Plays and poems | ||
440
[Like old King Hamlet sleeping in the flowers]
Like old King Hamlet sleeping in the flowers,O'er-arched with woodbine and the clustering rose,
I lay supine in odorous repose,
Safe, as I thought, amid my garden bowers:
While with light footsteps tripped the smiling hours,
And my heart fluttered with the rapturous throes
Of such a dream of joy as, haply, flows
Past the closed eyelids of the musing powers
Who rest in Eden—with a dream of thee.
Anon upon me, with accurséd bane,
Fate stole on tiptoe, and through ear and brain
Poured his foul poison. Wild with agony,
I shriek, I wake, I would but cannot flee;
Then helpless fall, no more to dream again.
Plays and poems | ||