Lived on one's back,

In the long hours of repose

Life is a practical nightmare—

Hideous asleep or awake.

Shoulders and loins

Ache — — —!

Ache, and the mattress,

Run into boulders and hummocks,

Glows like a kiln, while the bedclothes—

Tumbling, importunate, daft—

Ramble and roll, and the gas,

Screwed to its lowermost,

An inevitable atom of light,

Haunts, and a stertorous sleeper

Snores me to hate and despair.

All the old time

Surges malignant before me;

Old voices, old kisses, old songs

Blossom derisive about me;

While the new days

Pass me in endless procession:

A pageant of shadows

Silently, leeringly wending

On . . . and still on . . . still on!

Far in the stillness a cat

Languishes loudly. A cinder

Falls, and the shadows

Lurch to the leap of the flame. The next man to me

Turns with a moan; and the snorer,

The drug like a rope at his throat,

Gasps, gurgles, snorts himself free, as the night-nurse,

Noiseless and strange,

Her bull's eye half-lanterned in apron,

(Wispering me, 'Are ye no sleepin' yet?')

Passes, list-slippered and peering,

Round . . . and is gone.

Sleep comes at last—

Sleep full of dreams and misgivings—

Broken with brutal and sordid

Voices and sounds that impose on me,

Ere I can wake to it,

The unnatural, intolerable day.

William Ernest Henley,

London Voluntaries, 1898.