Daydream Drift Capsizing

Daydream Drift Capsizing

Daydream Drift Capsizing

The basis of the surreal is the exact antithesis of the persistent popular tradition that describes all experience in terms of distinct "objective" and "subjective" worlds. In the art of the Surrealist, the "objective" world refuses to remain a separate realm but actively unites with our imagination to break down the confining walls of this simple rational deceit, freeing the mind to invest the world of sense with its own complex meanings. In consequence, we look with fresh eyes upon the objects of space and with a new comprehension of the mysterious expanse of our minds. And in this new unity, there is peculiar satisfaction.

The Day-Dream is a poem written by Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson. Tennyson's earlier works discuss journeys through memory, including "Sense and Conscience", "The Merman", "The Mermaid", and "Recollections of the Arabian Nights". The Day-Dream discusses the nature of sleeping and of dreaming, especially in relation to individuals that would want to escape from reality. The poem furthermore compares the act of poetry with dreaming and asserts that the two are the same. Published in 1842.

A summer crisp with shining woods.
And I too dream'd, until at last
Across my fancy, brooding warm,
The reflex of a legend past,
And loosely settled into form.
The poem compares the act of poetry with dreaming and says that the two are the same. The dream is able to stimulate the memory of sleeping. The poem reverses time and declares that the living, contemporary artists are ancient while those who have died before are the young:
And all that else the years will show,
the Poet-forms of stronger hours,
The vast Republics that may grow,
The Federations and the Powers;
Titanic forces taking birth
In divers seasons, divers climes;
For we are Ancients of the earth
And in the morning of the times