• the reader witnesses the demise of a man's health as he suffers from the AIDS virus.
• We also witness a man who wakes up in the middle of the night scared and fearful about losing his life.

• The purpose of the poem is to generate compassion in the minds of the reader and experience the pain and suffering that the poet is undergoing.
• By not providing a name or a title to the person in the poem, the writer is trying to drive home the fact that all of us are at sometime susceptible to contracting some illness at some point in our lives.
• The tone of the poem is one of deep grief and sadness as it portrays the emotions of a man who is dying.

the words cold and hot

• The poem's parallelism underlines the close relationship between the speaker's creative calling and his very existence.
• The phrase "one life, one writing," establish continuity between the elements they compare. In other words, to the speaker, life and writing are one and the same.

Form and Structure

• This poem is composed of two sonnets stacked on top of each other: lines 1-14 make up a Shakespearean sonnet, while lines 15-28 form a Petrarchan sonnet.

• The Shakespearean sonnet is broken up into three quatrains, or four-line stanzas, followed by a rhyming couplet. Traditionally, the couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet wraps up or responds to the 12 preceding lines. In this poem, it communicates the danger of the speaker's creative anxiety, which burns wildly inside the "urn" of his body.

• The Petrarchan sonnet, meanwhile, is broken up into an eight-line octave following by a six-line sestet. As is typical for a Petrarchan sonnet, the octave introduces a problem of sorts (the speaker's confusion and disorientation upon waking up) while the sestet responds to that problem.
• Petrarchan sonnets have a volta, or turn, between the octave and the sestet, at which point there's some sort of major shift in direction in the poem. In "Night Sweat," that volta appears in line 22, which indicates a glimmer of hope as the speaker's wife is able to lift some of his troubles. The use of two sonnets is notable for a few reasons here. For one thing, this is a classic, very "poetic" form.
• Given that this is a poem about creative anxiety and writer's block, the use of such a traditional form might reflect the speaker's longing to be a great poet.

• Shakespeare, of course, is widely considered the greatest English-language writer, so the fact that the speaker uses the sonnet form that Shakespeare popularized taps into the lineage.

• Petrarchan sonnets, meanwhile, are linked with love poetry. It makes sense, then, that the section of the poem about the speaker's relationship with his wife turns to this poetic form.

• The speaker alludes to "The Tortoise and the Hare," a famous Aesop fable, at the end of the poem. The story is about a race between the two titular characters: the quick-footed hare and the slow tortoise.
• This allusion reflects the effect that the speaker's anxieties have on his partner.
• First, the speaker uses a simile to say that his wife's heart "hops and flutters like a hare." This emphasizes how she is not weighed down by anxieties and doubts in the way that her husband is. Yet it's almost as though helping her husband turns her into the tortoise;
• having cleared the metaphorical cobwebs of her husband's mind, she slows down, becomes a "Poor turtle, tortoise." She can no longer hop and flutter about, but must carry her husband's burdens.
• The additional allusion in the poem's final lines reflects this shift, as the speaker compares his wife to a tortoise who carries "this world's dead weight and cycle on your back." The wife becomes that turtle here, forced to bear the "dead weight" of her husband.

• When the speaker calls himself a "heap of wet clothes," this is another metaphor. It's as though the speaker has literally transformed into the byproduct of his anxiety—his sweat-soak clothing.
• The speaker's writer's block—and the night sweat, which can be understood as the direct product of that creative stress—wholly dominates his life and has even overtaken his sense of self.

• metaphor of the horses pulling his attention back to despair.
• "gray skulled horses" represent an abstract, nightmarish vision of the nighttime darkness that fades as the sun rises.
• 'skulled horses' creates an image of horses that are taking him back to hell.
• 'whinny' is the noise a horse makes. They are pushing him, pulling him into the 'soot of night'. 'Soot' is the black, flaky substance found at the bottom of a chimney.
• The skulled horses are trying to pull him back into the darkness on one hand and on the other hand he has his wife who is pulling him up towards hope. Conflict between despair and hope presented here where he is being torn in two different directions.

• We see a sudden shift in the tone of the poem at this point.
• The two exclamation marks at the start of the sentence where he suddenly feels the supportive presence of his wife in the room.

"the downward glide / and bias of existing," talks about the way that the demands of daily life feel heavy and burdensome and sap the speaker of his creative energies.

• Robert Lowell’s “Night Sweat” demonstrates the toll of creative anxiety and self-doubt.
• The "night sweat" of the poem's title is a consequence of the speaker's creative blockage and self-doubt,
• It speaks about the pain and anxiety of feeling creatively stuck and the resulting terror that creeps in when one can’t seem to do what they feel it’s their life’s purpose to do.
• “Night Sweat” speaks not only to the nature of creative anxiety, but also the push and pull of relationships and how one partner’s comfort can sometimes become the other’s burden.
• While the poem’s speaker initially seems isolated from the rest of the world, his wife is able to help temper both his creative and existential anxiety.
• This relationship represents a vital way out of the speaker’s misery, but this aid does not come without costs to his wife. The speaker seems to acknowledge the way in which his own comfort takes a toll upon his partner and, potentially, upon their relationship.
• The poem has a scared and confused tone. The poet is confused and scared about his own state of mind
• The poet is nervous and tired and hence the title, 'Night Sweat' almost indicative of the fact that he might be having a panic attack or moments of anxiety in the night.
• He describes his illness as his 'night's fever' by personifying his bipolar disorder.

Light breaks through the trees as the poet becomes aware of his wife's presence.

• He begs her for help and comfort.
• We see a real cry of desperation

• He describes her as a 'poor turtle' carrying him on her back and he feels like he is a burden to her.
• He feels like she is shouldering the entire responsibility of him and their marriage and how she is the one who is keeping him going.

• She has the power to remove the darkness.
• She is removing the spider's web that is dominating his thoughts, his depression, his bipolar disorder and the difficulty he has in dealing with his own mental problems.
• She has the power to remove the negativity that he is referring to as the 'spider's sack' which is filled with his suppressed ideas and creativity.

• This is where the significance and the poet's love for his wife is revealed.
• She is presented as a holy, God like entity who has the power/ ability to transform everything

the ellipsis after the word wife is allowing the poet to have a moment of silence, where he is allowing the thought of his wife to wash over him which brings light and joy and happiness to his mind.

• His bipolar disorder re-asserts itself like a bomb going off in his head but at the same time he is able to find inspiration from it in the form of his wife.
• His inner child has been compared to his manic moments, his outbursts of anger and frustration that is trying to break out of his adult restrictive socialization

• Up until now the poet was feeling very heavy, dull, tired and unhappy and suddenly with the presence of his wife, his eyelids are feeling light and is willing to open his eyes and see the world around him.
• We see connotations of hope and despair here in these lines and how his wife gives him motivation and hope to go on.
• There is imagery of weight in the words 'leaded eyelids' reflecting the heaviness of his depression which is removed by the presence of his wife which removes the denseness represented in the first half of the poem.

Imagery depicting how his depleting energy is being burned like fuel until is completely empty.

• The poet uses the adjective 'animal' to describe the sweat indicating how he is being hunted by himself from within

• Every adult existing today was once a child and here the poet is saying that the child inside him has died indicating that the youthful energy that was inside him has not faded but has actually died.
• According to the poet, the child inside him was a representative of youthful and positive energy, who viewed the world optimistically which is dead now leaving behind this sad, dull and negative and bitter person.
• The poet is connecting his creativity and ability to write with his child, youthful energy and how time has been successful in wringing him dry of both his creativity and sanity.

• 'The bias of existing' implies despair, as if suffering inevitable.
• The poet is saying that just to exist is biased which indicates that just by being born, we are forced into a category by society which is different from our own identity. This puts a lot of pressure on each one of us as we are expected to behave in a socially acceptable way, conform to certain rules which makes us anxious and depressed.

• Personification of his bipolar disorder in the phrase ' life's fever.
• He uses Sibilance in the line 'soaking in night sweat'. Sibilance is a repetition of the 's' word to provide atmosphere to the line.
• Here is it visceral imagery of the sweat creeping upto him through the 's' sounds

• The third verb in the poem 'embalms' suggests death.
• Embalming is a process in which people used to do to dead bodies to preserve them. Here he is saying that the salt in the sweat is embalming his body.
• Not only is he comparing himself to a wilted flower, but he is comparing himself to a dead man in this world.
• He is expressing his suffering and bipolar disorder through this poem and through these powerful verbs.

• Use of the verb wilting implies a dying flower- he is no longer blossoming
• 'wilted' is what happens to a flower when it has died. When a flower has not had adequate nutrition, it shrivels and dies and is a very sad word to describe nature.
• Here, the poet is comparing himself to nature where he feels that his mind and energy is wilting.

• He uses a metaphor to describe the anxiety that is dampening his spirits. The sweat is personified.
• Here he describes that he has been in this anxious, depressed state for ten nights and uses personification to describe the sweating feeling of nervousness through the verb 'creeping damp'.
• The word 'creeping' has a connotation of a sinister atmosphere and gives the reader a feeling of how the poet is aware that this illness is slowly inching ahead to consume him and make him completely unable to make progress.

The enjambment here is an indication of his confused state of mind where his thoughts are over-lapping one another highlighting his conflict between hope and despair. The hope being the realization that he has the support of his wife in the form of the tidied room and despair at his own state through the words-stalled equipment and litter.

• He describes his equipment as stalled which could mean that he is unable to lift his pen to paper and hence his tools are stalled as he is not using them.
• Here again, this could also refer to his mind- since it is established that he has writer's block- he feels that his mind has stalled or come to a pause because of which he is not able to think because of his anxiety and depression.

As a writer, these are his only tools, alongside his mind. The word 'litter' has a double meaning: i) The poet is viewing his work as trash even though we are told later that his room as actually tidy. ii)This could mean that this word is used as metaphor for his work which shows that he doesn't have much faith in his work and isn't happy with what he is producing.