In Walter de la Mare’s “Sleep,” every living thing—people, birds, creeping beasts—lets go of the “moving wonder” of waking life as darkness deepens. The speaker describes how easily they close off their senses, “without a thought, or fear,” and let their strength fall into stillness. There is neither struggle nor regret in this surrender; it is quiet, secret, almost magical.
The mood is hushed and a little eerie, full of awe at how completely sleep removes us from the world. The earth’s “transient strangeness” disappears from view, and sleepers rest hidden in a “silent gloom.” Yet sleep is not simply absence. The speaker says each sleeper has two worlds: the ordinary globe of day and night, forgotten for now, and the “enchanted realm of dream” that blossoms out of darkness. Sleep becomes both a nightly vanishing and an entry into another, stranger kind of life.