ah god, life, law, so many names you keep,

you great, you patient effort, and you sleep

that does inform this various dream of living,

you sleep stretched out for ever, ever giving

us out as dreams, you august sleep

coursed round by rhythmic movement of all

time,

the constellations, your great heart, the sun

fierily pulsing, unable to refrain;

since you, vast, outstretched, wordless sleep

permit of no beyond, ah you, whose dreams

we are, and body of sleep, let it never be said

i quailed at my appointed function, turned poltroon

for when at night, from out the full surcharge

of a day's experience, sleep does slowly draw

the harvest, the spent action to itself;

leaves me unburdened to begin again;

at night, i say, when i am gone in sleep,

does my slow heart rebel, do my dead hands

complain of what the day has had them do?

never let it be said i was poltroon

at this my task of living, this my dream,

this me which rises from the dark of sleep

in white flesh robed to drape another dream,

as lightning comes all white and trembling

from out the cloud of sleep, looks round about

one moment, sees, and swift its dream is over,

in one rich drip it sinks to another sleep,

and sleep thereby is one more dream enrichened.

if so the vast, the god, the sleep that still grows

richer

have said that i, this mote in the body of sleep

must in my transiency pass all through pain,

must be a dream of grief, must like a crude

dull meteorite flash only into light

when tearing through the anguish of this life,

still in full flight extinct, shall i then turn

poltroon, and beg the silent, outspread god

to alter my one speck of doom, when round me

burns

the whole great conflagration of all life,

lapped like a body close upon a sleep,

hiding and covering in the eternal sleep

within the immense and toilsome life-time,

heaved

with ache of dreams that body forth the sleep?

shall i, less than the least red grain of flesh

within my body, cry out to the dreaming soul

that slowly labours in a vast travail,

to halt the heart, divert the streaming flow

that carries moons along, and spare the stress

that crushes me to an unseen atom of fire?

when pain and all

and grief are but the same last wonder, sleep

rising to dream in me a small keen dream

of sudden anguish, sudden over and spent—

croydon

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