Few poems about sleep manage to be both a portrait and a question, but Elizabeth von Schonberg's "Sleep" does exactly that. Its first four lines paint sleep as a figure of royalty, and its last four turn suddenly philosophical, asking whether the waking world we trust so completely is any more real than the one we visit at night. Nothing is known here about the poet's life, so the poem has to stand on its own, and it can.
The opening image is a coronation. Sleep "bears a priceless crown laid on the brow / By gentle fingers of the silent night." Notice how the crown is not something sleep takes or earns; it is placed on her, delicately, by night itself. Even the fingers are "gentle," and the night is "silent," so the whole ceremony happens in hushed tones. The effect is of something precious being handed over without a sound. Calling the crown "priceless" quietly argues that sleep is the one luxury everyone can possess and no one can buy. Her robes, meanwhile, are made of "starlit dreams dropt tenderly," a phrase in which the sky and the sleeping mind merge: the stars become the fabric of dreams, and the dreams glitter like stars. The old-fashioned spelling "dropt" gives the line a soft, falling sound, as if the dreams really are drifting down.
Then comes the poem's one moment of movement. At dawn sleep "flees before his light!" The personification becomes more specific here, since sleep is a woman and the daylight a man, and she runs from him rather than meeting him. The exclamation mark is the only one in the first stanza, and it breaks the calm abruptly. After all that stillness, the sudden flight feels almost startling, which is precisely how waking feels: the crown and robes vanish and the queen is gone.
The second stanza shifts from picture to argument. "The spirit free to wander" suggests that the body stays behind while something less tangible travels. The poem then asks its real question: "who can say / Which is the dream, and which reality?" It is worth pausing on how bold this is. The speaker does not claim that dreams are unreal and waking life solid; she leaves the question open and, in a striking twist, defers the answer to "some day." The final line, "This we shall know when we awake," uses the word "awake" with a double meaning. On one level it means waking up in the morning, but the phrase "some day" pushes the reading further, hinting at a final awakening beyond ordinary life, one that would reveal our waking existence as the lesser dream. This is an inference from the wording rather than something the poem states outright, but the open-ended tone invites it.
Structurally, the poem is tidy. It has two quatrains, and the lines run in iambic pentameter, the traditional ten-syllable line of English verse, which gives the poem a measured, dignified pace that suits its royal subject. The rhyme scheme is loose and interesting: "night" pairs with "light" in the first stanza, and "say" with "day" in the second, so the rhymes fall on the second and fourth lines while the lines between them carry no matching sounds. That leaves the first and third lines unrhymed, which keeps the poem from sounding sing-song. The pairing of "night" and "light" is especially neat, because it enacts the poem's own story of darkness yielding to day.
What makes the poem significant is its balance. It is gentle enough to read as a lullaby, yet its final question is one philosophers have returned to for centuries. In just eight lines it moves from a coronation to an uncertainty about the nature of reality itself, and it leaves the reader with the pleasant unease of not quite knowing which side of the pillow the real world is on.