So tomorrow is meant to be the longest day of the year so I have chosen something suitable and also something close to my heart as I studied the play for my Drama A Level.

I’m not entirely sure whether this counts as a poem but I am going for it.

This chosen piece is from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare and is the meditation that Duke Theseus delivers on what it means to dream.

More strange than true! I never may believe

These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:

That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination,

That if it would but apprehend some joy,

It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

Or in the night, imagining some fear,

How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!

William Shakespeare