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Poetry and Sleep
Nightmare
Old War-Dreams
Walt Whitman
In midnight sleep of many a face of anguish,
Of the look at first of the mortally wounded, (of that indescribable look,)
Of the dead on their backs with arms extended wide,
I dream, I dream, I dream.
Of scenes of Nature, fields and mountains,
Of skies so beauteous after a storm, and at night the moon so unearthly bright
Shining sweetly, shining down, where we dig the trenches and gather the heaps,
I dream, I dream, I dream.
Long have they pass’d, faces and trenches and fields,
Where through the carnage I moved with a callous composure,
or away from the fallen,
Onward I sped at the time—but now of their forms at night,
I dream, I dream, I dream.
Bad Dreams
Robert Browning
Last night I saw you in my sleep:
And how your charm of face was changed!
I asked, “Some love, some faith you keep?”
You answered, “Faith gone, love estranged.”
Whereat I woke—a twofold bliss:
Waking was one, but next there came
This other: “Though I felt, for this,
My heart break, I loved on the same.”
Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream
John Keats
Before he went to live with owls and bats
Nebuchadnezzar had an ugly dream,
Worse than a housewife’s when she thinks her cream
Made a naumachia for mice and rats.
So scared, he sent for that “Good King of Cats”,
Young Daniel, who straightway did pluck the beam
From out his eye, and said “I do not deem
Your scepter worth a straw—your cushion old door-mats”.
A horrid nightmare similar somewhat
Of late has haunted a most valiant crew
Of loggerheads and chapmen—we are told
That any Daniel though he be a sot
Can make their lying lips turn pale of hue
By drawling out, “Ye are that head of Gold.”
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