Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, RETURNING DREAMS, by RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

RETURNING DREAMS, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: In the lone silence of my later nights
Last Line: For us to find, and feel that truth is there!
Alternate Author Name(s): Houghton, 1st Baron; Houghton, Lord
Subject(s): Dreams; Nightmares


IN the lone silence of my later nights,
The dreams I dreamt in youth come back to me;
Not a returning presence that affrights, --
Nor a mere play of hard-forced memory, --
But there is no reality which seems
To me so real as those repeated dreams.

I find, in such revivals of old joys,
An earnest of the unity that reigns
In this our inner life, an equipoise
To all our vacillating outward pains;
A constant well, from which our souls updraw
Continuous Truth and undisturbed Law.

If few to us, and far between, appear
The favoured hours at which reverberate
These spiritual echoes, that from sphere
To sphere are sped by Power compassionate,
In Life's short pass, how rarely are we found
Just at the point where strikes the heavenly sound!

But unlike echoes among natural things,
That live in faintness and are breathed away, --
To ends most distant their reflection brings
Glories and bliss impervious to decay,
Fresh and refreshing as when first they come
From the Eternal Thought, which is their home.

As in that World of Dream, whose mystic shades
Are cast by still more mystic substances,
We ofttimes have an unreflecting sense,
A silent consciousness, of some things past,
So clear, that we can wholly comprehend
Others of which they are a part, and even
Continue them in action, though no stretch
Of after-memory can recognise
That we have had experience of those things,
Or sleeping or awake; --
Thus in the dream,
Our Universal Dream, of Mortal Life,
The incidents of an anterior Dream,
Or, it may be, Existence (for the Sun
Of Being, seen thro' the deep dreamy mist,
Itself is dream-like), noiselessly intrude
Into the daily flow of earthly things;
Instincts of Good, -- immediate sympathies,
Places come at by chance, that claim at once
An old acquaintance, -- single, random, looks,
That bare a stranger's bosom to our eyes;
We know these things are so, we ask not why,
But act and follow as the Dream goes on.

Happy the many to whom Life displays
Only the flaunting of its Tulip-flower,
Whose minds have never bent to scrutinize
Into the maddening riddle of the Root, --
Shell within shell, -- dream folded over dream, --
No heart, no kernel of essential Being,
For us to find, and feel that Truth is there!





Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net