Figurative Language In Billy Collins 'Reading Myself To Sleep'

Figurative Language in a Poem “All late readers know this sinking feeling of sinking of falling/ into the liquid feeling of falling asleep then rising again”(13-14). Late readers know how it feels when falling asleep, the pull of sleep, and the want to keep reading pulling you out. Sleep acts as liquid because you can sink down into sleep or rise up and out, as if in the water. In Billy Collins’s poem “Reading Myself to Sleep” He explains how on one dark night, with only a lamp for reading, he lies in bed reading. He wants to keep reading but slowly falls to sleep. The author struggles to stay awake but succumbs to sleep.In the poem “Reading Myself to Sleep” by Billy Collins, figurative language is used to create a better understanding of the poem for the reader, including metaphor, simile, and personification.
During the night the author is slowly falling asleep. He compares falling asleep while reading to an endless rope. Collins writs, “There is no more gentle way to go into the night/ than to follow an endless rope of sentences”(7-8). The author, is using a metaphor to elaborate on how he was slowly reading his book and falling asleep. Collins uses “to follow and endless rope of sentences” because it creates the feeling of following a rope of words from his book. A rope of sentences implies that the words will never end and are dragging him into sleep. Those words help bring a realistic feeling to the reader drifting off to