“Consummation,” which generally means “the point at which something is finalized or complete,” here refers to death, the ultimate ending. Hamlet presents the sleep of death as something desirable, but also something you’d better be serious about—a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Should we read sexual overtones into “consummation” also (as in “consummation of marriage”)? Should we connect this with the penetrative image of the dagger? Sex and death are linked constantly in literature; Shakespeare often plays, for example, on the word “die” as a winking reference to the French la petit mort (“little death,” slang for orgasm).

It’s not uncommon for both sex and death to be linked metaphorically with sleep as well: think of the ending of Romeo and Juliet. Or the sensual, sleepy imagery of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” which imagines an ideal death. Or, in the 20th century, Hart Crane’s “Voyages II”:

Hasten, while they are true,–sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.

The narrator is astonished to hear the raven speak. Sure, the raven hasn’t exactly answered the speaker’s question. Still, he’s acting as though the word “nevermore,” which is so charged in this context – because it reminds him of his huge irredeemable loss of Lenore – bears “little relevancy.” He’s a pro at rationalizing!

His fears and rationalizations are now battling each other at a fever pitch.

“Be still my heart” has been a cliché for a long time. In the 1705 play Zelmane by William Mountfield, 140 years before The Raven, Amphialus laments:

Ha! Hold my Brain; be still my beating Heart
What, must they suffer then!

He’s trying to calm his nerves. Throughout the poem we’ll see the narrator get more and more flustered, and scared, so that his entreaties to himself to chill out become more and more urgent.