Dream-Life

From the Spanish by Edward Fitzgerald From “Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made of” AND yet—and yet—in these our ghostly lives, Half night, half day, half sleeping, half awake, How if our waking life, like that of sleep, Be all a dream in that eternal life To which we wake not till we sleep in death? How if, I say, the senses we now trust For date of sensible comparison,— Ay, ev’n the Reason’s self that dates with them, Should be in essence of intensity Hereafter so transcended, and awoke To a perceptive subtlety so keen As to confess themselves befooled before, In all that now they will avouch for most? One man—like this—but only so much longer As life is longer than a summer’s day, Believed himself a king upon his throne, And played at hazard with his fellows’ lives, Who cheaply dreamed away their lives to him. The sailor dreamed of tossing on the flood: The soldier, of his laurels grown in blood: The lover, of the beauty that he knew Must yet dissolve to dusty residue: The merchant and the miser of his bags Of fingered gold; the beggar of his rags: And all this stage of earth on which we seem Such busy actors, and the parts we played Substantial as the shadow of a shade, And Dreaming but a dream within a dream!