Compare Hamlet and Faustus

The Dreams of Pain

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a leader of the British Romantic movement, was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher. His extensive use of a substance called opium and efforts to leave it, influence many of his writings. His dreams, nightmares and obsessions experienced as a result of withdrawal from this addiction become the muse for his literary works. In The Pains of Sleep, Samuel Taylor Coleridge exhibits the debilitating and painful effects of this addiction to opium and the agony he experiences in his struggle to overcome it. The poem is written in the first person from the point of view of an un-named narrator and is divided in three stanzas in which the speaker describes the three different nights with its own atmosphere and tone.

In the first stanza, Coleridge presents us with an atmosphere of calmness since he opens the poem with himself lying on bed welcoming the sleep that awaits him. He reveals that his ability has not been to pray before bedtime "with moving lips or bended knees". Instead, he prefers to compose "silently, by slow degrees" with love his spirit with "reverential resignation" and "a sense of supplication". He also makes the point in that despite his weakness, he does not feel himself unblest since he finds wisdom and strength in the presence of a something good, "Since in me, round me, everywhere / Eternal Strength and wisdom are". This phrase implies the presence of a superior or maybe God around him. In other words, it can be pointed out that his inability to sleep is due to the fact that he has not been humbled by the spirit presence or divine love.

In the second stanza, the speaker addresses the second night and the atmosphere of quietness and peace changes into an atmosphere of pain and terror. No longer does he pray aloud in supplication and resignation but "in anguish and agony". Feelings of thirst of revenge, loathing, remorse and woe describe the narrator´s dream. He wakes frightened by "the friendship crowd/of shapes and thoughts" that torture him. He claims to be tormented with guilt and shame due to