Sleep in "The Mask of Anarchy"

“Hypnos speaks: ‘For night brought me not forth to be the lord of the lyre, nor to be seer or leech, but to lull to rest men's souls.’”

-Plutarch, On Love

To Shelley, England had been in entrapped in the passive “lull” of sleep for far too long. Note that “The Mask of Anarchy” begins in its very first line by establishing Shelley himself as “asleep in Italy.” As the subtitle of the poem suggests, the Massacre at Manchester has served to rouse Shelley from his proverbial slumber, and “The Mask of Anarchy” is his attempt to do the same for his countrymen. The ensuing stanzas are filled with unrelentingly grotesque imagery of Anarchy and his compatriots. Shelley never once offers a reprieve for the reader but rather continues to hammer away—desperate to awaken England. “Again, again, again!” he bellows, as if playing the part of a human alarm clock. Only when Anarchy is finally slain by the knight do these vulgar images cease, and, not coincidentally, Shelley likens that moment to the way “flowers beneath May’s footstep waken…” The knight itself appears like the morning star, morning being an oft cited metaphor for nature’s awakening. The poem ends with a frantic plea for Englishmen everywhere to “rise like lions after slumber…[S]hake your chains to earth like dew/Which in sleep had fallen on you…”

What might Shelley have chosen sleep as a comparison for his country’s condition? Sleep is inherently temporary, and by repeatedly drawing comparisons Shelley is reinforcing the fact that an English revolution is not a matter of if, but simply when. Every use of the motif of sleep is in reference to the act of waking up rather than falling asleep—the morning dew, the flower blooming, the lion rising from his slumber. Shelley could have chosen any number of metaphors, but he chose one that cannot be mentioned without the implication of eventually, sooner or later, being stirred from that “lull.”