Lines Composed in Sleep
Dreamed before 1887 by Owen Meredith (Robert, Earl of Lytton)
This is the place. Here flourish'd Wicked Deeds
And wither'd, in a world without a name, Buried ere ours was born. Fierce troops of crimes Weapon'd and crown'd, athwart a desert land, A wasted loveliness, to reach this place Travell'd in pomp: here settled, and here died, Grown old and weak: and, dying left behind No chronicle upon the bare rock graven Of what they were or what they did. The lives They cramm'd with evil, all their wicked loves, Their wicked hates, Death and slow Time have turn'd
This sprawling troop of roofless ruin huge
|
AUTHOR'S NOTE
These lines are the result of a slumber, not induced by any narcotic, for when the writer awoke under an extraordinarily vivid impression that he had composed in his sleep a poem of considerable length of the purport of this poem, he retained only a vague and shadowy notion; but more than a hundred lines of it were lingering (as it seemed to him) so distinctly in his recollection that he hastened to write them down. His memory, however (or the illusion which had usurped the function of memory) suddenly and completely failed him at the point where this fragment breaks off. He has never been able to complete it, and it is printed here, without alteration, as a psychological curiosity.
EDITOR'S NOTES
Coleridge it's not, but it's gloriously lurid, isn't it? I love those "spangled reptiles" partying away... and of course our Newt Methuselah.
SOURCE: Owen Meredith's After Paradise, or Legends in Exile (1887) p. 156, as quoted in The Dream World (Ed. R.L. Megroz, 1939)
--Chris Wayan
World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sk - Sl-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites