Canto XLII
If Sleep and Death be truly one,And every spirit’s folded bloomThro’ all its intervital gloomIn some long trance should slumber on;
Unconscious of the sliding hour,Bare of the body, might it last,And silent traces of the pastBe all the colour of the flower:
So then were nothing lost to man;But that still garden of the soulsIn many a figured leaf enrollsThe total world since life began:
And love would last as pure and wholeAs when he loved me here in Time,And at the spiritual primeRewaken with the dawning soul.