I Fellowed Sleep
Viewed 238 timesI Fellowed Sleep
by Dylan Thomas
I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,
Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper’s eye,
Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon.
So, planing-heeled, I flew along my man
And dropped on dreaming and the upward sky.
I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,
Reaching a second ground far from the stars;
And there we wept, I and a ghostly other,
My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;
I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.
‘My fathers’ globe knocks on its nave and sings.’
‘This that we tread was, too, your fathers’ land.’
‘But we tread bears the angelic gangs,
Sweet are their fathered faces in their wings.
‘These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.’
Faded my elbow ghost, the mothers-eyed,
As, blowing on the angels, I was lost
On that cloud coast to each grave-grabbing shade;
I blew the dreaming fellows to their bed
Where still they sleep unknowing of their ghost.
Then all the matter of the living air
Raised up a voice, and, climbing on the words,
I spelt my vision with a hand and hair,
How light the sleeping on this soily star,
How deep the waking in the worlded clouds.
There grows the hours’ ladder to the sun,
Each rung a love or losing to the last,
The inches monkeyed by the blood of man.
An old, mad man still climbing in his ghost,
My fathers’ ghost is climbing in the rain.
Miscellany
Other poems by Dylan Thomas (read randomly)
From love’s first fever to her plague, from the sof …
And the hollow minute of the womb,
From the unfolding to the scissored caul,
"O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning"
Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo's mo …
Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan's hill,
As the green blooms ride upward, to the...
O
Out of a bed of love
When that immortal hospital made one more moove to
It’s my belief that every man
Should do his share of work,
And in our economic plan
I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,
Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper’s eye,
Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon.
I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
If I were tickled by the rub of love,
A rooking girl who stole me for her side,
Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged stri
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
In the beginning was the three-pointed star,
One smile of light across the empty face;
One bough of bone across the rooting air,
Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloa …
On the silent sea we have heard the so...
Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head …
A girl mad as birds
