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Lost city

Chapter 11: THE DREAM
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About This Book

A collection of lyric poems rooted in Cambridge and its fenlands, blending pastoral observation with elegiac reflection. The verses move between close depictions of river courts, chestnut avenues, college streets and the quiet of fields, and meditations on memory, dreams, and bereavement. Mythic imagery of the underworld appears alongside intimate scenes of loss, mourning, and the persistence of vanished companionship. Recurrent themes include landscape as repository of recollection, the friction between public ritual and private grief, and a desire for renewal or new roads amid enduring sorrow.

THE DREAM

Through the still streets whose windows were shut down
I wandered in a dumb and unknown town,
Where streets wound on and on, and had no name,
Where unseen fingers brushed my sleeve, and came
To a walled place of trees, and a voice said,
“Seek here, seek here, and you shall find your dead!”
And stooping down beneath the boughs asway
I found your name, and knew that there you lay.
And the blue twilight fell, and the cold dew,
While I lay in the grass and spoke to you....
So, when I rose, “Now God be thanked,” said I,
“Who set my feet to find you, where you lie.
My own, my own, I shall not dream again
You lie uncoffined in the pitiless rain....”
And woke; and knew I dreamed; and turned, to see
There, on my pillow, the old agony....