C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
The Pains of Sleep
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
E
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble Trust mine eyelids close,
With reverential resignation;
No wish conceived, no thought expressed!
Only a sense of supplication,
A sense o’er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest;
Since in me, round me, everywhere,
Eternal Strength and Wisdom are.
In anguish and in agony,
Upstarting from the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning still!
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
And shame and terror over all!
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,
Which, all confused, I could not know
Whether I suffered, or I did:
For all seemed guilt, remorse, or woe,—
My own or others’, still the same
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.
Saddened and stunned the coming day.
Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me
Distemper’s worst calamity.
The third night, when my own loud scream
Had waked me from the fiendish dream,
O’ercome with sufferings strange and wild,
I wept as I had been a child;
And having thus by tears subdued
My anguish to a milder mood,
Such punishments, I said, were due
To natures deepliest stained with sin;
For aye entempesting anew
The unfathomable hell within,
The horror of their deeds to view,
To know and loathe, yet wish to do!
But wherefore, wherefore fall on me?
To be beloved is all I need,
And whom I love, I love indeed.