The (almost really) Complete Works of Lewis Carroll

Is All Our Life

Source: Sylvie and Bruno (dedication)

The dream-gleam-stream rhyme which reappears here again Carroll probably borrowed from a poem he read about 1850, see the published diaries for a letter from March 15, 1886 to Mr. Watson.

Is all our Life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time’s dark resistless stream?

Bowed to the earth with bitter woe,
Or laughing at some raree-show,
We flutter idly to and fro.

Man’s little Day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.