Dream-Life

Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681)

From the Spanish by Edward Fitzgerald

From “Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made of”

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 of intensity

Hereafter so transcended, and awoke

To a perceptive subtlety so keen

As to confess themselves befooled 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 played at hazard with his fellows’ lives,

Who cheaply dreamed away their lives to him.

The sailor dreamed 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 fingered gold; the beggar of his rags:

And all this stage of earth on which we seem

Such busy actors, and the parts we played

Substantial as the shadow of a shade,

And Dreaming but a dream within a dream!