Emily Dickinson wrote the following poem:
Let me not mar that perfect dream
By an auroral stain,
But so adjust my daily night
That it will come again.
Thirty years later, Henry James recorded the following piece in his journal:
Oh, wretched Eos, shine not your rosy-fingered light,
caused by clouds hovering over the eastern harbor,
in such a manner that my dream, my perfect
--insofar as a dream can be called perfect,
as my sleepy fantasies do not have a realistic conformity
and only the real, the waking harming beautifully dangerous real
can be considered perfect--
dream is ruined, erased, devoid of its misty imagery,
sharp-edged and soft-focused simultaneously
like the ephemeral borders of a Brady daguerrotype,
Oh, sweet Hypnos, hear my unvoiced supplication
--unvoiced because I still drift in and out of your kingdom,
in that foggy mystical time when thoughts are more voluminous than shouts
and genius emanates from the tips of all my nerves--
to allow my return to,
like I had purchased a round trip ticket on a particularly punctual train,
to place me in possession of,
this exact same location
in this forgotten-during-the-daylight-hours dream.
Thirty years after this, Ernest Hemingway wrote the following on a cocktail napkin at Sloppy Joe's:
This fine dream is ruined
Because I didn't pull the curtain,
Would a repeat of last night's debauch
Bring it back for certain?
Thirty years later, Dylan Thomas etched these words in a sticky coffee stain:
I boiled and seethed at the rising of the light
My dream scattered like flakes of ash on a tradewind breeze
How I regret waking and living a new day
Missing this vision that I might never re-seize.
About thirty years after this, a group of men who would go on to form The Wiggles wrote this:
You dreamt your dreamy dream
But now it's time to wake up and move
Eat, brush, comb, dress, you're doing
the Getting Ready for School Groove.
Are poems really a reflection of their times?
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