The Poet's Dream
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1820
Public domain
From The Golden Treasury, selected by Francis Turner Palgrave. Percy Bysshe Shelley. The text is free of copyright in the United States. This copy is the poem, without the Project Gutenberg header.
On a Poet's lips I slept
Dreaming like a love-adept
In the sound his breathing kept;
Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,
But feeds on the aerial kisses
Of shapes that haunt Thought's wildernesses.
He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,
Nor heed nor see, what things they be--
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living Man,
Nurslings of immortality!