Waking

Lying beneath a hundred seas of sleep     With all those heavy waves flowing over me,     And I unconscious of the rolling night     Until, slowly, from deep to lesser deep     Risen, I felt the wandering seas no longer cover me     But only air and light....     It was a sleep     So dark and so bewilderingly deep     That only death's were deeper or completer,     And none when I awoke stranger or sweeter.     Awake, the strangeness still hung over me     As I with far-strayed senses stared at the light.     I--and who was I?     Saw--oh, with what unaccustomed eye!     The room was strange and everything was strange     Like a strange room entered by wild moonlight;     And yet familiar as the light swept over me     And I rose from the night.     Strange--yet stranger I.     And as one climbs from water up to land     Fumbling for weedy steps with foot and hand,     So I for yesterdays whereon to climb     To this remote and new-struck isle of time.     But I found not myself nor yesterday--     Until, slowly, from deep to lesser deep     Risen, I felt the seas no longer over me     But only air and light.     Yes, like one clutching at a ring I heard     The household noises as they stirred,     And holding fast I wondered. What were they?     I felt a strange hand lying at my side,     Limp and cool. I touched it and knew it mine.     A murmur, and I remembered how the wind died     In the near aspens. Then     Strange things were no more strange.     I travelled among common thoughts again;     And felt the new forged links of that strong chain     That binds me to myself, and this to-day     To yesterday. I heard it rattling near     With a no more astonished ear.     And I had lost the strangeness of that sleep,     No more the long night rolled its great seas over me.     --O, too anxious I!     For in this press of things familiar     I have lost all that clung     Round me awaking of strangeness and such sweetness     Nothing now is strange     Except the man that woke and then was I.