A Dream in November / Edmund Gosse

A Dream in November

Far, far away, I know not where, I know not how,
     The skies are grey, the boughs are bare, bare boughs in flower:
Long lilac silk is softly drawn from bough to bough,
     With flowers of milk and buds of fawn, a 'broidered shower.

Beneath that tent an Empress sits, with slanted eyes,
     And wafts of scent from censers flit, a lilac flood;
Around her throne bloom peach and plum in lacquered dyes,
     And many a blown chrysanthemum, and many a bud.

She sits and dreams, while bonzes twain strike some rich bell,
     Whose music seems a metal rain of radiant dye;
In this strange birth of various blooms, I cannot tell
     Which spring from earth, which slipped from looms, which sank from sky;

Beneath her wings of lilac dim, in robes of blue,
     The Empress sings a wordless hymn that thrills her bower;
My trance unweaves, and winds, and shreds, and forms anew
     Dark bronze, bright leaves, pure silken threads, in triple flower.

~~

Edmund Gosse (1849-1928)

from The Yellow Book, April 1894

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

Edmund Gosse biography