Death — the last sleep? No, it is the final awakening.

The line overturns the common metaphor of death as “sleep,” insisting instead that death is a kind of revelation—an awakening into a fuller reality. Read this way, it reflects a religious or metaphysical confidence that consciousness and moral accounting do not end at the grave, but become clearer beyond it. The rhetorical question (“the last sleep?”) stages a familiar consolation only to reject it, replacing passivity with heightened awareness. In a literary context, the phrasing also works as a memento mori: if death is awakening, then life is a preparatory state in which one’s choices acquire ultimate significance when the veil lifts.