drowse

verb

1. (transitive)To make (someone or something) heavy with drowsiness or sleepiness.

   “But novv the Fume of his aboundant Drink, / Drouzing his Brain, beginneth to deface / The ſvveet remembrance of her lovely Face: […]”

   “A few people were there, loitering away Sunday in their best clothes. The warmth drowsed them and replaced contentment.”

2. (transitive)Followed by away: to pass (time) drowsily or in sleeping; also, to proceed (on a way) drowsily or sleepily.

   “[T]he wary tadpole returned from exile, the bullfrog resumed his ancient song, the tranquil turtle sunned his back upon bank and log and drowsed his grateful life away as in the old sweet days of yore.”

   “Why plague me who am pledged to home-delights? / I'm the engaged now: through whose fault but yours? / On duty. As you well know. Don't I drowse / The week away down with the Aunt and Niece? / No help: it's leisure, loneliness and love.”

   “[William] Congreve held fast to the Greek poets, but otherwise seems to have drowsed his way through Trinity studies.”

   “They slept again, then woke, and drowsed their way slowly towards the late afternoon when the unexpected fever awoke in him—an onslaught so sudden that the symptoms for her seemed instantly recognisable as a rogue attack of malaria.”

   “Ida had kept him awake while he drowsed his way up the old King's Trace in eastern Missouri, feverish and weak.”

3. (figuratively, transitive)To make (someone or something) dull or inactive, as if from sleepiness.

   “Then, father, I will lead your legions forth, / Compact in steeled squares, and speared files, / And bid our trumpets speak a fell rebuke / To nations drows'd in peace!”

   “In a letter, however, to Lady Beaumont [Margaret, wife of Sir George Beaumont, 7th Baronet] of March, 1826, there is a passage which it is interesting to compare with the 'Work without Hope' ("All nature seems at work," &c.) composed just a year later. It is a prose version of those exquisite lines, with the addition of an acknowledgment that "the spell that drowsed his soul" was of his [Coleridge's] own conjuring.”

4. (intransitive)Often followed by away or off: to be drowsy or sleepy; to be half-asleep.

   “He vvas […] Seene, but vvith ſuch eie / As ſicke and blunted vvith communitie, / Affoord no extraordinary gaze, / Such as is bent on ſu[n]-like maieſtie, / VVhen it ſhines ſeldome in admiring eies, / But rather drovvzed, and hung their eie-lids dovvn, / Slept in his face, and rendred ſuch aſpect / As cloudy men vſe to their aduerſaries / Being vvith his preſence glutted, gordge, and full.”

   “[T]hen to my office again, where I could not hold my eyes open for an houre, but I drowsed (so little sensible I apprehend my soul is of necessity of minding business), but anon I wakened and minded my business, and did a great deale with very great pleasure, […]”

   “[T]he Cohort bright / Of vvatchful Cherubim; four faces each / Had, like a double Janus, all thir ſhape / Spangl'd vvith eyes more numerous then thoſe / Of Argus, and more vvakeful then to drouze, […]”

   “Yet you hold back, reluctant still to die, / Whose life itself is but a living death, / Who wearest out in sleep the most of life, / Drowsest awake, and ever dwellest in dreams, / Bearing a mind o'ercharged with idle fears, / Nor canst discern the true source of thy ills; […]”

   “He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped / Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls; / Aqueous like floating rays of amber light, / Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep,— […]”

5. (figuratively, intransitive)To be dull or inactive, as if from sleepiness.

   “Ill huſbandry drowſeth at fortune ſo awke, / good huſbandry rowſeth him ſelfe like a hawke.”

   “Let not your prudence, dearest, drowse, or prove / The Danaïd of a leaky vase, for fear / This whole foundation ruin, and I lose / My honour, these their lives.”

   “The Leam [a river in England]—the "high complectioned Leam," as [Michael] Drayton calls it—after drowsing across the principal street of the town [Leamington Spa] beneath a handsome bridge, skirts along the margin of the Garden without any perceptible flow.”

   “Under the aching noon-day glare, when the green things drooped and the birds withdrew to the depths of the forest, and all nature drowsed, his great "Ha! ha!" and "Ho! ho!" rose up to the sky and challenged the sun.”

   “What!—our hoar old houses, / Where the past dead-drowses, / Nor a child or spouse is / Of our name at all?”

noun

1. An act, or a state, of being drowsy or sleepy.

   “in a drowse”

   “He saw his mother's face, accepting it / In change for heaven itself, with such a smile / As might have been learnt there,—never moved, / But smiled on, in a drowse of ecstasy, / So happy (half with her and half with heaven) / He could not have the trouble to be stirred, / But smiled and lay there.”

   “On a sudden, many a voice along the street, / And heel against the pavement echoing, burst / Their drowze; […]”

2. (figuratively)A state of dullness or inactivity, as if from sleepiness.

   “Here, in this latest August dawn, / By windows opening on the lawn, / Where shadows yet are sharp with night, / And sunshine seems asleep, though bright; / And, further on, the wealthy wheat / Bends in a golden drowse, how sweet / To sit, and cast my careless looks / Around my walls of well-read books, […]”