Martyr La Mode

Ah God, life, law, so many names you keep,     You great, you patient Effort, and you Sleep     That does inform this various dream of living,     You sleep stretched out for ever, ever giving     Us out as dreams, you august Sleep     Coursed round by rhythmic movement of all time,     The constellations, your great heart, the sun     Fierily pulsing, unable to refrain;     Since you, vast, outstretched, wordless Sleep     Permit of no beyond, ah you, whose dreams     We are, and body of sleep, let it never be said     I quailed at my appointed function, turned poltroon     For when at night, from out the full surcharge     Of a day's experience, sleep does slowly draw     The harvest, the spent action to itself;     Leaves me unburdened to begin again;     At night, I say, when I am gone in sleep,     Does my slow heart rebel, do my dead hands     Complain of what the day has had them do?     Never let it be said I was poltroon     At this my task of living, this my dream,     This me which rises from the dark of sleep     In white flesh robed to drape another dream,     As lightning comes all white and trembling     From out the cloud of sleep, looks round about     One moment, sees, and swift its dream is over,     In one rich drip it sinks to another sleep,     And sleep thereby is one more dream enrichened.     If so the Vast, the God, the Sleep that still grows richer     Have said that I, this mote in the body of sleep     Must in my transiency pass all through pain,     Must be a dream of grief, must like a crude     Dull meteorite flash only into light     When tearing through the anguish of this life,     Still in full flight extinct, shall I then turn     Poltroon, and beg the silent, outspread God     To alter my one speck of doom, when round me burns     The whole great conflagration of all life,     Lapped like a body close upon a sleep,     Hiding and covering in the eternal Sleep     Within the immense and toilsome life-time, heaved     With ache of dreams that body forth the Sleep?     Shall I, less than the least red grain of flesh     Within my body, cry out to the dreaming soul     That slowly labours in a vast travail,     To halt the heart, divert the streaming flow     That carries moons along, and spare the stress     That crushes me to an unseen atom of fire?     When pain and all     And grief are but the same last wonder, Sleep     Rising to dream in me a small keen dream     Of sudden anguish, sudden over and spent -         CROYDON