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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=416379" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Insomnia</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Sleepless himself to give to others sleep.<br>He giveth His beloved sleep.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> I HEARD the sounding of the midnight hour;<br> The others one by one had left the room,<br> In calm assurance that the gracious power<br> Of Sleep's fine alchemy would bless the gloom,<br> Transmuting all its leaden weight to gold, <br> To treasures of rich virtues manifold,<br> New strength, new health, new life;<br> Just weary enough to nestle softly, sweetly,<br> Into divine unconsciousness, completely<br>Delivered from the world of toil and care and strife.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Just weary enough to feel assured of rest,<br> Of Sleep's divine oblivion and repose,<br> Renewing heart and brain for richer zest<br> Of waking life when golden morning glows<br> As young and pure and glad as if the first <br> That ever on the void of darkness burst<br> With ravishing warmth and light;<br> On dewy grass and flowers and blithe birds singing<br> And shining waters, all enraptured springing,<br>Fragrance and shine and song, out of the womb of night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> But I with infinite weariness outworn,<br> Haggard with endless nights unblessed by sleep,<br> Ravaged by thoughts unutterably forlorn,<br> Plunged in despairs unfathomably deep,<br> Went cold and pale and trembling with affright<br> Into the desert vastitude of Night,<br> Arid and wild and black;<br> Foreboding no oasis of sweet slumber,<br> Counting beforehand all the countless number<br>Of sands that are its minutes on my desolate track. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"> And so I went, the last, to my drear bed,<br> Aghast as one who should go down to lie<br> Among the blissfully unconscious dead,<br> Assured that as the endless years flowed by<br> Over the dreadful silence and deep gloom <br> And dense oppression of the stifling tomb,<br> He only of them all,<br> Nerveless and impotent to madness, never<br> Could hope oblivion's perfect trance for ever:<br>An agony of life eternal in death's pall.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> But that would be for ever, without cure! —<br> And yet the agony be not more great;<br> Supreme fatigue and pain, while they endure,<br> Into Eternity their time translate;<br> Be it of hours and days or countless years, <br> And boundless aeons, it alike appears<br> To the crushed victim's soul;<br> Utter despair foresees no termination,<br> But feels itself of infinite duration;<br>The smallest fragment instant comprehends the whole.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> The absolute of torture as of bliss<br> Is timeless, each transcending time and space;<br> The one an infinite obscure abyss,<br> The other an eternal Heaven of grace. —<br> Keeping a little lamp of glimmering light<br> Companion through the horror of the night,<br> I laid me down aghast<br> As he of all who pass death's quiet portal<br> Malignantly reserved alone immortal,<br>In consciousness of bale that must for ever last.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> I laid me down, and closed my heavy eyes,<br> As if sleep's mockery might win true sleep;<br> And grew aware, with awe but not surprise,<br> Blindly aware through all the silence deep,<br> Of some dark Presence watching by my bed, <br> The awful image of a nameless dread;<br> But I lay still, fordone;<br> And felt its Shadow on me dark and solemn<br> And steadfast as a monumental column,<br>And thought drear thoughts of Doom, and heard the bells chime <br> One.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> And then I raised my weary eyes and saw,<br> By some slant moonlight on the ceiling thrown<br> And faint lamp-gleam, that Image of my awe,<br> Still as a pillar of basaltic stone,<br> But all enveloped in a sombre shroud <br> Except the wan face drooping heavy-browed,<br> With sad eyes fixed on mine;<br> Sad weary yearning eyes, but fixed remorseless<br> Upon my eyes yet wearier, that were forceless<br>To bear the cruel pressure; cruel, unmalign.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Wherefore I asked for what I knew too well:<br> 0 ominous midnight Presence, What art Thou?<br> Whereto in tones that sounded like a knell:<br> 'I am the Second Hour, appointed now<br> To watch beside thy slumberless unrest.' <br> Then I: Thus both, unlike, alike unblest;<br> For I should sleep, you fly:<br> Are not those wings beneath thy mantle moulded?<br> 0 Hour! unfold those wings so straitly folded,<br>And urge thy natural flight beneath the moonlit sky.<br> <br> 'My wings shall open when your eyes shall close<br> In real slumber from this waking drear;<br> Your wild unrest is my enforced repose;<br> Ere I move hence you must not know me here.<br> Could not your wings fan slumber through my brain, <br> Soothing away its weariness and pain?<br> 'Your Sleep must stir my wings:<br> Sleep, and I bear you gently on my pinions<br> Athwart my span of hollow night's dominions,<br>Whence hour on hour shall bear to morning's golden springs.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> That which I ask of you, you ask of me,<br> 0 weary Hour, thus standing sentinel<br> Against your nature, as I feel and see<br> Against my own your form immovable:<br> Could I bring Sleep to set you on the wing, <br> What other thing so gladly would I bring?<br> Truly the Poet saith:<br> If that is best whose absence we deplore most,<br> Whose presence in our longings is the foremost,<br>What blessings equal Sleep save only love and death?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> I let my lids fall, sick of thought and sense,<br> But felt that Shadow heavy on my heart;<br> And saw the night before me an immense<br> Black waste of ridge-walls, hour by hour apart,<br> Dividing deep ravines: from ridge to ridge <br> Sleep's flying hour was an aerial bridge;<br> But I, whose hours stood fast,<br> Must climb down painfully each steep side hither,<br> And climb more painfully each steep side thither,<br>And so make one hour's span for years of travail last.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Thus I went down into that first ravine,<br> Wearily, slowly, blindly, and alone;<br> Staggering, stumbling, sinking depths unseen,<br> Shaken and bruised and gashed by stub and stone;<br> And at the bottom paven with slipperiness, <br> A torrent-brook rushed headlong with such stress<br> Against my feeble limbs,<br> Such fury of wave and foam and icy bleakness<br> Buffeting insupportably my weakness<br>That when I would recall, dazed memory swirls and swims.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> How I got through I know not, faint as death;<br> And then I had to climb the awful scarp,<br> Creeping with many a pause for panting breath,<br> Clinging to tangled root and rock-jut sharp;<br> Perspiring with faint chills instead of heat, <br> Trembling, and bleeding hands and knees and feet;<br> Falling, to rise anew;<br> Until, with lamentable toil and travel<br> Upon the ridge of and sand and gravel<br>I lay supine half-dead and heard the bells chime Two;</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> And knew a change of Watchers in the room<br> Without a stir or sound beside my bed;<br> Only the tingling silence of the gloom,<br> The muffled pulsing of the night's deep dread;<br> And felt an Image mightier to appal, <br> And looked; the moonlight on the bed-foot wall<br> And corniced ceiling white<br> Was slanting now; and in the midst stood solemn<br> And hopeless as a black sepulchral column<br>A steadfast shrouded Form, the Third Hour of the night.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> The fixed regard implacably austere,<br> Yet none the less ineffably forlorn.<br> Something transcending all my former fear<br> Came jarring through my shattered frame outworn:<br> I knew that crushing rock could not be stirred;<br> I had no heart to say a single word,<br> But closed my eyes again;<br> And set me shuddering to the task stupendous<br> Of climbing down and up that gulf tremendous<br>Unto the next hour-ridge beyond hope's farthest ken.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Men sigh and plain and wail how life is brief:<br> Ah yes, our bright eternities of bliss<br> Are transient, rare, minute beyond belief,<br> Mere star-dust meteors in Time's Night-abyss;<br> Ah no, our black eternities intense <br> Of bale are lasting, dominant, immense,<br> As Time which is their breath;<br> The memory of the bliss is yearning sorrow,<br> The memory of the bale clouds every morrow<br>Darkening through nights and days into the night of Death.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> No human words could paint my travail sore<br> In the thick darkness of the next ravine,<br> Deeper immeasurably than that before;<br> When hideous agonies, unheard, unseen,<br> In overwhelming floods of torture roll, <br> And horrors of great darkness drown the soul,<br> To be is not to be<br> In memory save as ghastliest impression,<br> And chaos of demoniacal possession....<br>I shuddered on the ridge, and heard the bells chime Three.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> And like a pillar of essential gloom,<br> Most terrible in stature and regard,<br> Black in the moonlight filling all the room<br> The Image of the Fourth Hour evil-starred<br> Stood over me; but there was Something more, <br> Something behind It undiscerned before,<br> More dreadful than Its dread,<br> Which overshadowed It as with a fateful<br> Inexorable fascination hateful, —<br>A wan and formless Shade from regions of the dead. <br> I shut my eyes against that spectral Shade,<br> Which yet allured them with a deadly charm,<br> And that black Image of the Hour, dismayed<br> By such tremendous menacing of harm;<br> And so into the gulf as into Hell;<br> Where what immeasurable depths I fell,<br> With seizures of the heart<br> Whose each clutch seemed the end of all pulsation,<br> And tremors of exanimate prostration,<br>Are horrors in my soul that never can depart.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> If I for hope or wish had any force,<br> It was that I might rush down sharply hurled<br> From rock to rock until a mangled corse<br> Down with the fury of the torrent whirled,<br> The fury of black waters and white foam,<br> To where the homeless find their only home,<br> In the immense void Sea,<br> Whose isles are worlds, surrounding, unsurrounded,<br> Whose depths no mortal plummet ever sounded,<br>Beneath all surface storms calm in Eternity. <br> Such hope or wish was as a feeble spark,<br> A little lamp's pale glimmer in a tomb,<br> To just reveal the hopeless deadly dark<br> And wordless horrors of my soul's fixed doom:<br> Yet some mysterious instinct obstinate, <br> Blindly unconscious as a law of Fate,<br> Still urged me on and bore<br> My shattered being through the unfeared peril<br> Of death less hateful than the life as sterile:<br>I shuddered on the ridge, and heard the bells chime Four.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> The Image of that Fifth Hour of the night<br> Was blacker in the moonlight now aslant<br> Upon its left than on its shrouded right;<br> And over and behind It, dominant,<br> The shadow not Its shadow cast its spell, <br> Most vague and dim and wan and terrible,<br> Death's ghastly aureole,<br> Pregnant with overpowering fascination,<br> Commanding by repulsive instigation,<br>Despair's envenomed anodyne to tempt the Soul. <br> I closed my eyes, but could not longer keep<br> Under that Image and most awful Shade,<br> Supine in mockery of blissful sleep,<br> Delirious with such fierce thirst unalloyed;<br> Of all worst agonies the most unblest<br> Is passive agony of wild unrest:<br> Trembling and faint I rose,<br> And dressed with painful efforts, and descended<br> With furtive footsteps and with breath suspended,<br>And left the slumbering house with my unslumbering woes. <br> Constrained to move through the unmoving hours,<br> Accurst from rest because the hours stood still;<br> Feeling the hands of the Infernal Powers<br> Heavy upon me for enormous ill,<br> Inscrutable intolerable pain, <br> Against which mortal pleas and prayers are vain,<br> Gaspings of dying breath,<br> And human struggles, dying spasms yet vainer:<br> Renounce defence when Doom is the Arraigner;<br>Let impotence of Life subside appeased in Death.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> I paced the silent and deserted streets<br> In cold dark shade and chillier moonlight grey;<br> Pondering a dolorous series of defeats<br> And black disasters from life's opening day,<br> Invested with the shadow of a doom <br> That filled the Spring and Summer with a gloom<br> Most wintry bleak and drear;<br> Gloom from within as from a sulphurous censer<br> Making the glooms without for ever denser,<br>To blight the buds and flowers and fruitage of my year.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Against a bridge's stony parapet<br> I leaned, and gazed into the waters black;<br> And marked an angry morning red and wet<br> Beneath a livid and enormous rack<br> Glare out confronting the belated moon, <br> Huddled and wan and feeble as the swoon<br> Of featureless despair:<br> When some stray workmen half-asleep but lusty<br> Passed urgent through the rainpour wild and gusty,<br>I felt a ghost already, planted watching there.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> As phantom to its grave, or to its den<br> Some wild beast of the night when night is sped,<br> I turned unto my homeless home again<br> To front a day only less charged with dread<br> Than that dread night; and after day, to front <br> Another night of — what would be the brunt?<br> I put the thought aside,<br> To be resumed when common life unfolded<br> In common daylight had my brain remoulded;<br>Meanwhile the flaws of rain refreshed and fortified.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> The day passed, and the night; and other days,<br> And other nights; and all of evil doom<br> The sun-hours in a sick bewildering haze,<br> The star-hours in a thick enormous gloom<br> With rending lightnings and with thunder-knells; <br> The ghastly hours of all the timeless Hells:-<br> Bury them with their bane!<br> I look back on the words already written,<br> And writhe by cold rage stung, by self-scorn smitten,<br>They are so weak and vain and infinitely inane....</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> 'How from those hideous Malebolges deep<br> I ever could win back to upper earth,<br> Restored to human nights of blessed sleep<br> And healthy waking with the new day's birth?'-<br> How do men climb back from a swoon whose stress, <br> Crushing far deeper than all consciousness,<br> Is deep as deep death seems?<br> Who can the steps and stages mete and number<br> By which we re-emerge from nightly slumber? —<br>Our poor vast petty life is one dark maze of dreams.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=James+Thomson">James Thomson</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=416379" data-title="Insomnia de James Thomson" data-description="Sleepless himself to give to others sleep.
He giveth His beloved sleep.

 I HEARD the sounding of the midnight hour;
 The others one by one had left the room,
 In calm assurance that the gracious power
 Of Sleep's fine alchemy would bless the gloo..."></div>
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