Owen Suffolk - The Real And The Ideal

I feel I have - and who has not? <br />An inner and outer life: <br />The one may be a dreary lot, <br />With sorrow and with suff'ring rife; <br />While in the other may be found <br />A magic world of fancies fair, <br />Where brightest dreams of joy abound, <br />And never enters dark despair. <br /> <br />The life I live may seem to those <br />Who gaze upon it outwardly <br />A drear existence, full of woes <br />And never-ceasing misery; <br />But in the mystic life of mind, <br />Abstracted from earth's things of sense, <br />Oblivious to my grief, I find <br />A joy exalted and intense. <br /> <br />My outward life is prison-gloomed, <br />My life of dreams is fancy free; <br />The one is ever care-consumed, <br />The other tranquil as can be. <br />Existence that is sternly real <br />As mine would crush the heart with grief, <br />Were it not that the bright ideal <br />With visioned joy imparts relief. <br /> <br />There's not a joy the world can give, <br />There's not a bliss the heart has known, <br />But in the spirit life I live <br />I have the power to make my own. <br />I care not what my actual lot <br />While thus sustained my soul can be; <br />My sorrows shall be all forgot <br />In fairest dreams of poesy.<br /><br />Owen Suffolk<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem..../the-real-and-the-id