An Old Picture
John Boyle O'Reilly 1844 (Dowth) – 1890 (Boston)
THERE are times when a dream delicious
Steals into a musing hour,
Like a face with love capricious
That peeps from a woodland bower;
And one dear scene comes changeless;
A wooded hill and a river;
A deep, cool bend, where the lilies end,
And the elm-tree shadows quiver.
And I lie on the brink there, dreaming
That the life I live is a dream;
That the real is but the seeming,
And the true is the sun-flecked stream.
Beneath me, the perch and the bream sail past
In the dim cool depths of the river;
The struggling fly breaks the mirrored sky
And the elm-tree shadows quiver.
There are voices of children away on the hill;
There are bees thro' the flag-flowers humming;
The lighter-man calls to the lock, and the mill
On the farther side is drumming.
And I sink to sleep in my dream of a dream,
In the grass by the brink of a river,
Where the voices blend and the lilies end
And the elm-tree shadows quiver.
Like a gift from the past is the kindly dream,
For the sorrow and passion and pain
Are adrift like the leaves on the breast of the stream,
And the child-life comes again.
O, the sweet sweet pain of a joy that died—
Of a pain that is joy forever!
O, the life that died in the stormy tide
That was once my sun-flecked river.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:11 min read
- 128 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | abababcB dedexbxB fdfdebcB exexgbgb |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,233 |
Words | 239 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8, 8 |
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"An Old Picture" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 10 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/21983/an-old-picture>.
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