 21 Feb 2004 @ 23:53, by Tom Bombadil
From The Dream (Lord Byron):
...Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past—they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power—
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not—what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanished shadows—Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow?—What are they?
Creations of the mind?—The mind can make
Substances, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh
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The picture at the top of the page is a photograph of Constantin Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse (one of many.) The title conjures the limitless realm of dreams and inspiration, while the white ovoid shape (left) also evokes the image of an egg—a symbol for the potential of life and growth. In subsequent versions, particularly two stone heads from 1917-18, Brancusi emphasized that analogy by further minimizing the descriptive details, a trend that culminated in the purely abstract ovoid "Beginning of the World," 1920.
—Text adapted from "Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: 150 Works of Art" (1996)
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