'Laugh at Gilded Butterflies'

Only once before had a fragment of poetry showed up while I was dreaming. Twenty years ago or more, I was swimming in a dream, treading water, no land in sight, a wooden raft nearby. No sense of panic. My dreaming mind dredged up a sliver from Allen Tate’s poem “The Swimmers,” which has little to do with swimming: “Kentucky water, clear springs.” This was followed by my dream-self trying to remember the German word for “swimming.” It’s a close cognate to the English, Schwimmen, but I couldn’t come up with it. That’s it. Puzzling, blandly entertaining, but ultimately ineffable, like most dreams, a random firing in the limbic brain.

 

It  happened again early Friday morning. The setting was a familiar one from thousands of previous dreams: a deserted factory. Bare concrete walls, indistinct machinery. I’m on an upper floor looking through a wide gap in the wall onto a paved courtyard. I became conscious of these lines: “[We’ll] take upon’s the mystery of things, / As if we were God’s spies.” That’s Lear speaking to Cordelia in Act V, Scene 3. Here’s the larger context:

 

“No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison:

We two alone will sing like birds I’ the cage:

When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,

And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,

Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;

And take upon’s the mystery of things,

As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,

In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,

That ebb and flow by the moon.”

 

The King and his daughter soon are dead. This is a passage and a play I know as well as any in all of literature. It is our species’ artistic summit, rivalled only by Dante. Why did that fragment of text show up in my dream? No answer available in the literal-minded now. Interpreting dreams with certainty is a mug’s game. I accept and sometimes enjoy them. Dr. Johnson writes:

      

“. . . I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.”