THE PAINS OF SLEEP
by: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772-1834)
- RE on my
bed my limbs I lay,
- It hath not been my use to pray
- With moving lips or bended knees;
- But silently, by slow degrees,
- My spirit I to Love compose,
- In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
- With reverential resignation
- No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
- Only a sense of supplication;
- A sense o'er all my soul imprest
- That I am weak, yet not unblest,
- Since in me, round me, every where
- Eternal strength and Wisdom are.
-
- But yester-night I prayed aloud
- In anguish and in agony,
- Up-starting from the fiendish crowd
- Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
- A lurid light, a trampling throng,
- Sense of intolerable wrong,
- And whom I scorned, those only strong!
- Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
- Still baffled, and yet burning still!
- Desire with loathing strangely mixed
- On wild or hateful objects fixed.
- Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
- And shame and terror over all!
- Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
- Which all confused I could not know
- Whether I suffered, or I did:
- For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe,
- My own or others still the same
- Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.
-
- So two nights passed: the night's dismay
- Saddened and stunned the coming day.
- Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me
- Distemper's worst calamity.
- The third night, when my own loud scream
- Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
- O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild,
- I wept as I had been a child;
- And having thus by tears subdued
- My anguish to a milder mood,
- Such punishments, I said, were due
- To natures deepliest stained with sin,--
- For aye entempesting anew
- The unfathomable hell within,
- The horror of their deeds to view,
- To know and loathe, yet wish and do!
- Such griefs with such men well agree,
- But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
- To be loved is all I need,
- And whom I love, I love indeed.
MORE POEMS BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE |
|