The Making Dream

Hayden Carruth

I dreamt that I had found
A page by Master Yeats
Never known before.
My heart did sing and bound
For joy of what I read
Beside the fallen tower.

Twined in the hard script,
The golden key
To all our dreamt creation.
Truly the poet knit
Of his own stone and tree,
My dreaming, my anguish.

Why should a poet see
Better than plumber
Carpenter, or clerk
Into our ecstasy?
It said destroying wonder
Is a poet's work.

It said the world we make,
Dreaming, is fearful, hard,
Because we must decoy,
From fear, from love's mistake,
From solitude's high guard,
The heart to the heart's joy.

University of Virginia Virginia Quarterly Review
5 Boar's Head Place
PO Box 400223
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22903-3237
ISSN 2154-6932