Life as a waking dream

 

Clotaldo medita sobre Segismundo, en  Life Is a Dream, la traducción de La vida es sueño por Edward Fitzgerald:

    So sleep; sleep fast: and sleep away those two
     Night-potions, and the waking dream between
     Which dream thou must believe; and, if to see
     Again, poor Segismund! that dream must be.—
     And yet, and yet, in these our ghostly lives,
     Half night, half day, half sleeping, half awake,
     How if our waking life, like that of sleep,
     Be all a dream in that eternal life
     To which we wake not till we sleep in death?
     How if, I say, the senses we now trust
     For date of sensible comparison,—
     Ay, ev'n the Reason's self that dates with them,
     Should be in essence or intensity
     Hereafter so transcended, and awake
     To a perceptive subtlety so keen
     As to confess themselves befool'd before,
     In all that now they will avouch for most?
     One man—like this—but only so much longer
     As life is longer than a summer's day,
     Believed himself a king upon his throne,
     And play'd at hazard with his fellows' lives,
     Who cheaply dream'd away their lives to him.
     The sailor dream'd of tossing on the flood:
     The soldier of his laurels grown in blood:
     The lover of the beauty that he knew
     Must yet dissolve to dusty residue:
     The merchant and the miser of his bags
     Of finger'd gold; the beggar of his rags:
     And all this stage of earth on which we seem
     Such busy actors, and the parts we play'd,
     Substantial as the shadow of a shade,
     And Dreaming but a dream within a dream!

A Dream within a Dream

 

—oOo—