A wide realm of wide reality

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I r o n   S h a r p e n e t h   I r o n

Green Mount Cemetery

Baltimore, Maryland

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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 wide 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 vanished shadows. -- Are they so?

Is not the past all shadow? What are they?

Creations of the mind? -- The mind can make

Substances, 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 dreamed

Perchance in sleep, -- for in itself a thought,

A slumbering thought, is capable of years,

And curdles a long life into one hour.

= George Gordon, Lord Byron =

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Happy Monday :: Happy New Week