by Poe · Cluster: Memory and Time · Memory · Nostalgia
Abstract
Early lyric figuring the speaker’s life as a proud, dreamlike tide of vanished hope and visionary thought now passed away.
Connections
Topoi: Tempus Fugit Motifs: Dreams, Memory, Eyes and Sight Themes & Concepts: Transience, Melancholy, Pride, Nostalgia, Imagination Forms & Genres: Lyric
Testo integrale / Full text
A dark unfathom’d tide
Of interminable pride—
A mystery, and a dream,
Should my early life seem;
I say that dream was fraught
With a wild, and waking thought
Of beings that have been,
Which my spirit hath not seen,
Had I let them pass me by,
With a dreaming eye!
Let none of earth inherit
That vision on my spirit;
Those thoughts I would control
As a spell upon his soul:
For that bright hope at last
And that light time have past,
And my worldly rest hath gone
With a sigh as it pass’d on
I care not tho’ it perish
With a thought I then did cherish.
1827.