Poetry

Waking Thought

EVERY night, now, I am walking with the dead,

The white-haired smiling statesman, the young soldier,

The old tough poet whom I never met.

Gravely they come to me, and take my hand.

I hear their words, yet cannot carry from them

Any remembrance, save that, when I wake, I know I have been walking with the dead ;

And yet there is nothing so concrete as a dream.

The poet who is out to mare a shadow 'Will take no magic, unsubstantial net, For incantation lies in common things.

Toad's eye and ferret's finger—the odds and ends That sputtered in a witch's recipe, Though barbarous, reveal how daily means Best call those shapes who own another time.

We have learned their lesson, seen our magic made With plain, terrestrial tools.

Even a dream is jumbled from the bins Wherein we use to throw such stuff away.

Inform me, dream, whose swift ingredients Are but the mirror-counters of my day : Teach me the meaning you have so combined. Come, dream-arrangement, furnish me the key, For I am humble, not all ignorant, And have stacked counters that made others dream.

Is Time a searchlight, flying over Space, And is the thing once lit forever there, Though unillumined, self and posture both ? Do we in dreams, lit by another light, Behold the not-accomplished and the done, Fixed in eternal Space, impartially ? See, every question's fettered, all's forsworn. The daily tools betray us. They but help By us discarded, sorted by a dream.

Lean then on One who has nor space nor time, Lean on the Architect of dream and day, With Whom the dead and living share One life.

Fear we no traveller's tale, where all is true,

Nor look for soil of meetings in our hand : Time can filch nothing from eternity.

L. A. G. • Stztoz:u.'