by Chesterton · Cluster: Dreams · Moon
Abstract
A lyric song set on the dreamlike island of ‘Nevercometrue’, where the man and woman that might have been dance and wed; a melancholy meditation on the unlived life, lost love and longing for what never came true.
Testo / Text
Connections
Archetypes: Lover
Settings: Island
Topoi: Unattainable Beloved, Double
Motifs: Dreams, Music and Song, Moon, Flowers, Garden, Dance, Marriage Themes & Concepts: Unrequited Frustrated Love, Nostalgia, Melancholy, Romantic Love, Longing Forms & Genres: Comic Verse Song, Lyric
Testo integrale / Full text
Song
There’s a sound of the flutes and the lutes tonight
In the island of Nevercometrue;
In a fire-lit isle in the seas of night
Black with depth of blue;
And the man that might have been I shall dance
With woman that might have been you:
Under the world where a man remembers
More than he ever knew.
There’s a noise of songs in the gongs tonight,
In the garden of Nevercometrue;
Under the trees of the terrible flowers
That bloom when the moon is blue;
And the man that never was I is wed
To the woman that never was you—
O nothing nearer than all that is,
In Nevercometrue come true.
G.K. Chesterton
[Published in G.K.’s Weekly, 28th March, 1925]