Michelangelo: Dear to Me is Sleep

DEAR TO ME IS SLEEP
Dear to me is sleep: still more, being made of stone.
While pain and guilt still linger here below,
Blindness and numbness--these please me alone;
Then do not wake me, keep your voices low.

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Besides being a sculptor and a painter, Michelangelo was a poet as well. His poems are, of course, not as brilliant as his more famous works. But still, I find the poem above captivating in it's gentle melancholy, and it's slight allusion (or is it?) to his main passion--the "stone". Although alot of other people use this ("being made of stone") as a metaphor for death, I'm still singling it out as I find it's use special since the man worked with stone.

Michelangelo the man
Michelangelo, who was often arrogant with others and constantly unsatisfied with himself, thought that art originated from inner inspiration and from culture. In contradiction to the ideas of his rival, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo saw nature as an enemy that had to be overcome. The figures that he created are therefore in forceful movement; each is in its own space apart from the outside world. For Michelangelo, the job of the sculptor is to free the forms that, he believed, were already inside the stone. This can most vividly be seen in his unfinished statuary figures, which to many appear to be struggling to free themselves from the stone.

(from Wikipedia)

I do not know when Michelangelo wrote this, but I still find this a very moving, mournful and somewhat wistful contemplation of death. He seems rather accepting of death, only "blindness and numbness...please me", and it sounds as if his life and time past bring him more grief, being "pain and guilt", and he wishes to turn away from them. Michelangelo is all weariness and resignation as he turns away from the "voices" of us, the readers--perhaps later people, who will talk of him and judge him and wonder what he was thinking when he was alive.



Does anyone understand the phrase "here below"?