This long inconstant waking to a day
Hung round with clouds, fouled with dark smears of rain
On passive walls of grey
That spent-out gusts obscurely trouble,
Makes a contented window, whose wide pane
Looks two ways on a world made double;
Uncertain day, uncertain dream.
I wake under wings, among such wraps
As yield to dawn’s murk imperceptibly;
My limbs succeed to histories that lapse
Slow-fingered into the giant holes of night,
From their persuasions loosing me,
Comforted in this ashen world to remember them:
Dreams of an unknown freedom and appetite.
For I have been through and still am moist from it
Some place of birth in that last untroubled plain of sleep:
A misted, populous marl-pit
Where the body’s made whole;
And countless human limbs lie folded deep,
Growing in ease under a silvered rain,
In dream-earth’s strange and common bowl
Denuded of identity and pain.