I DREAMPT THAT I DWELT
"I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls
With vassals and serfs at my side"
my father would hum or sing
or da da dah'd as he sawed.
"And of all who assembled within those walls
That I was the hope and the pride."
A shining smile of nails
as he hammered the tune home.
Carpentry was for me
songs and words and stories.
Tall tales and wood shavings
from my father's "reminiscings'".
Saw dust floating in a summer
were to me atoms made visible.
I played with wood instead
of planning it.
The various tools transformed
with one imaginative leap.
Hand drill and spirit level
became Star Trek ships
attacked by a fleet
of tape measures.
Hacksaws...jigsaws were
all the one to me really.
And yes I knew that tooth spacing
and tooth shape were important in a saw.
A wavy set and milled teeth for plastic and metals.
A side set and ground tooth for a fast clean cut with wood.
But to me they were merely the teeth
of various pterodactyls in my Harryhausen mood.
And yes I planed wood
but only to release the genie of the pine.
The scent a magic
carpet ride.
And I planed and planed
until there was nothing left
but the graceful curl of
a sea of wood shavings.
Later he would laugh
when I brought him Carroll's parody.
"I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And each damp thing that creeps and crawls
went wobble-wobble on the walls..."
Or an Orwell even...
"I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?"
Or auld Jimmy the Joist
and his warping words
"When you dreamt that you'd wealth
in marble arch do you ever think of pool beg slowe."
Cracking up when
Finnegans Wake'd
"... at this passing moment
by localoption in the birds' lodging,
me pheasants among,
where I'll dreamt that I'll dwealth
mid warblers' walls when throstles and choughs
to my sigh hiehied,..."
"Ahhh Dónall lad yer a great one
for the books but
ya never took to the wood
it was always words words words!"
"But I also dreamt, which charmed me most
That you loved me still the same
That you loved me, you loved me still the same
That you loved me, you loved me still the same"
Always remember my Da singing this to me and I cuddled closely into him...his voice almost a whisper...the words his breath upon my cheek. I was very very small and he always told me that I was his hope and pride and that he loved me...he loved me...still the same. I would fall asleep to his singing and he would carry me to bed and give me a kiss on the top of my head....I was never so happy and felt so loved and adored.
And he sang it to me after my sister was killed in a bus crash with tears rolling down his checks.
Or Mr. Carroll's parody .NUMBER 1: THE PALACE OF HUMBUG
I DREAMT I dwelt in marble halls, And each damp thing that
creeps and crawls Went wobble-wobble on the walls.
Faint odours of departed cheese, Blown on the dank, unwholesome
breeze, Awoke the never-ending sneeze.
Strange pictures decked the arras drear, Strange characters of woe
and fear, The humbugs of the social sphere.
One showed a vain and noisy ****, That shouted empty words and
big At him that nodded in a wig.
And one, a dotard grim and gray, Who wasteth childhood’s happy
day In work more profitless than play.
Whose icy breast no pity warms, Whose little victims sit in swarms,
And slowly sob on lower forms.
And one, a green thyme-honoured Bank, Where flowers are
growing wild and rank, Like weeds that fringe a poisoned tank.
All birds of evil omen there Flood with rich Notes the tainted air,
The witless wanderer to snare.
The fatal Notes neglected fall, No creature heeds the treacherous
call, For all those goodly Strawn Baits Pall.
The wandering phantom broke and fled, Straightway I saw within
my head A vision of a ghostly bed, Where lay two worn decrepit
2
men, The fictions of a lawyer’s pen, Who never more might breathe
again.
The serving-man of Richard Roe Wept, inarticulate with woe: She
wept, that waited on John Doe.
“Oh rouse”, I urged, “the waning sense With tales of tangled
evidence, Of suit, demurrer, and defence.”
“Vain”, she replied, “such mockeries: For morbid fancies, such as
these, No suits can suit, no plea can please.”
And bending o’er that man of straw, She cried in grief and sudden
awe, Not inappropriately, “Law!”
The well-remembered voice he knew, He smiled, he faintly
muttered “Sue!” (Her very name was legal too.)
The night was fled, the dawn was nigh:
A hurricane went raving by, And swept the Vision from mine eye.
Vanished that dim and ghostly bed, (The hangings, tape; the tape
was red:) ‘Tis o’er, and Doe and Roe are dead!
Oh, yet my spirit inly crawls, What time
Oxford, 1855.
Or Orwell's 1946 essay WHY I WRITE...
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago,
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.
And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.
All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.
But girls’ bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.
It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them;
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.
I am the worm who never turned,
The ****** without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;
And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn’t born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?