Words That Burn

Sleep’s Threshold, by Edgar Fawcett (1847-1904)

What footstep but has wandered free and far

Amid that Castle of Sleep whose walls were planned

By no terrestrial craft, no human hand,

With towers that point to no recorded star?

Here sorrows, memories, and remorses are,

Roaming the long, dim rooms or galleries grand;

Here the lost friends our spirits yet demand

Gleam through mysterious door-ways left ajar.

But of the uncounted throngs that ever win

The halls where Slumber’s dusky witcheries rule,

Who after wakening, may reveal aright

By what phantasmal means he entered in?–

What porch of cloud, what vapory vestibule,

What stairway quarried from the mines of night?