Page images
PDF
EPUB

THE DREAM

Introduction to the Dream.

"I DOUBT Sometimes (says Byron in his 'Detached Thoughts') whether, after all, a quiet and unagitated life would have suited me: yet I sometimes long for it. My earliest dreams (as most boy's dreams are) were martial, but a little later they were all for love and retirement, till the hopeless passion for Mary Chaworth began and continued (though sedulously concealed) very early in my teens. This threw me out again alone on a wide, wide sea." Throughout the poetry of his earlier years there are traces of this passion occupying much of his thoughts. He only met his early love once after her marriage, but before going on his pilgrimage, in 1809, the stanzas, "To *** on leaving England," show that his thoughts still dwelt on the days he had spent at Annesley Hall. When Byron was still sore from his wife's desertion, he composed at Diodati the poem now known as "The Dream," which is a retrospect of the past, and of the strange destiny which made both the object of his attachment and himself such sufferers. Mrs Chaworth's marriage had been as unhappy as Byron's. Her mind became affected, and in 1832 she closed her melancholy life by a death almost as mournful. Colwick Hall was sacked by Nottingham rioters during the disturbances over the Reform Bill, and Mrs Chaworth, who had to fly, received such a shock that she died soon afterwards.

THE DREAM.

I.

OUR life is twofold: Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality.

And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;

They pass like spirits of the past,-they speak
Like Sibyls of the future; they have power-
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not-what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanish'd shadows-Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow?-What are they?
Creations of the mind?-The mind can make
Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recall a vision which I dream'd
Perchance in sleep-for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.

[blocks in formation]
« PreviousContinue »