Come Sleep! Oh Sleep Suffering Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Line)

Quote #1

Come Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release, (1-3)

The speaker is tired. That's a kind of suffering if we ever saw one. The lines talk about the ways in which Sleep can alleviate different kinds of suffering (woe, poverty) and thus foreshadow the speaker's own complaints later in the poem.

Quote #2

With shield of proof, shield me from out the prease
Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw; (5-6)

As if we didn't know that Despair was causing some serious suffering, the speaker rhymes "throw" with "woe" (2) and "low" (4). This sequence of rhymes emphasizes at the level of sound what the speaker tells us: he's in a state of woe and feeling low (hey look, we rhymed internally).

Quote #3

O make in me those civil wars to cease;
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so (7-8)

Some of the speaker's sufferings come from the inside. There's some really bad stuff going in inside of him. Civil wars? It sounds like a metaphor for some conflicting emotions that are really doing a number. He wouldn't call them wars if they weren't pretty bad.