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Home: Poetry: Conrad Aiken: The Dreamer of Dreams
| THE DREAMER OF DREAMS |
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a poem by Conrad Aiken
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- The sun goes down in a cold pale flare of light.
- The trees grow dark: the shadows lean to the east:
- And lights wink out through the windows, one by one.
- A clamor of frosty sirens mourns at the night.
- Pale slate-grey clouds whirl up from the sunken sun.
- And the wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams,
- The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street,
- And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.
- The purple lights leap down the hill before him.
- The gorgeous night has begun again.
- "I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams,
- I will hold my light above them and seek their faces.
- I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins . . ."
- The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness,
- Or as a wind blown over a myriad forest,
- Or as the numberless voices of long-drawn rains.
- We hear him and take him among us, like a wind of music,
- Like the ghost of a music we have somewhere heard;
- We crowd through the streets in a dazzle of pallid lamplight,
- We pour in a sinister wave, ascend a stair,
- With laughter and cry, and word upon murmured word;
- We flow, we descend, we turn . . . and the eternal dreamer
- Moves among us like light, like evening air . . .
- Good-night! Good-night! Good-night! We go our ways,
- The rain runs over the pavement before our feet,
- The cold rain falls, the rain sings.
- We walk, we run, we ride. We turn our faces
- To what the eternal evening brings.
- Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid,
- We have built a tower of stone high into the sky,
- We have built a city of towers.
- Our hands are light, they are singing with emptiness.
- Our souls are light; they have shaken a burden of hours . . .
- What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . .
- Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . .
- And after a while they will fall to dust and rain;
- Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands;
- And hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.
| "The Dreamer of Dreams" is reprinted from The House of Dust: A Symphony. Conrad Aiken. Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1920. |
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