Poetry and Sleep

Dreams

Jacob's Ladder
Marc Chagall

I walk in the world as in a forest.
On my hands and feet do I crawl.
Every tree sheds its leaves,
They wake me. I am scared.

I paint my world as sleeping in a dream;
And when the woods are filled with snow,
My painting is from another world,
But for a long time, I alone stand on it and stand.

I stand and wait for a miracle to embrace me from afar,
To warm my heart and drive out my tremor.
I wait for you to come to me from all sides.
And I shall stand no more, but fly --
And rise with you on Jacob's Ladder.

Mist
Mark R Slaughter 2010

Entranced in mist –

Mind mist; kind mist –
In a lea near woods –
Child woods; wild woods,
In shade serene –
We intertwined,
Exchanged a kiss.

Regal plumes of wings
Fluttered off and on
Attractive blooms:
Perfumed whores with
Nectar bribes.

The lea was our escape –
Innate – as of a child’s imagination;
Our psychotropic fantasy –
Legendary dynasty,
Silent in a deafening
Bliss of nature.

We – a creature paired
In one through coupled hands,
Caracoling, jaunting over
Grassy calluses –
Forgot about the world –
Cruel world, hard world,
In merciless extreme.

For now, we were the dream.

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Dreams
Thomas Traherne (1637-74)

‘Tis strange! I saw the Skies;
I saw the Hills before mine Eys;
The Sparrow fly;
The Lands that did about me ly;
The reall Sun, that hev’nly Ey!
Can closed Eys ev’n in the darkest Night
See throu their Lids, and be inform’d with Sight?

The Peeple were to me
As tru as those by day I see;
As tru the Air,
The Earth as sweet, as fresh, as fair
As that which did by day repair
Unto my waking Sense! Can all the Sky,
Can all the World, within my brain-pan ly?

What sacred Secret’s this,
Which seems to intimat my Bliss?
What is there in
The narrow Confines in my Skin,
That is alive and feels within
When am I dead? Can Magnitude possess
An activ Memory, yet not be less?

May all that I can see
Awake, by Night within me be?
My Childhood knew
No Differences, but all was Tru,
As Reall all as what I view;
The World its Self was there. ‘Twas wondrous strange,
That Hev’n and Earth should so their place exchange.

Till that which vulgar Sense
Doth falsly call Experience,
Distinguisht things:
The Ribbans, and the gaudy Wings
Of Birds, the Virtues, and the Sins
That represented were in Dreams by night
As really my Senses did delight,

Or griev, as those I saw
By Day: Things terrible did aw
My soul with Fear;
The Apparitions seem’d as near
As Things could be, and Things they were:
Yet were they all by Fancy in me wrought,
An all their Being founded in a Thought.

O what a Thing is Thought!
Which seems a Dream; yea, seemeth Nought,
Yet doth the Mind

Affect as much what we find
Most near and tru! Sure Men are blind,
And can’t the forcible Reality
Of things that Secret are within them see.

Thought! Surely Thoughts are tru;
They pleas as much as Things can do:
Nay things are dead,
And in themselves are severed
From Souls; nor can they fill the Head
Without our Thoughts. Thoughts are the Reall things
From whence all Joy, from whence all Sorrow springs.

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A Dream of Mountaineering
Po Chu-I
Translated by Arthur Waley

At night, in my dream, I stoutly climbed a mountain,
Going out alone with my staff holly-wood.
A thousand crags, a hundred hundred valleys –
In my dream-journey none were unexplored
And all the while my feet never grew tired
And my step was as strong as in my young days.
Can it be that when the mind travels backward
The body also returns to its old state?
And can it be, as between body and soul,
That the body may languish, while the soul is still strong?
Soul and body – both are vanities;
Dreaming and waking – both alike unreal.
In the day my feet are palsied and tottering;
In the night my steps go striding over the hills.
As day and night are divided in equal parts –
Between the two, I get as much as I lose.

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Dreams In Middle Age
Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)

Sooner let nightmares whinny, if we cannot
Retrieve our dreams of dalliance. Gloom or green,
We have been drowned or blinded, we have seen
Our springtime lady in her ringtime arbour,
We have been turned to stone or flown through chanting trees,
We have been present at the Crucifixion.
Such make have been our dreams – but what are these?

The debris of the day before; the faces
Come stuttering back while we ourselves remain
Ourselves or less, who, totting up in vain
The nightlong figures of the daylong ledger,
Stick at a point. Our lives are bursting at the seams
With petty detail. Thus if we live, if living
Means that, and thus we dream – if these are dreams.

No, sooner let the dark engulf us. Sooner
Let the black horses, spluttering fire, stampede
Through home and office, let the fierce hands feed
Our dying values to the undying furnace.
The watch will stop and mark the red cross on the door
And cry ‘Bring out your dead!’ at any and every moment,
Unless we can be ourselves – ourselves or more.

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The Dream
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)

I met her as a blossom
Before she ever breathed, and in that dream
The mind remembers from a deeper sleep:
Eye learned form eye, cold lip from sensual lip.
My dream divided on a point of fire;
Light hardened on the water where we were;
A bird sang low; the moonlight sifted in;
The water rippled; and she rippled on.

She came toward me in the flowing air,
A shape of change, encircled by its fire.
I watched her there, between me and the moon;
The bushes and the stones danced on and on;
I touched her shadow when the light delayed;
I turned my face away, and yet she stayed.
A bird sang from the center of a tree;
She loved the wind because the wind loved me.

Love is not a love until love’s vulnerable.
She slowed to sigh, in that long interval.
A small bird flew in circles where we stood;
The deer came down, out of the dappled wood.
All who remember, doubt. Who calls the strange?
I tossed a stone, and listened to its plunge.
She knew the grammar of least motion, he
Lent me one virtue, and I live thereby.
She held her body steady in the wind;
Our shadows met, and slowly swung around;
She turned the field into a glittering sea;
I played in flame and water like a boy
And I sway out beyond the white seafoam;
Like a wet log, I sang within a flame
In that last while, eternity’s confine,
I came to love, I came into my own.

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Gacela of the Dark Death
Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936)

I want to sleep the dream of the apples,
to withdraw from the tumult of cemetries.
I want to sleep the dream of that child
who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

I don't want to hear again that the dead do not lose their blood,
that the putrid mouth goes on asking for water.
I don't want to learn of the tortures of the grass,
nor of the moon with a serpent's mouth
that labors before dawn.

I want to sleep awhile,
awhile, a minute, a century;
but all must know that I have not died;
that there is a stable of gold in my lips;
that I am the small friend of the wind;
that I am the intense shadows of my tears.

Cover me at dawn with a veil,
because dawn will throw fistfuls of ants at me,
and wet with hard water my shoes
so that the pincers of the scorpion slide.

For I want to sleep the dream of the apples,
to learn a lament that will cleanse me to earth;
for I want to live with that dark child
who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

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Mirage
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

The hope I dreamed of was a dream,
Was but a dream; and now I wake,
Exceeding comfortless, and worn, and old,
For a dream's sake.

I hang my harp upon a tree,
A weeping willow in a lake;
I hang my silent harp there, wrung and snapped
For a dream's sake.

Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;
My silent heart, lie still and break:
Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed
For a dream's sake.  

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Dreams
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

All people dream, but not equally.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind,
Wake in the morning to find that it was vanity.

But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people,
For they dream their dreams with open eyes,
And make them come true.

Sleep
John Fletcher (1579-1625)

Come, Sleep, and with thy sweet deceiving
Lock me in delight awhile;
Let some pleasing dreams beguile
All my fancies; that from thence
I may feel an influence
All my powers of care bereaving!

Though but a shadow, but a sliding,
Let me know some little joy!
We that suffer long annoy
Are contented with a thought
Through an idle fancy wrought:
O let my joys have some abiding!

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A Ballad of Dreamland
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)

I hid my heart in a nest of roses,
Out of the sun's way, hidden apart;
In a softer bed then the soft white snow's is,
Under the roses I hid my heart.
Why would it sleep not? why should it start,
When never a leaf of the rose-tree stirred?
What made sleep flutter his wings and part?
Only the song of a secret bird.

Lie still, I said, for the wind's wing closes,
And mild leaves muffle the keen sun's dart;
Lie still, for the wind on the warm seas dozes,
And the wind is unquieter yet than thou art.
Does a thought in thee still as a thorn's wound smart?
Does the fang still fret thee of hope deferred?
What bids the lips of thy sleep dispart?
Only the song of a secret bird.

The green land's name that a charm encloses,
It never was writ in the traveller's chart,
And sweet on its trees as the fruit that grows is,
It never was sold in the merchant's mart.
The swallows of dreams through its dim fields dart,
And sleep's are the tunes in its tree-tops heard;
No hound's note wakens the wildwood hart,
Only the song of a secret bird.

ENVOI

In the world of dreams I have chosen my part,
To sleep for a season and hear no word
Of true love's truth or of light love's art,
Only the song of a secret bird.

And On My Eyes Dark Sleep By Night
Michael Field (1846-1914)

Come, dark-eyed Sleep, thou child of Night,
Give me thy dreams, thy lies;
Lead through the horny portal white
The pleasure day denies.

O bring the kiss I could not take
From lips that would not give;
Bring me the heart I could not break,
The bliss for which I live.

I care not if I slumber blest
By fond delusion; nay,
Put me on Phaon's lips to rest,
And cheat the cruel day!

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Last Night As I Was Sleeping
Antonio Machado (1875-1939)

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night as I slept,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

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I Arise from Dreams of Thee
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

I arise from dreams of thee,
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright:
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Hath led me--who knows how?--
To thy chamber window, Sweet!

The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream--
The Champak odours fall
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale's complaint,
It dies upon her heart;
As I must on thine,
Oh, beloved as thou art!

Oh lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast;
Oh! press it to thine own again,
Where it will break at last.

Song Of A Dream
Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949)

Once in the dream of a night I stood
Lone in the light of a magical wood,
Soul-deep in visions that poppy-like sprang;
And spirits of Truth were the birds that sang,
And spirits of Love were the stars that glowed,
And spirits of Peace were the streams that flowed
In that magical wood in the land of sleep.

Lone in the light of that magical grove,
I felt the stars of the spirits of Love
Gather and gleam round my delicate youth,
And I heard the song of the spirits of Truth;
To quench my longing I bent me low
By the streams of the spirits of Peace that flow
In that magical wood in the land of sleep.

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Monna Innominata (I dream of you, to wake)
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

I dream of you, to wake: would that I might
Dream of you and not wake but slumber on;
Nor find with dreams the dear companion gone,
As, Summer ended, Summer birds take flight.
In happy dreams I hold you full in night.
I blush again who waking look so wan;
Brighter than sunniest day that ever shone,
In happy dreams your smile makes day of night.
Thus only in a dream we are at one,
Thus only in a dream we give and take
The faith that maketh rich who take or give;
If thus to sleep is sweeter than to wake,
To die were surely sweeter than to live,
Though there be nothing new beneath the sun.

A Dream
William Blake (1757-1827)

Once a dream did weave a shade
O’er my Angel-guarded bed,
That an Emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.
Troubled, ‘wilder’d, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangled spray,
All heart-broken I heard her say:
“O, my children! do they cry?
Do they hear their father sigh?
Now they look abroad to see:
Now return and weep for me.”
Pitying, I drop’d a tear;
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied: “What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?
“I am set to light the ground,
While the beetle goes his round:
Follow now the beetle’s hum;
Little wanderer, hie thee home.”

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Lover's Gifts XXVIII: I Dreamt

I dreamt that she sat by my head, tenderly ruffling my hair with
her fingers, playing the melody of her touch. I looked at her face
and struggled with my tears, till the agony of unspoken words burst
my sleep like a bubble.
I sat up and saw the glow of the Milky Way above my window,
like a world of silence on fire, and I wondered if at this moment
she had a dream that rhymed with mine.

Dream World
Norman MacCraig (1910-1996)

In your loving arms there lie
Serious field and fickle sky;
Syllables of your breath compose
Arctic wind and desert rose;
And fidgeting Atlantic’s sigh
To sleep beneath your lullaby.

Let the presaging planets weep.
No nightmares from their mirrors creep
To touch you with their breath and show
The eyes of innocence how to know
The world you dandle into sleep
Rocks your cradle six feet deep.

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A Dream
Jean Garrigue

In that deep sleep I knew not
Of what I dreamed or why
Until a waking tempted me
Along rare heights to go
Into a tent of cloud or snow
Not unlike a sailing silk,
A secret thing on shuttling element
Adrift and of an eastern stamp.
All else was bird-still, cold and white
Beneath an undiscovered moon
That yet gave out a stealth of light
A mist rose to with giddy turn
Except beneath this azured cone
Where far within lay one
As if in sculptured sleep
Upon a linen of the light
And bound, I saw, by curious knots
Like the devisings of a net
As if he could not stir,
Clasped in subtler argument
Than body makes with soul,
Than world with body, spirit with
What rules it from afar?
In trance upon that element
Like fine toils of a wrinkling net
The while was wrought debate
Insidiously from point to point
I thought I saw that thing of snow
Its azured sides grown great

Set forth upon the flowing night
Or what craft was this of flight
By shifting dream before a pane
That seemed to hold the moon-made tent?
I did not know, so caught
Where dream and memory met
For this was one my heart knew well
That now a dark did drink.
Deep the quaff.  His struggle wild
Those bands and seals to break
Until it grew my own who saw
That moon-made thing swell out
On silver-coated waters tracked
By skeins and circles of the light
And struggled then to smash the pane
That held the mirror up to dream
Of what was passing that I saw
Had happened and that yet must be
And struggled with an aerial strength
So alien and so intimate
To clarify—like horns by sea
Odd triumphs of a revelry!
There was suspension then
Before, flung up and held,
It plunges, broken, glittering
Into the crawl and sucking of the ebb
Until I knew that what I saw
Was the performance of a rite
And this, the rite, all we may do

In the action of the heart,
Thought bodied forth and past
The place where tears start
As those full swollen sails went out
And knew another dreamed my dream
Though those sails had taken him
And sang now to my dream a song
As if were borrowed the sea’s slow voice
As if a thousand shells sighed out
What wind has told to them,
Rough tones commanded by a pulse
Hoarse, silken, like the sea’s slow breath
Until the pane went dark.

Fierce  memory that is
Co-genitor with dream,
Did you speak out to me,
Another thing from another world
Because a light had surged
From out the dark it had gone through
To rise again, like some pronged star,
Or a bough dipped in light,
Glittering like a crystal, what
Dream upon death’s heights had met?
An instant then to blaze the pane
Before life’s other life begins
That rides the fluent force
And binds the fiery light
That strikes the sunrise coast.

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Dreams
Norman MacCaig

The farmers are walking about
in their soggy fields.  Inside their heads
a pleasant sun shines on crops without weeds.

In a house across the road a young man
plays a piano, aware of Bach and Bartok
listening indulgently to his blundering counterpoint.

And the dog asleep in a doorway twitches
his forepaws.  He’s chasing
the fattest hare in Midlothian.

Dreams fly everywhere.  They creep
into minds whose owners have slammed them shut.
That boy’s lungs are full of them.

Sometimes they come true and the world stares
at a new great painting or a body by the wayside
with chopped off hands.

The dreams of sleep dissolve when the window whitens
and the dreams of daylight swarm in with a passport to heaven
in one hand and a passport to hell in the other.

And sweet berries grow over the graves
of all of us or a white stone marks the place
which is the end of dreams, and of hell, and of heaven.

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“Thou sleepest fast”
Anonymous

Thou sleepest fast, and I with woeful heart
Stand here alone sighing and cannot fly:
Thou sleepest fast, when cruel Love his dart
On me doth cast, alas, so painfully!
Thou sleepest fast, and I, all full of smart,
To thee, my foe, in vain do call and cry:
And yet, methinks, though thou sleepest fast
Thou dreamest still which way my life to waste.

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Dreams
Robert Herrick

Here we are all, by day; by night we are hurled
By dreams, each one into a several world.

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I Dream’d I Lay
Robert Burns

I dream’d I lay where flowers were springing
Gaily in the sunny beam;
List’ning to the wild birds singing,
By a falling crystal stream:
Straight the sky grew black and daring;
Thro’ the woods the whirlwinds rave;
Trees with aged arms were warring,
O’er the swelling drumlie wave.

Such was my life’s deceitful morning,
Such the pleasures I enjoyed:
But lang or noon, loud tempests storming
A’ my flowery bliss destroy’d.
Tho’ fickle fortune has deceiv’d me—
She promis’d fair, and perform’d but ill,
Of mony a joy and hope bereav’d me—
I bear a heart shall support me still.

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“Why did I dream of you last night?”
Philip Larkin

Why did I dream of you last night?
Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light
Memories strike home, like slaps in the face:
Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog
Beyond the window.

So may things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
—Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.

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When they Awaken
C.P. Cavafy

Try to keep them, Poet,
However few there be that can be stayed
The visions of your loving.
Put them half hidden in our sentences;
Try to hold them, Poet,
When they awaken in your brain
In the night-time, or in the brightness of mid-day.

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“I Dreamed of an Out-Thrust Arm of Land”
Philip Larkin

I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land
Where gulls blew over a wave
That fell along miles of sand;
And wind climbed up the caves
To tear at a dark-faced garden
Whose black flowers were dead,
And broke round a house we slept in,
A drawn blind and a bed.

I was sleeping, and you woke me
To walk on the chilled shore
Of a night with no memory,
Till your voice forsook my ear
Till your two hands withdrew
And I was empty of tears,
On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea
And a cold hill of stars.

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On Dreams
In Imitation of Petronius

Those Dreams that on the silent Night intrude,
And with false flitting Shades our Minds delude,
Love never sends us downward from the Skies,
Nor can they from infernal Mansions rise;
But all are mere Productions of the Brain,
And Fools consult Interpreters in vain.

For, when in Bed we rest our weary Limbs,
The Mind unburthen’d sports in various Whims,
The busy Head with mimick Art runs o’er
The Scenes and Actions of the Day before.

The drowsy Tyrant, by his Minions led,
To regal Rage devotes some Patriot’s Head.
With equal Terrors, not with equal Guilt.
The Murd’rer dreams of all the Blood he spilt.

The Soldier smiling hears the Window’s Cries,
And stabs the Son before the Mother’s Eyes.
With like Remorse his Brother of the Trade,
The Butcher, feels the Lamb beneath his blade.

The Statesman rakes the Town to find a Plot,
And dream of Forfeitures by Treason got.
Nor less Tom Turd-Man of true Statesman mold,
Collects the City Filth in search of Gold.

Orphans around his Bed the Lawyer sees,
And takes the Plaintiff’s and Defendant’s Fees.
His Fellow Pick-Purse, watching for a Job,
Fancies his Fingers in the Cully’s Fob.

The kind Physician grants the Husband’s Prayers,
Or gives Relief to long-expecting Heirs.
The sleeping Hangman ties the fatal Noose,
Nor unsuccessful waits for dead Men’s Shoes.

The grave Divine with knotty Points perplext,
As if he were awake, nods o’er his Text:
While the sly Mountebank attends his Trade,
Harangues the Rabble, and is better paid.

The hireling Senator of modern Days,
Bedaubs the guilty Great with nauseous Praise:
And Dick the Scavenger with equal Grace,
Flirts from his Cart the Mud in Walpole’s Face.

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The Dream called Life
Edward FitzGerald

A dream it was in which I found myself.
And you that hail me now, then hailed me king,
In a brave place that was all my own,
Within, and all without it, mine; until
Drunk with excess of majesty and pride,
Methought I towered so big and swelled so wide
That of myself I burst the glittering bubble
Which my ambition had about me blown
And all again was darkness.  Such a dream
As this, in which I may be walking now,
Dispensing solemn justice to you shadows,
Who make believe to listen; but anon
Kings, princes, captains, warriors, plume and steel
Ay, even with all your airy theater,
May flit into the air you seem to rend
With acclamations, leaving me to wake
In the dark tower; or dreaming that I wake
From this that waking is; or this and that,
Both waking and both dreaming; that I wake
From this that waking is; or this and that,
Both waking and both dreaming, such a doubt
Confounds and clouds our mortal life about.
But whether wake or dreaming, this I know
How dreamwise human glories come and go;
Whose momentary ensure not to break,
Walking as one who knows he soon may wake,
So fairly carry the full cup, so well
Disordered insolence and passion quell,
That there be nothing after to upbraid
Dreamer or doer in the part he played;
Whether to-morrow’s dawn shall break the spell,
Or the last trumpet of the Eternal Day,
When dreaming, with the night, shall pass away.

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Presences
W.B. Yeats

This night has been so strange that it seemed
As if the hair stood up on my head.
From going-down of the sun I have dreamed
That women laughing, or timid or wild,
In rustle of lace or silken stuff,
Climbed up my creaking stair.  They had read
All I had rhymed of that monstrous thing
Returned and yet unrequited love.
They stood in the door and stood between
My great wood lectern and the fire
Till I could hear their hearts beating:
One is a harlot, and one a child
That never looked upon man with desire,
And one, it may be, a queen.

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One Third of a Dream
Jean Garrigue

When was I scalloped with leaves,
When was my body half horse
When in the fields where the gods race
At sports with bugle and lance
Did I have a companion the eagle-beaked griffon,
Fringed hair down his throat and his body?

Was it other than I who tied the animal claws about me
And wore over my hard the beast-friend mouth,
Open the tigrish jaws for me to stare through,
Given the dual-headed look?

Languors of flesh and stone—the stripling god
Learning against a bough, his lyre before him,
And meads of the blue-veined water, dimpled and tented,
A stretch of the sky beside land…

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“Within the Dream you said”
Philip Larkin

Within the dream you said:
Let us kiss then,
In this room, in this bed,
But when all’s done
We must not meet again.

Hearing this last word,
There was no lambing-night,
No gale-driven bird
Nor frost-encircled root
As cold as my heart.

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Morpheus
Philip Sidney

Morpheus, the lively son of deadly sleep,
Witness of life to them that living die,
A prophet oft, and oft an history,
A poet eke, as humours fly or creep;
Since thou in me so sure a power dost keep,
That never I with closed-up sense do lie,
But by thy work my Stella I descry,
Teaching blind eyes both how to smile and weep;
Vouchsafe, of all acquaintance, this to tell,
Whence hast thou ivory, rubies, pearl, and gold,
To show her skin, lips, teeth, and head so well?
Fool! answers he; no Indes such treasures hold;
But from thy heart, while my sire charmeth thee,
Sweet Stella’s image I do steal to me.

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