replaced by a heavy, permanent blackness. This is not sleep, which he dismisses as grey with dreams, and not death, which still quivers with the ache of life. What he craves is silence and stillness so total that nothing inside or outside him can move or hurt. The title’s wish—“that the man I am might cease to be”—makes the real desire clear: he wants his own consciousness to stop. The mood is suffocating and despairing, yet the language is calm, as if the speaker is too tired to raise his voice. Darkness becomes a strange kind of peace: an end to feeling altogether.
"And Oh--That the Man I Am Might Cease to Be--" — Summary
No, now I wish the sunshine would stop, and the white shining houses, and the gay red flowers on the balconies and the bluish mountains beyond, would be crushed out between two valves of darkness; the darkness falling, the darkness rising, with muffled sound obliterating everything.
I wish that whatever props up the walls of light would fall, and darkness would come hurling heavily down, and it would be thick black dark for ever. Not sleep, which is grey with dreams, nor death, which quivers with birth, but heavy, sealing darkness, silence, all immovable.
What is sleep? It goes over me, like a shadow over a hill, but it does not alter me, nor help me. And death would ache still, I am sure; it would be lambent, uneasy. I wish it would be completely dark everywhere, inside me, and out, heavily dark utterly.