Dreams and Imagination

It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round.

Forth from his dark and lonely hiding place (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, Drops his blue-fringèd lids, and holds them close, And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, Cries out, “Where is it?”

A sight to dream of, not to tell!

To all, to each, a fair goodnight, And pleasing dreams, and slumbers light!

The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the poet’s dream.

Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Still as they run they look behind, They hear a voice in every wind, And snatch a fearful joy.

Those oft are stratagems which errors seem, Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.

Too low they build, who build beneath the stars.

Like our shadows, Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.

Tired nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep!

What if earth Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?

Into a limbo large and broad, since called The Paradise of Fools, to few unknown.

Methought I saw my late espoused saint Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave.

But oh! as to embrace me she inclin’d, I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.

A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes, and beck’ning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men’s names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.

And pomp, and feast, and revelry, With mask, and antique pageantry, Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream. Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson’s learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child, Warble his native wood-notes wild, And ever, against eating cares, Lap me in soft Lydian airs, Married to immortal verse Such as the meeting soul may pierce, In notes with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out.

Go, and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me, where all past years are, Or who cleft the Devil’s foot. Teach me to hear mermaids singing.

O brave new world, That has such people in’t!

Where the bee sucks, there suck I In a cowslip’s bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry. On the bat’s back I do fly After summer merrily: Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.