[Editor: This poem by William Blocksidge (also known as William Baylebridge) was published in Songs o’ the South (1908).]
Retrospection
Was it a dream that came to me
As once I slept an hour away?
Is it a phantom that I see
So plainly here to-day?
Ah! tell me not that I must know
How things that happened long ago
Are gone for ever, and that years
Can wipe away the burning tears.
For if, in truth, it was a dream
That flashed of old across my brow,
And if it is a phantom’s gleam
That plays before me now,
I find how deeper it doth lie
Engraved upon my heart and eye
Than these material things that stand
About me here, to touch my hand.
And if ’twas ev’n as I have said —
A dream, and is a phantom’s part,
And though the sceptics call it dead
While living in my heart,
Time does not take away the pain
That mingles in the scene again:
It calls across the fleeting years,
And lo! my heart is filled with tears.
Source:
William Blocksidge, Songs o’ the South, London: Watts, 1908, pp. 16-17
Editor’s notes:
doth = (archaic) does
ev’n = (vernacular) even
’twas = (archaic) a contraction of “it was”
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