The Dream by Lord Byron, Part 1

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 development 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 waking toils, 
They do divide our being; 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, 
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 
Substances, and people planets of its own 
With beings brighter than have been, and give 
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh. 
I would recall a vision which I dreamed 
Perchance in sleep -for in itself a thought, 
A slumbering thought, is capable of years, 
And curdles a long life into one hour. 


OK, this poem is incredible. I was very tempted to end the blog post there but I don't have much else to do, so ramble I will. This is only the first part of the poem, from nine in total. I was considering including the whole thing but it is probably slightly too long for a blog post. 

One thing to note about this poem is that it is very uncharacteristic of Byron to write in blank verse, he was a staunch defender of rhyming verse. He said of Milton's Paradise Lost that, ‘I am not persuaded that the Paradise Lost would not have been more nobly conveyed to posterity, not perhaps in heroic couplets – although even they could sustain the subject, if well balanced – but in the stanza of Spenser, or of Tasso, or in the terza rima of Dante, which the powers of Milton could easily have grafted on our language.’

Actually it seems Byron rather enjoyed criticising established greats of poetry, though of course he was entirely entitled to do so. He said of Shakespeare that: 'Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down. He had no invention as to stories, none whatever. He took all his plots from old novels, and threw their stories into a dramatic shape, at as little expense of thought as you or I could turn his plays back again into prose tales. That he threw over whatever he did write some flashes of genius, nobody can deny: but this was all.' This seems rather severe but honestly there is nothing terribly factually incorrect here. It is Shakespeare's masterful use of language that immortalises his works more than the stories themselves.

Anyway, I must leave now, I require a cold shower after reading that poem.