Which is enduring, so be deep! I pray to God that she may lie While the dim sheeted ghosts go by! My love, she sleeps! Oh may her sleep, Soft may the worms about her creep ! For her may some tall vault unfold- A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM. All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream. I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand TO F Beloved! amid the earnest woes My soul at least a solace hath In dreams of thee, and therein knows And thus thy memory is to me Like some enchanted far-off isle In some tumultuous sea Some ocean throbbing far and free Just o'er that one bright island smile. ULALUME. THE skies they were ashen and sober; Here once, through an alley titanic Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul— Our talk had been serious and sober, But our thoughts they were palsied and sere- For we knew not the month was October, And we marked not the night of the year(Ah night of all nights in the year!) We noted not the dim lake of Auber(Though once we had journeyed down here)— Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber, Nor the ghoul haunted woodland of Weir. And now, as the night was senescent, Distinct with its duplicate horn. And I said "She is warmer than Dian: She has seen that the tears are not dry on These cheeks, where the worm never dies, And has come past the stars of the Lion, Come up, in despite of the Lion, To shine on us with her bright eyes- Said "Sadly this star I mistrust— Oh fly!--let us fly!-for we must." In terror she spoke, letting sink her Wings till they trailed in the dust— Plumes till they trailed in the dust- Its sibylic splendour is beaming With hope and in beauty to-night:- Ah we safely may trust to its gleaming, We safely may trust to a gleaming That cannot but guide us aright, Since it flickers up to heaven through the night." Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her, And tempted her out of her gloom— And we passed to the end of the vista, But were stopped by the door of a tomb- Then my heart it grew ashen and sober As the leaves that were crisped and sere- And I cried-"It was surely October That I journeyed-I journeyed down here— Well I know, now, this dark tarn of Auber, TO HELEN. HELEN, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore On desperate seas long wont to roam, 1 This is the form of the poem which obtained, I presume, the ultimate approval of its author. An earlier version gave an additional last stanza : Said we then the two, then-" Ah can it To bar up our way and to ban it From the secret that lies in these wolds From the thing that lies hidden in these wolds Have drawn up the spectre of a planet From the limbo of lunary souls This sinfully scintillant planet From the hell of the planetary souls?" |