O That I Dream, And Dream Abstruse Today Poem by Emmanuel George Cefai

O that I dream, and dream abstruse to-day
Dream full abstruse to cut the chains
Of this attachment to conventionality:
Day follows routine of the day
Night follows day, next day follows
The wheel turns on; the sands fall down
The time-glass full becomes; years pass;
And our hands are empty.

O that I dream, and dream abstruse to-day

At last my vexed brain in the vexations
Of abstruse dreams and dreaming will
Find its old self its will its youth, past.
No subject is proposed; goblins
Fauns, satyrs, all welcome are
As the Three Graces; beauties white
And the white northern snows I want
And more the goddesses of ebony
From weltering wealds in tropic lushness lost:
These all I want and love and all commixed
In one abstruse idiom; like a potion
Everything is mixed and simultaneously
There is a taste of everything
The abstruse film at one time concentrates
And the scene is ‘diurnal’ ‘normal’ nay:
Then the ribbons of the film are raveled
And images whirl one into the other mixed
And climb I the high mount of the abstruse:
And in those intervals
My brain its lease of vital oxygen gets
In its gasp, and asphyxia intellectual:
The night slumbers on touched by the wand
Of Morpheus.
At one time then the ribbons of the film
Seem to be unraveled by themselves
(Or by a hand invisible else unseen
In that morphean madness) such the brain
Mutters itself away as do the lips
Giving strange words in language unknown:

I dream
Of ancient towns, of alleys strait,
Of waters raging opening their white jaws
Of green-faced storms; green seas; then
A green giant lizard on the shore
With horrid rolling eyes of red
So large, I say, so large; and then
Seeing me so small Gulliver-like
I yield to my arcane instinct and flee.
Then on the roof I stand in the dark night
And horrid the wild winds about me whirl
Their eerie cries how frightening to me
I seem to hear now that am awake:
And then, and then, the shadows grey and taut
That like a robber going down on the wall
Went down the stone-stairs and in the dark
Was lost, into the night it went.


O that I dream, I dream abstruse to-day.