Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, REVERIE OVER MEMORIES, by JOHN FREEMAN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

REVERIE OVER MEMORIES, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: I did not dream. And yet if I had dreamed
Last Line: And the imagination of delight.
Subject(s): Memory; Nostalgia; Past; Time


I DID not dream. And yet if I had dreamed
Nothing more sharp and visionary had seemed.

With what long-hungering eyes I saw once more
What I had seen a thousand times before—
But thirty years ago: the house, the street,
The lamps, the dust, the roofs, the wire-hung sky,
The shining laurel and sere lilac's leaf.
Not with those eyes I saw, but the mind's eye
That turns back, seeking neither sour nor sweet
But a long satisfaction in far distant things and things most brief.
And there myself I saw, part of the street,
And the street part of me; its brick and stone
In me and of me as flesh and blood and bone.
These that a thousand thousand times I have stared at
Unconscious, unreflecting, are become
Me and immortal with me. Even the rat-tat
Of the iron knocker, the factory horn's gruff hum,
The shine of window brass, the groan of the rusting gate,
Never more to be seen and heard and never to be forgot—
These Time with his coarse sleeve may obliterate not.

It was with hungering and aching eyes
I turned and looked, and saw the crowded years
Roam like an infinite flock of feeding sheep.
For each day with its unsurprising new surprise,
Its quiet miracle of sense, its fears,
Its joys and laughter, loneliness and tears,
Light dreams, and long nights of unburdened sleep,
And sudden waking, and then pondering long and deep—
Each day's own flock of still familiar sheep
Roamed by, and I the shepherd, and then I the green
Pasture and all the sheep a part of me
Moving over my acres endlessly,
Seen or unseen as clear as if unseen;
Till with their movement I was satisfied,
And my eyes shut, day came, and the vision died.

Where is the house, the street, the shining brass
And all that was? It has passed, or it will pass.
Another street or a wilderness again
Will be, and this that was be like the dust
Blown with another dust and then forgot
As the last cloudy eddy of a spent gust. ...
No! these may be obliterated not.
Solid things in their image will remain
Sharing the immortality of the mind
Though their dust whirls in Time's forgetful wind.

These things that men have made, in mine, in their
Dark minds live now immortally on and on
With the sunlight on the wall, the tapping air
Upon the shuttered windows, with the night
Of stars and clouds flowing on and on and on,
With love, with thought, with sense of dark and light,
And the imagination of delight.





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