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.