Milton’s Mysterious Dream, William Blake, 1816 – 1820
A bibliography of future, further reading will be shared on the day but in the meantime each dreamer might like to become familiar with this poem, A Dream, by William Blake.
A Dream
Once a dream did weave a shade
O’er my angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.
Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangle spray,
All heart-broke, I heard her say:
‘Oh my children! do they cry,
Do they hear their father sigh?
Now they look abroad to see,
Now return and weep for me.’
Pitying, I dropped a tear:
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied, ‘What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?
‘I am set to light the ground,
While the beetle goes his round:
Follow now the beetle’s hum;
Little wanderer, hie thee home!’
Dream Compositions
Holly Pester
Tuesday 12 May 2020 (via Zoom)
6—8pm
Fully Booked
Rhubaba presents Dream Compositions, an online writing workshop with Holly Pester. In this workshop we will consider what strategies for composition and radical reflection come from our dream plots. We will also intuit the shared processes of dreaming and writing. We might find space to explore the particular imaginative shapes that occur to us during lockdown; what languages of invention and/or anxiety are being created by our dreams. To do so, each participant is required to bring a short paragraph synopsis of a dream, or a single, simple diagram. All the dreams will be compiled onto a shared page for us each to work from, devising story lines, poetic resources, textures of correspondence and experimental symbologies.
Free but booking essential. Email info@rhubaba.org with subject line ‘Dream Compositions’ by Wednesday 6 May to book.
Further Information
Holly Pester is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at University of Essex where she teaches a module on Dreaming and Writing. Her radio work, Poems for Idle Workers was commissioned for BBC Radio 4 in 2019 and the transcript is out with Distance is No Object as a poetry pamphlet, Eclogues for Idle Workers. Her poetry collection, Comic Timing is forthcoming in 2021 from Granta.