Lesya Ukrainka

We start the morning off with a quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest:

‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.’ [Prospero]

And we continue with this poem by Lesya Ukrainka (February 25, 1871 – August 1, 1913) one of Ukrainian literature's foremost writers, best known for her poems and plays. She was also an active political, civil, and feminist activist.

A Summer Night’s Dream

One summer night I dreamed a blissful dream:
Short as the summer night it swiftly sped
My dream, brief as the dark, soon melted, disappeared,
Ere in the east the morning sky was red.

A marvelous dream it was, ineffable and bright,
Absorbing all my being as I slept.
I dreamed about a future of pure happiness,
I dreamed that unknown raptures o’er me swept.

I felt that I was blest, immeasurably blest.
I dreamed that I …. but written words are vain!
Where is in all the world a language so divine
Whose words could give that sense of bliss again?

The dream was brief, so brief! So swiftly did it pass,
It died, ‘twas gone almost as soon as born;
It took its flight to where the golden-crimson haze
Gave token of the fast-approaching morn.

I looked and lo, the summer night already gone!...
My soul felt burdened with a weight of grief,
And whispering in sadness to my self I said;
“A summer night, a dream, alas, how brief!”

No happiness like that shall ever be my lot,
For other dreams are in my heart always.
Though I at times for such a dream may grieve, yet I
For such a blessedness will never pray.

Let others seek in dreams for future happiness;
I do not wish to sleep, but live and burn
Let those who wake from sleep their blissful dreams forget,
For to such ecstasies there is no return.

--Lesya Ukrainka

[translated by Percival Cundy]