ART & ORGANISM
EXCERPT from THE DREAM by Lord Byron (1816)
Our life is twofold: Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their developement have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of Joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our waking toils,
They do divide our being;[35] they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of Eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past, – they speak
Like Sibyls of the future; they have power –
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not – what they will,
And shake us with the vision that’s gone by,[36]
The dread of vanished shadows – Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? – What are they?
Creations of the mind? – The mind can make
Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
George Gordon Lord Byron 1816 (complete poem and notes)
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