--| the dream of the island |-----


Then came the sound of a musical instrument,
from behind it seemed,
very sweet and very short,
as if it were one plucking of a string
or one note of a bell,
and after it a full, clear voice -
and it sounded so high and strange
that he thought it was very far away,
further than a star.

The voice said, Come.
Then John saw that there was a stone wall
beside the road in that part:
but it had (what he had never seen
in a garden wall before) a window.
There was not glass in the window and no bars;
it was just a square hole in the wall.
Through it he saw a green wood full of primroses:
and he remembered suddenly how he had gone into another wood
to pull primroses, as a child, very long ago -
so long that even in the moment of remembering
the memory seemed still out of reach.

While he strained to grasp it,
there came to him from beyond the wood a sweetness
and pang so piercing that instantly he forgot
his father's house,
and his mother,
and the fear of the Landlord,
and the burden of the rules.
All the furniture of his mind was taken away.
A moment later he found that he was sobbing,
and the sun had gone in:

and what it was that had happened to him
he could not quite remember,
nor whether it had happened in this wood,
or in the other wood when he was a child.
It seemed to him that a mist
which hung at the far end of the wood
had parted for a moment,
and through the rift he had seen a calm sea,
and in the sea an island,
where the smooth turf
sloped down unbroken to the bays,
and out of the thickets peeped the pale,
small-breasted Oreads,
wise like gods,
unconscious of themselves like beasts,
and tall enchanters, bearded to their feet,
sat in green chairs among the forests.

But even while he pictured these things he knew,
with one part of his mind,
that they were not like the things he had seen -
nay, that what had befallen him was not seeing at all.
But he was too young to heed the distinction:
and too empty, now that the unbounded sweetness passed away,
not to seize greedily whatever it had left behind.
He had no inclination yet to go into the wood:
and presently he went home,
with a sad excitement upon him,
repeating to himself a thousand times,
"I know now what I want."

The first time that he said it,
he was aware that it was not entirely true:
but before he went to bed he was believing it.

(C.S. Lewis, "The Dream of the Island", from "The Pilgrim's Regress")

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this page last updated: december 9, 1999