'Perchance to dream' is an offer that most of us would accept in the blink of an eye. That mysterious 'other world' where the day's reality is processed by our subconscious, really is a mystery, even to the experts and self-help books who decipher our beguiling imaginings with all sorts of reasonings. Perhaps the better truth is that most of us don't remember much about our dreams, unlike its near neighbour the nightmare! Day-dreams too fall into a fantasy imagining where we try to re-route the natural course of events as we move from one emotion to another.
Our unconscious dreams seem essential for our mental and emotional well-being and some believe they provide solutions, answers and prophesize important events. In the conscious world we use the word to describe our goals, desires and wishes which reveal much about who we are and our chosen path for life.
Whatever their significance may or may not be, they are universal and a subject on which our poets have much to say.
With such a rich seam to mine, our poets from Sarojini Naidu to Lewis Carroll, Edna St Vincent Millay to Shakespeare by way of Antonio Machado and Longfellow and a host of others provide a pillowful of poems that will set you dreaming.
01 - The Poetry of Dreams - An Introduction
02 - He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven by W B Yeats
03 - A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allen Poe
04 - The Dream by John Donne
05 - The Dream by Amy Levy
06 - Ay, Workman, Make Me A Dream by Stephen Crane
07 - House of Dreams by Sara Teasdale
08 - My Darling Dear, My Daisy Flower by John Skelton
09 - Roses of a Dream by Damon Runyon
10 - A Ballad of Dreamland by Algernon Charles Swinburne
11 - Longing by Matthew Arnold
12 - The Dream by Alexander Pushkin
13 - A Dream by Edgar Allen Poe
14 - The Dream by Aphra Behn
15 - Love by Rupert Brooke
16 - This Faulted Dream by Daniel Sheehan
17 - Sonnet 87 - Farewell! Thou Art Too Dear For My Possessing by William Shakespeare
18 - The Dream Called Life by Pedro Calderon de la Barca
19 - Dream Fable by Rabia al Basri
82 - Under the April Moon by Bliss William Carman
21 - Song of a Dream by Sarojini Naidu
22 - A Midday Dreamer by James Weldon Johnson
23 - Dreams Old by D H Lawrence
24 - A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky (Life Is But a Dream) by Lewis Carroll
25 - Dream Town by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
26 - A Little Boy's Dream by Katherine Mansfield
27 - The Opal Dream Cave by Katherine Mansfeild
28 - Dreams by John Dryden
29 - Life Tells the Dreamer by Margaret Widdemer
30 - Dreams by Anne Bronte
31 - The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver by Edna St Vincent Millay
32 - My Dead Dream by Sarojini Naidu
33 - Dreams by Edgar Allen Poe
34 - I Wake And Feel The Fell Of Dark Not Day by Gerard Manley Hopkins
35 - I Go on Dreaming of Paths by Antonio Machado
36 - Dreamland by Edgar Allen Poe
37 - I Dream'd I Lay by Robert Burns
38 - A Dream Lies Dead by Dorothy Parker
39 - Harlem by Langston Hughes
40 - Forgotten Dreams by Edward Silvera
41 - Boaz Asleep by Victor Hugo
42 - A Dream of Glory by Albery Allson Whitman
43 - I Rose From Dreamless Hours by James Elroy Flecker
44 - From Dewy Dreams, My Soul Arise by James Joyce
45 - Dream Variation by Langston Hughes
46 - Dreams by Robert Tannahill
47 - Dreams by Robert Herrick
48 - Dream Pediary by Thomas Lovell Beddoes
49 - Dreamland by Christina Rossetti
50 - A Nocturnal Reverie by Anne Kingsmill-Finch
51 - Dreams and Duty by Tom Kettle
52 - Last Night I Dreamed by Hafiz
53 - Musselman's Dream by Anne Kingsmill-Finch
54 - Th
