Classic Poem

Ay, we are dreamed; and, if ever the Dreamer
Wake from the sleep to remember the dream,
We of His waking shall thrill in the tremor,
Dawn with His memory, mingle and stream.

What though He slumber through eon on eon?
When He has dreamed all the infinite full,
Dreamed all the worlds and the lives there to be on,
Out to dreamed gravity's uttermost pull;

Dreamed forth of matter and force interblended
(Storm-drifts of matter and torrents of force)
Cyclones of flame, globed, exploded, and rended —
Wide wild beginnings of Time's endless course;

Dreamed out of chaos the suns in the spaces,
Dreamed down the suns to their white molten cores,
Dreamed off the worlds in their systemal places,
Over them dreaming the continent-floors

Out of their pulps of fire — dreaming the oceans
Out of the rain from their heavens of steam,
And of their mad elemental commotions
Molding the motions of life in His dream;

Dreaming the marvelous atoms together
Into the miracles feeling and thought,
Hitching, with matter's mysterious tether,
Selfhoods of sense to insensible naught;

Dreaming the span of the measureless chasm
Yawning between the alive and the dead —
Wonder of dreams in the organless plasm
Crawling to soul from the sea's oozy bed —

Feeling to soul in the sea's vital foment,
Feeling to form and to faculties dim,
Till, at the touch of a consummate moment,
Loosed into freedom to rise and to swim —

Swimming of dreams in the nightmare of waters!
Hydras, chimeras, and gorgons of sleep,
That by transitions of mutual slaughters
Play the dream-tragedy Life in the deep;

When His long dream through the spawning and swarming
Sea-generations has passed into things
Creeping aland, and has risen transforming
Into the slow apparition of wings;

When from the budding of nerves in the banded
Spirals of earth-crawling pleasure and pain
Upward has issued His dream and expanded
Into the glorified blooming of brain —

Flower of all the world's forces and ages,
Top-bloom of matter exhaling the soul,
Opening volume whose unopened pages
Yet of God's being shall utter the whole, —

Here from His dream shall He start into waking —
Dream of the universe waking in Me —
Me as a shore where the great billows breaking
Leap out of silence in sounds of the sea!

Here, in the self of Me, here wakes the Dreamer,
Wakes and shall wake as the brain shall unfold;
Here is the Christ of God, here the Redeemer,
Spirit incarnate that Faith has foretold.

Growth of the brain shall be God manifested
Here in the flesh, when the dead shall arise,
By an inherited memory vested
With the immortal life dreamed of the skies.

When, through heredity raised and perfected,
Faculties now in the germ shall have bloomed,
All the forgotten shall be recollected,
All that is buried shall be disentombed.

Whatso has ever with being been gifted,
Since the first givings of being began,
Living again shall be gathered and lifted
Into the sovereign consciousness, Man.

He shall remember all living and dying,
He shall think back to life's origin here —
Nay, shall recall when he hither came flying,
Seed of life ripened in some other sphere —

Brought by some inter-world wind accidental,
Or by some gravity's fated monsoon,
Hence to be traced by that form rudimental
Haply through all forms of life on the moon.

So shall he read the soul's mystery-story,
Turning the pages from star back to star,
Now in the gloom and again in the glory,
Till he shall come where the last secrets are.

Then, thus with insight illumined to seeing
All that has been, he shall see all that is —
Thrill with the pulses of all the world's being,
Make all the God of the universe his.

Yet shall he, ere that divine consummation,
All the career of existence have run,
World after world, to his last habitation —
Seraph of light on the ultimate sun;

Sun, of the globes of all systems compacted,
Orb, of all motion the center and rest
(Time to a moment eternal contracted),
Goal of all spirits immortal and blest.

They shall be one, though their number be legion,
And with one consciousness they shall revive
Into the bliss of that radiant region
All of the past that was ever alive.

Thus we shall share in the last resurrection;
So shall the mind of the angels recall
Us and all creatures, and that recollection
Be the salvation in heaven for all.