WAKING

Lying beneath a hundred seas of sleep

With all those heavy waves flowing over me,

And I unconscious of the rolling night

Until, slowly, from deep to lesser deep

Risen, I felt the wandering seas no longer cover me

But only air and light....

It was a sleep

So dark and so bewilderingly deep

That only death's were deeper or completer,

And none when I awoke stranger or sweeter.

Awake, the strangeness still hung over me

As I with far-strayed senses stared at the light.

I — and who was I?

Saw — oh, with what unaccustomed eye!

The room was strange and everything was strange

Like a strange room entered by wild moonlight;

And yet familiar as the light swept over me

And I rose from the night.

Strange — yet stranger I.

And as one climbs from water up to land

Fumbling for weedy steps with foot and hand,

So I for yesterdays whereon to climb

To this remote and new-struck isle of time.

But I found not myself nor yesterday —

Until, slowly, from deep to lesser deep

Risen, I felt the seas no longer over me

But only air and light.

Yes, like one clutching at a ring I heard

The household noises as they stirred,

And holding fast I wondered. What were they?

I felt a strange hand lying at my side,

Limp and cool. I touched it and knew it mine.

A murmur, and I remembered how the wind died

In the near aspens. Then

Strange things were no more strange.

I travelled among common thoughts again;

And felt the new forged links of that strong chain

That binds me to myself, and this to-day

To yesterday. I heard it rattling near

With a no more astonished ear.

And I had lost the strangeness of that sleep,

No more the long night rolled its great seas over me.

— O, too anxious I!

For in this press of things familiar

I have lost all that clung

Round me awaking of strangeness and such sweetness

Nothing now is strange

Except the man that woke and then was I.