Sometimes when I have dropped asleep, <br />Draped in soft luxurious gloom, <br />Across my drowsy mind will creep <br />The memory of another room, <br />Where resinous knots in roofboards made <br />A frescoing of light and shade, <br />And sighing poplars brushed their leaves <br />Against the humbly sloping eaves. <br /> <br />Again I fancy in my dreams <br />I'm lying in my trundle-bed. <br />I seem to see the bare old beams <br />And unhewn rafters overhead; <br />The hornet's shrill falsetto hum <br />I hear again, and see him come <br />Forth from his mud-walled hanging house, <br />Dressed in his black and yellow blouse. <br /> <br />There, summer dawns, in sleep I stirred, <br />And wove into my fair dream's woof <br />The chattering of a martin bird, <br />Or rain-drops pattering on the roof. <br />Or, half awake, and half in fear, <br />I saw the spider spinning near <br />His pretty castle, where the fly <br />Should come to ruin by and by. <br /> <br />And there I fashioned from my brain <br />Youth's shining structures in the air, <br />I did not wholly build in vain, <br />For some were lasting, firm and fair. <br />And I am one who lives to say <br />My life has held more good than gray, <br />And that the splendor of the real <br />Surpassed my early dream's ideal. <br /> <br />But still I love to wander back <br />To that old time and that old place; <br />To thread my way o'er Memory's track, <br />And catch the early morning's grace <br />In that quaint room beneath the rafter, <br />That echoed to my childish laughter; <br />To dream again the dreams that grew <br />More beautiful as they came true.<br /><br />Ella Wheeler Wilcox<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-room-beneath-the-rafters/
