Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. THE DREAM GOES BY, by EDWARD CARPENTER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 4. THE DREAM GOES BY, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The dream goes by, touches men's hearts, and floats and fades again
Last Line: And floats, and waits, again.
Subject(s): Dreams; Labor & Laborers; Nightmares; Work; Workers


THE dream goes by, touches men's hearts, and floats and fades again—
Far on the hills away from this nightmare of modern cheap-jack life:
The finished free Society.

Finished and done with so much that clogs to-day the weary spirit, weary
body;
Finished and done with all the old cumbersome apparatus of Law and
Authority, with the endless meanness of 'business' and money-making, with the
silly paraphernalia of distinction and respectability, with the terrible
struggle of each against all, and the trampling of the weak underfoot by the
strong;
Done with the endless joyless labors for the bread that perisheth, for
clothing which keeps not the heart warm, for possessions which only weigh their
owners to the ground;
With envies, greeds, jealousies—loads and burdens of life too great to
be borne—Sisyphus toils that bring no nearer to the goal.


The grown man hand in hand with his little girl, walking the woodland path,

With brown uncovered bodies, both of them, so glad, content, unconscious;
And all the wealth and beauty of the world is theirs;
The Sun shining on their limbs; and in their minds the long results of
human culture.
The simple dresses of the public thoroughfare, used of not used with quiet
sense of fitness;
The simple diet so easily won, so gladly shared;
The stores of human science, human knowledge, acces sible to all—for
all to use.
And Death no longer terrible, but full
Of poignant strange Expansion; Labor too
(Which is our daily death
And resurrection in the thing created)
An ever-abiding joy.—
A life so near to Nature, all at one with bird and plant and beast and
swimming thing,
So near to all its fellows in sweet love—
In joy unbounded and undying love.

The dream goes by, touches and stirs men's hearts,
And floats, and waits, again.





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