In A Dream
 

Revision

Now A Wonder

Still dreaming, see an early glow,
spring’s fall into new morning,
raise the window to a lilting scent
where cheering robins soon visit.
Leave the room clinging to the dark
and watch the world ease on,
hear the roof dove coo
today is now a wonder,
see new morning tumble
laughing down the stairs
to where the hearth is cool,
wait before you follow behind
and hear the new light spool
a slip for night’s last mooring.

***

In A Dream

In a dream see an early glow,
a new spring’s fall into a new morning,
raise the window to a lilting scent
where cheering robins soon visit.
Leave the room that clings to the dark
and watch the world ease on,
hear the roof dove coo
today is now a wonder,
see the new morning tumble
laughing down the stairs
to where the hearth is cool,
wait before you follow behind
to hear the new light spool
a slip for night’s last mooring.

Hi, John—
I wonder if this doesn’t belong in the non-metrical section. It reads like free verse to me.
I like how the imperatives (see, raise, leave, hear, see, wait) give the poem structure. Maybe find a way to avoid repeating “see?” Taste is the only sense missing.
Maybe it’s a result of the dream-like state, but I feel a tension between active, excited verbs and verbals (fall, cheering, wonder, tumble, laughing) and quiet, thoughtful ones (glow, lilting, clings, watch, wait, mooring). It was difficult for me to decide what the speaker’s dominant tone was meant to be. The last two lines are money. I like the complex image and synaesthesia of hearing the light and the /ōō/ assonance with “new,” “spool,” and “mooring.”
Glenn

Here I go again. I hear three beats a line. Accentual.

Thanks for the comment, Glenn. I'm happy it strikes you that way.

John, how you get only three beats out of L2 is beyond me, but I don’t think anyone here really cares. We’re just glad to read your poems.

I like the way nature does most of the acting, while the N simply opens his senses, leaves, waits and follows. Even when he actively raises the window, he’s told to do so.

Since you are punctuating, though minimally, I think you need a period or comma after “coo.”

My only real nit is “cheering,” which seems a little clichéd or telly or maybe too much on top of “lilting.” I couldn’t decide, but it bugged me.

Glenn is so right about the exquisite last two lines. At first I heard something ominous in “the night’s last mooring,” but I suppose the night has several moorings during sleep and will set out again when day is done.

My favorite bit is

     see the new morning tumble
     laughing down the stairs

Exuberantly disordered, both metrically and concept-wise!

Nits to take or leave:

I'm not wild about reinforcing the title's "In a Dream" with the first three words of L1, which seems like bending over backwards to make sure I understand that this is not happening in the waking world. But I can't fathom why I'm not allowed to think that the narrator might not wake up from this springtime magic anytime soon. Does it really matter at all whether the narrator is dreaming this? Wouldn't it be a lot more charming if he's not?

I do wish that the reportage about the robins' doings were a tad more dramatic than "soon visit."

"follow behind" also seems a little pleonastic. Perhaps "follow, eager" or similar instead?

I tend to ignore titles, so I initially read it as a real waking up. Next I read it as all dreaming, which helps to explain the “final mooring” as the final one before waking up. Ultimately, I went back to my first interpretation. If I’m right, Julie has a point about the title being misleading.

John, it looks like you’ve broken down and written another traditionally-minded poem about spring—and this one feels much more traditional than your last one (despite its debatably accentual basis and its non-rhyming)! That window and “lilting” look familiar, lol. This poem is so adamantly light and positive that it feels somewhat cloying even to me. I assume that it must feel all the more so to you, given some of your comments on your last spring poem.

Is “a new spring’s fall” perhaps a bit too cheeky in its play with the word “fall”? I don’t normally think of a season, especially spring, “falling into” a morning.

I agree about the need for some punctuation after “coo.” Personally, I’d prefer a period, as that would be grammatically correct, and a little breather here would be nice. A semicolon (or period or em dash or colon) rather than a comma would be correct after “wonder.”

But my favorite part by far is “see the new morning tumble/laughing down the stairs.” Now there’s a fall that works! It would be wonderful to bring everything else in the poem up to the register of this phrase.

I’m not a nautical person, so I wasn’t sure about the meaning of “spool a slip for last night’s mooring,” but it does have a lovely sound to it. Still, I was thrown a bit by this sudden appearance of a nautical reference at the very end, and how it gets the last word. This image feels disconnected from all the homey scenes that the poem has centered on up until then.

If there is a problem(s) with the rhythm or beats, I'm always open to critiques to improve. That's why I post. Maybe I'm trying to be better at writing these types of poems. It's weird, and not weird, that the reaction too often "This doesn't belong here." It's like trying to make it through the Pearly Gates.

I agree Julie about the title. I haven't thought of a better one yet and uses the first three words as a placeholder. I should have made that clear. I did want to emphasize it's a dream. Nothing here is happening. It can't be cloying or pro-spring or too sentimental. The question for me is why is someone dreaming this? So, perhaps emphasizing that it's a dream is too much for some readers and not enough for others.

Thanks to everyone who has commented. I've addressed the thematic questions and gathered the crits to use in revision.

Help is always appreciated.

John

When laughing morning tumbles down the stairs
And lands upon his face, we fall to prayers.

"Still dreaming, see an early glow" would leave more ambiguity, leaving it up to the reader whether or not to take the waking/dreaming at literal face value.

I've made a couple of changes. What Julie suggested and I worked on L3. I also changed the title. Thanks, Julie. Maybe this is better?

Sam, what are those lines from? I've googled and ended with an AI-generated poem.

Thanks for the help.

I made a few more nips and tucks.

John, it was SG-generated. I'm sorry, but I find the poem a bit trite.

Cheerful robins, cooing doves, and tumbling morning (wouldn't morning light go up the stairs--I'm not sure?). Reread Spring & All. Williams avoids all the easy pickin's.

It doesn't fail because it's trite. Nothing in it is real. It's a dream. It fails because I thought there was more in the gap between the dream and the actual than there is. Apparently. The trite scene is a dream and why a narrator has such a dream may not be an interesting enough question to entertain the reader's curiosity. It's the poem's machine that isn't working, not it being trite. The trite is on purpose and obvious.

Is it always the poem's fault when a reader doesn't see beyond the surface? Maybe asking the reader to wonder about a dream is the problem. Who cares? Perhaps that's what is trite? Or unrealistic? Or just dumb? Who cares about dreams in 2024?

Thanks, Sam

FWIW, I don't find it trite, but I can see it getting that reaction from someone who wants more complexity and unusual word choices. I'd count myself in with the ranks who like simplicity, and simpler word choices, so it works for me.

First time around - with the new title - I missed that the whole thing was a dream. It does, of course, read very differently when you understand that. At first I thought it was a guileless celebration of spring - which I didn't mind at all - but I agree that things take on quite a different hue once you factor the dream into it.

I prefer it the way you've revised it, John, but maybe you need to reinstate "In a dream", to help the lazily inattentive (like me) not to jump to the wrong but easy conclusion.

Cheers

David

.
Dreams defy metrics, I think. I wish this were a prose poem (proetry)

I know it’s been a long time since it’s been in vogue to take the title of a poem from the opening line, but I like it — at least in certain situations, like this one. I like the original title.

L3: The image “lilting scent” doesn’t make sense to me.

New morning immediately brings to mind Bob Dylan. It feels like you are trying too hard to make the word “new” do too much in the poem.

.

John, it's just not a beguiling dream. Why would the P care to recall it? Real spring is right outside the door.

Sam, how do you know spring is right outside the door? How do you know where the dreamer is dreaming from? I said earlier I think it doesn't work. Not enough is at stake or something else may be the problem. But we know nothing of the situation except it is a dream. The world may be on fire outside.

"The world may be on fire outside."

That would make a great epigraph, or title.

Nemo

Thanks to each for the additional feedback. Nemo I had not considered an epigraph. That may work.

Hi John,

I'm thinking that maybe "In a dream" works better to convey that spring exists (potentially only) in the dream. I'm not 100% sure why, but to me, "Still dreaming ..." gives me more of an impression that it's actually spring, that maybe what he sees is real and that he's still dreaming other things at the same time, or that the real spring is somehow woven into the dream. With "In a dream" it's clearer to me that what's being described is a dream. He's dreaming of an idyllic spring. I guess, "in a dream" can also mean something like "in a daze", but I didn't read it that way.

I'm not entirely sure what "spool a slip for last night's mooring" means, though I like the sound of it. Though it doesn't (I think) say this, it did make think that, in dreaming, he'd slipped from last night's mooring. And perhaps that the spring he dreams is the result of slipping from his mooring, that which held in place, tied him down, in escaping it, he'd found, in his dream, a better place. Though that's not what it says. For that it would need to be something like, "hear the new light spool, and slip from night’s last mooring." But as it stands: well I can imagine a slip (as in losing one's footing) being spooled, I think, but I'm not sure why/how it's "for" last night's mooring. Hmm. Or maybe "slip" is a slipknot? Something to cast over the mooring-post?

best,

Matt

I took “spool a slip for night’s last mooring” to be an image of night as a boat that is being fastened by “spooling” or wrapping a rope around a capstan or pole into its “slip” (a parking place for a boat). The day that just came tumbling down the stairs is the “new light” that is helping to put the night into its resting place. At another level it suggests the energetic, exuberant youth (new light) putting the old, spent generation (night) into its “last mooring” (the grave).
Did I get it right?

Thanks Glenn. I need to brush up on my nautical terms. Didn't know "slip" meant that. Makes perfect sense now.

slip, noun, "a slope built leading into water, used for launching and landing boats and ships or for building and repairing them."

Nemo

That sounds like a "slipway", Nemo, a term I do know. It doesn't sound like a place to moor a boat.

On US sites I find "slip" (and "boatslip") described as a mooring place for a single boat. I couldn't find "slip" in a UK glossary of nautical terms, and Collins, a UK dictionary, tells me that "boatslip" is an American word. So, I'm thinking "slip", used in this sense, is too.

In which case, I'm pleased I have a good excuse for not having known it :)

Thanks, Matt. Duly noted.

I mean slip the say Nemo defined it.

The dream-vision was a standard genre in the middle ages. Then dreams were taken up by the surrealists, or at least imagery from them. I see from the new title that this is no longer a dream, right?

Here are some thoughts about the poem's language (as opposed to theme, meter, emotion, etc.):

I think the first four lines are weighed down by adjectives:

• early glow
• new morning
• lilting scent
• cheering robins

Some of them are redundant, as well. Once we know it's morning, we know that any glow will be "early" and the morning will be a "new" one. (You say "new morning" again later in the poem, and "new light" as well, perhaps beating us over the head a bit too much with the straightforward idea that it's a new day).

You also say "lilting scent/ where", but a scent is not a location.

In the phrase "soon visit," I am left wondering how the speaker knows this, since I take it that the visit has not yet happened but will happen "soon." But I don't know what "soon" contributes. Why not just say "visit"?

Why is the room "clinging to the dark" when you've just told us there's an early glow in the new morning? What dark is that? (I presume it's the room, not the speaker or his interlocutor, who is clinging to the dark, but the grammar is ambiguous).

In the phrase "is now a wonder," what does the word "now" contribute? Doesn't just saying "is" tell you that it's now?

Why "follow behind" and not just "follow"? How else can one follow except from behind? At any rate, who/what is being followed?

Thanks for the comments