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From a London garden cover

From a London garden

Chapter 29: THE DREAMER
By Arthur St. John Adcock
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About This Book

A collected series of lyrical poems moves between urban and rural imagery to reflect on love, mortality, time, memory, and moral growth. The poet uses concise, imagistic language and varied meters to meditate on human experience: longing and loss, pride and humility, the rhythms of city life and quiet country scenes, the passage of days and seasons, death and consolation. Voices range from personal confession to philosophical observation, with elegiac tones, religious reflection, and celebration of steadfastness. Recurring motifs—light and shadow, dawn and evening, gardens and streets—bind individual pieces into a contemplative portrait of inner life amid modern surroundings.

THE DREAMER

Night is the lord of our birth, and lord of our death he shall be:
We are visions born of a sleep, as mists are born of the sea.
And the hand we press, the face we know, and the voice that replies,
The folly and sin of the fool, the wisdom and work of the wise,
The world that echoes about us with ripple of laughter and song,
With music and shoutings of triumph, with wailing of sorrow and wrong,
And all that the happy enjoy and the wretched have toiled for in vain,
All the good that we lose and the little good that we gain—
Are nothing, or will be nothing when, sighing farewells, we embark
And return to the void, or are blown to some isle of new life in the dark.
Here, we are only the dreams of a slumber disturbed by our tears;
The sounds of our lives are as noises the Dreamer but dreams that he hears—
Unreal, confused and fantastic, they touch his compassion at most
As the weariful cries of the wind when it wanders all night like a ghost—
And all that is sweetest and dearest, and all that is fairest and best
Seems but more fancied and fabled and more of a dream than the rest.
Ah! let us live, let us die—all’s one when the night shall have flown!
We, who can wrangle and reason and dream we have dreams of our own,
We—with our pride and our meanness, with self the crowned king in our courts,
And Mammon our god in the highest—are less than the least of our thoughts:
For the world of the Dreamer remains, and even the things that we seem
By the might and the magic of labour to fashion and build in his dream
Will remain, when ourselves shall have gone and the dream-lives now lying dumb
And dim in the brain of the Sleeper—his dreams of the years to come—
Are here to inherit the work of our hands and to struggle and fret
For the pleasures and honours that we have forgotten, and they shall forget.
And the Dreamer?—Oh, heart, if our knowledge were knowing, our seeing but sight,
We might know the Unknown that is dreaming and dreams us here out of the night,
And if there shall yet be an end of his sleep and the visions he makes,
And whether he then will recall us, remembering his dreams when he wakes.