I would I could weave in
    The colour, the wonder,
The song I conceive in
    My heart while I ponder,

And show how it came like
    The magi of old
Whose chant was a flame like
    The dawn's voice of gold;

Who dreams followed near them
    A murmur of birds,
And ear still could hear them
    Unchanted in words.

In words I can only
    Reveal thee my heart,
Oh, Light of the Lonely,
    The shining impart.

Between the twilight and the dark
The lights danced up before my eyes:
I found no sleep or peace or rest,
But dreams of stars and burning skies.

I knew the faces of the day--
Dream faces, pale, with cloudy hair,
I know you not nor yet your home,
The Fount of Shadowy Beauty, where?

...

1.

When I dream that you love me, you'll surely forgive;
Extend not your anger to sleep;
For in visions alone your affection can live, -
I rise, and it leaves me to weep.


2.

Then, Morpheus! envelop my faculties fast,
Shed o'er me your languor benign;
Should the dream of to-night but resemble the last,
What rapture celestial is mine!


3.

They tell us that slumber, the sister of death,
Mortality's emblem is given;
To fate how I long to resign my frail breath,
If this be a foretaste of Heaven!


4.

Ah! frown not, sweet Lady, unbend your soft brow,
Nor deem me too happy in this;
If I sin in my dream, I atone for it now,
Thus doom'd, but to gaze upon bliss.


5.

Though...

Where we sat at dawn together, while the star-rich heavens shifted,
We were weaving dreams in silence, suddenly the veil was lifted.
By a hand of fire awakened, in a moment caught and led
Upward to the wondrous vision: through the star-mists overhead
Flare and flaunt the monstrous highlands; on the sapphire coast of night
Fall the ghostly froth and fringes of the ocean of the light.
Many coloured shine the vapours: to the moon-eye far away
'Tis the fairy ring of twilight mid the spheres of night and day,
Girdling with a rainbow cincture round the planet where we go,
We and it together fleeting, poised upon the pearl    glow;
We and it and all together flashing through the starry spaces
In a tempest dream of beauty lighting up the place of places.
Half our eyes behold the glory: h...

In visions of the dark night
I have dreamed of joy departed
But a waking dream of life and light
Hath left me broken-hearted.

Ah! what is not a dream by day
To him whose eyes are cast
On things around him with a ray
Turned back upon the past?

That holy dream that holy dream,
While all the world were chiding,
Hath cheered me as a lovely beam,
A lonely spirit guiding.

What though that light, thro' storm and night,
So trembled from afar
What could there be more purely bright
In Truth's day star?

When a dream is born in you
With a sudden clamorous pain,
When you know the dream is true
And lovely, with no flaw nor stain,
O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch
You'll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.

Dreams are like a bird that mocks,
Flirting the feathers of his tail.
When you seize at the salt-box
Over the hedge you'll see him sail.
Old birds are neither caught with salt nor chaff:
They watch you from the apple bough and laugh.

Poet, never chase the dream.
Laugh yourself and turn away.
Mask your hunger, let it seem
Small matter if he come or stay;
But when he nestles in your hand at last,
Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast.

I dream'd in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth;
I dream'd that was the new City of Friends;
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love - it led the rest;
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words.

There is a world Life dreams of, long since lost:
Invisible save only to the heart:
That spreads its cloudy islands, without chart,
Above the Earth,'mid oceans none has crossed:
Far Faerylands, that have become a part
Of mortal longings; that, through difficult art,
Man strives to realize to the uttermost.
Could we attain that Land of Faërie
Here in the flesh, what starry certitudes
Of loveliness were ours! what mastery
Of beauty and the dream that still eludes!
What clearer vision! Ours were then the key
To Mystery, that Nature jealously
Locks in her heart of hearts among the woods.

        Wherefore in dreams are sorrows borne anew,
    A healed wound opened, or the past revived?
        Last night in my deep sleep I dreamed of you;
    Again the old love woke in me, and thrived
        On looks of fire, and kisses, and sweet words
    Like silver waters purling in a stream,
        Or like the amorous melodies of birds:
    A dream - a dream!

        Again upon the glory of the scene
    There settled that dread shadow of the cross
        That, when hearts love too well, falls in between;
    That warns them of impending woe and loss.
        Again I saw you drifting from my life,
    As barques are rudely parted in a stream;
        Again my heart was torn with awful strife:
    A dream - a dream!

        Again the deep ni...

A dream of mine flew over the mead
To the halls where my old Love reigns;
And it drew me on to follow its lead:
And I stood at her window-panes;

And I saw but a thing of flesh and bone
Speeding on to its cleft in the clay;
And my dream was scared, and expired on a moan,
And I whitely hastened away.

[1]

Long since, a Mogul saw, in dream,
A vizier in Elysian bliss;
No higher joy could be or seem,
Or purer, than was ever his.
Elsewhere was dream'd of by the same
A wretched hermit wrapp'd in flame,
Whose lot e'en touch'd, so pain'd was he,
The partners of his misery.
Was Minos[2] mock'd? or had these ghosts,
By some mistake, exchanged their posts?
Surprise at this the vision broke;
The dreamer suddenly awoke.
Some mystery suspecting in it,
He got a wise one to explain it.
Replied the sage interpreter,
'Let not the thing a marvel seem:
There is a meaning in your dream:
If I have aught of knowledge, sir,
It covers counsel from the gods.
While tenanting these clay abodes,
This vizier sometimes gladly sought

I dreamed of a song, I heard it sung;
In the ear that sleeps not its music rung.
And the tones were upheld by harmonies deep,
Where the spirit floated; yea, soared, on their sweep
With each wild unearthly word and tone,
Upward, it knew not whither bound,
In a calm delirium of mystic sound--
Up, where the Genius of Thought alone
Loveth in silence to drink his fill
Of dews that from unknown clouds distil.
A woman's voice the deep echoes awoke,
In the caverns and solitudes of my soul;
But such a voice had never broke
Through the sea of sounds that about us roll,
Choking the ear in the daylight strife.
There was sorrow and triumph, and death and life
In each chord-note of that prophet-song,
Blended in one harmonious throng:
Such a chant, ere my voice has...

    I dreamed that each most lovely, perfect thing
    That Nature hath, of sound, and form, and hue -
    The winds, the grass, the light-concentering dew,
    The gleam and swiftness of the sea-bird's wing;
    Blueness of sea and sky, and gold of storm
        Transmuted by the sunset, and the flame
    Of autumn-colored leaves, before me came,
    And, meeting, merged to one diviner form.

    Incarnate Beauty 'twas, whose spirit thrills
    Through glaucous ocean and the greener hills,
    And in the cloud-bewildered peaks is pent.
        Like some descended star she hovered o'er,
    But as I gazed, in doubt and wonderment,
        Mine eyes were dazzled, and I saw no more.

Oh wind-swept towers,
Oh endlessly blossoming trees,
White clouds and lucid eyes,
And pools in the rocks whose unplumbed blue is pregnant
With who knows what of subtlety
And magical curves and limbs--
White Anadyomene and her shallow breasts
Mother-of-pearled with light.

And oh the April, April of straight soft hair,
Falling smooth as the mountain water and brown;
The April of little leaves unblinded,
Of rosy nipples and innocence
And the blue languor of weary eyelids.

Across a huge gulf I fling my voice
And my desires together:
Across a huge gulf ... on the other bank
Crouches April with her hair as smooth and straight and brown
As falling waters.
Oh brave curve upwards and outwards.
Oh despair of the downward tilting--
Despair...

They come, as the breeze comes over the foam,
Waking the waves that are sinking to sleep --
The fairest of memories from far-away home,
The dim dreams of faces beyond the dark deep.

They come as the stars come out in the sky,
That shimmer wherever the shadows may sweep,
And their steps are as soft as the sound of a sigh
And I welcome them all while I wearily weep.

They come as a song comes out of the past
A loved mother murmured in days that are dead,
Whose tones spirit-thrilling live on to the last,
When the gloom of the heart wraps its gray o'er the head.

They come like the ghosts from the grass shrouded graves,
And they follow our footsteps on life's winding way;
And they murmur around us as murmur the waves
That sigh on the shore at the dying ...

With an angel flower-laden, every day a dimpled maiden
    Sails away from off my bosom on a radiant sea of bliss;
I can see her drifting, drifting, hear the snowy wings uplifting
    As he woos her into Dreamland with a kiss.

Blissful hour, my pretty sleeper, guarded by an angel keeper,
    List'ning to the words he brings thee from a fairer world than this;
Sweet! thy heart he is beguiling, I can tell it by thy smiling,
    As he woos thee into Dreamland with a kiss.

Could there come to weary mortals such a glimpse through golden portals,
Would we not drift on forever toward the longed-for land of peace, jean    Would we not leave joys and sorrows,
    Glad to-days and sad to-morrows,
For the sound of white wings lifting, and the kiss?

God and I in space alone
    And nobody else in view.
"And where are the people, O Lord," I said,
"The earth below, and the sky o'er head,
    And the dead whom once I knew?"

"That was a dream," God smiled and said -
    "A dream that seemed to be true.
There were no people, living or dead,
There was no earth, and no sky o'erhead;
    There was only Myself - in you."

"Why do I feel no fear," I asked,
    "Meeting You here this way?
For I have sinned I know full well?
And is there heaven, and is there hell,
    And is this the judgment day?"

"Say, those were but dreams," the Great God said,
    "Dreams, that have ceased to be.
There are no such things as fear or sin,
There is no you - you never have been -
    There is nothing a...

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow,
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand,
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep, while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Dreamer, say, will you dream for me
A wild sweet dream of a foreign land,
Whose border sips of a foaming sea
With lips of coral and silver sand;
Where warm winds loll on the shady deeps,
Or lave themselves in the tearful mist
The great wild wave of the breaker weeps
O'er crags of opal and amethyst?

Dreamer, say, will you dream a dream
Of tropic shades in the lands of shine,
Where the lily leans o'er an amber stream
That flows like a rill of wasted wine, -
Where the palm-trees, lifting their shields of green,
Parry the shafts of the Indian sun
Whose splintering vengeance falls between
The reeds below where the waters run?

Dreamer, say, will you dream of love
That lives in a land of sweet perfume,
Where the stars drip down from the skies ab...