AH God, life, law, so many names you keep,      You great, you patient Effort, and you Sleep
     That does inform this various dream of living,
     You sleep stretched out for ever, ever giving
     Us out as dreams, you august Sleep
     Coursed round by rhythmic¹ movement of all
        time,
 
     The constellations², your great heart, the sun
     Fierily pulsing, unable to refrain;
     Since you, vast, outstretched, wordless Sleep
     Permit of no beyond, ah you, whose dreams
     We are, and body of sleep, let it never be said
     I quailed³ at my appointed function, turned poltroon⁴
 
     For when at night, from out the full surcharge
     Of a day's experience, sleep does slowly draw
     The harvest, the spent action to itself;
     Leaves me unburdened to begin again;
     At night, I say, when I am gone in sleep,
     Does my slow heart rebel, do my dead hands
     Complain of what the day has had them do?
 
     Never let it be said I was poltroon
     At this my task of living, this my dream,
     This me which rises from the dark of sleep
     In white flesh robed to drape another dream,
     As lightning comes all white and trembling
     From out the cloud of sleep, looks round about
     One moment, sees, and swift its dream is over,
     In one rich drip it sinks to another sleep,
     And sleep thereby⁵ is one more dream enrichened.
 
     If so the Vast, the God, the Sleep that still grows
          richer
     Have said that I, this mote⁶ in the body of sleep
     Must in my transiency pass all through pain,
     Must be a dream of grief, must like a crude
     Dull meteorite⁷ flash only into light
     When tearing through the anguish⁸ of this life,
     Still in full flight extinct, shall I then turn
     Poltroon, and beg the silent, outspread God
     To alter my one speck⁹ of doom¹⁰, when round me
          burns
     The whole great conflagration¹¹ of all life,
     Lapped like a body close upon a sleep,
     Hiding and covering in the eternal Sleep
     Within the immense and toilsome life-time,
          heaved
     With ache of dreams that body forth¹² the Sleep?
 
     Shall I, less than the least red grain of flesh
     Within my body, cry out to the dreaming soul
     That slowly labours in a vast travail¹³,
     To halt the heart, divert the streaming flow
     That carries moons along, and spare the stress
     That crushes me to an unseen atom of fire?
 
     When pain and all
     And grief are but the same last wonder, Sleep
     Rising to dream in me a small keen dream
     Of sudden anguish, sudden over and spent—
 
       CROYDON

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