I Dreamed Of Manderley Last Night Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

[for Daphne Du Maurier, on the novel, the film, Rebecca...]

I dreamed of Manderley last night
wrote the second Mrs. De Winter, years after
her coronation was still fresh in mind

it was a dream but even so
it was not the same in Time
as the rusted gates close on us all,

don't they, drifting back, even in dreams

but she went back to Manderley it seems,
seeking a gleam of what remained,
remains for the fragmented mind

in beautiful sentences wrote Du Maurier

the most beautiful of any I had heard
in modern novels
and at the beginning of the book

not saving the best wine for last.
ah unsurpassed I dreamed of Manderley
last night I dreamed...

I dreamed and dreamed over just those
lines like the voice-over of angels
on a familiar narration that's no longer just

your own though it sounds like you speaking it;
you, farther back

and you are all alone now
and you dream of Manderley
your own version of it

and shadows and shadows
on the long avenues
cast by the fitful trees wind-torn

as the heart remembering;

lining the roads, the trees and their reveries
that won't that can't lead home.

mary angela douglas 5 june 2015; 4 july 2019