“Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
"Life is but an empty dream!"”
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
St. 1.
A Psalm of Life (1839)
“I am the only being whose doom
No tongue would ask no eye would mourn”
I Am the Only Being (1836)
Context: I am the only being whose doom
No tongue would ask no eye would mourn
I never caused a thought of gloom
A smile of joy since I was born
In secret pleasure — secret tears
This changeful life has slipped away
As friendless after eighteen years
As lone as on my natal day
Diwan of Imru' al-Qays, Poem 2, quoted in Dictionary of Literary Biography, p. 213
The Poem of Imru' al-Qais
Light (1919), Ch. XV - An Apparition
Context: I felt the beginning of a farewell rise in me like a sob. But there are too many of them for one to mourn them all. How many of them are there on all this plain? How many, how many of them are there in all this moment? Our heart is only made for one heart at a time. It wears us out to look at all. One may say, "There are the others," but it is only a saying. "You shall not know; you shall not know."
“In dreams begins responsibility.”
Variant: In Dreams begins Responsibility.
Source: Epigraph to the book Responsibilities (1914); this was later adapted as the title of the story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" (1937) by Delmore Schwartz.
Part Four, Chapter 12.
Blue Highways (1982)
Context: What is it in man that for a long while lies unknown and unseen only one day to emerge and push him into a new land of the eye, a new region of the mind, a place he has never dreamed of? Maybe it's like the force in spores lying quietly under asphalt until the day they push a soft, bulbous mushroom head right through the pavement. There's nothing you can do to stop it.
