place. Thought clouds our life’s day-sense with strangeness, yet Never from strangeness more than that it’s strange Doth buy our perplexed thinking, for we get But the words’ sense from words—knowledge, truth, change. We know the world is false, not what is true. Yet we think on, knowing we ne’er shall know. 

 

XXVII.

 How yesterday is long ago! The past Is a fixed infinite distance from to-day, And bygone things, the first-lived as the last, In irreparable sameness far away. How the to-be is infinitely ever Out of the place wherein it will be Now, Like the seen wave yet far up in the river, Which reaches not us, but the new-waved flow! This thing Time is, whose being is having none, The equable tyrant of our different fates, Who could not be bought off by a shattered sun Or tricked by new use of our careful dates. This thing Time is, that to the grave-will bear My heart, sure but of it and of my fear. 

 

XXVIII.

 The edge of the green wave whitely doth hiss Upon the wetted sand. I look, yet dream. Surely reality cannot be this! Somehow, somewhere this surely doth but seem! The sky, the sea, this great extent disclosed Of outward joy, this bulk of life we feel, Is not something, but something interposed. Only what in this is not this is real. If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I’ll take And for truth commune with imaginings, Holding a dream too bitter, a too fair curse, This common sleep of men, the universe. 

 

XXIX.

 My weary life, that lives unsatisfied On the foiled off-brink of being e’er but this, To whom the power to will hath been denied And the will to renounce doth also miss; My sated life, with having nothing sated, In the motion of moving poisèd aye, Within its dreams from its own dreams abated— This life let the Gods change or take away. For this endless succession of empty hours, Like deserts after deserts, voidly one, Doth undermine the very dreaming powers And dull even thought’s active inaction, Tainting with fore-unwilled will the dreamed act Twice thus removed from the unobtained fact. 

 

XXX.

 I do not know what truth the false untruth Of this sad sense of the seen world 

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