The Fleeting Echoes of Hollow Dreams: A Reflection on Mythic Nonsense Poetry

The Fleeting Echoes of Hollow Dreams: A Reflection on Mythic Nonsense Poetry

Mervyn Peake once wrote that life is an effort to grip the startling, ghastly, or exquisitely blinding fish of the imagination before they slip away into oblivion. This sentiment—of fleeting visions, of grasping at meaning before it dissolves—feels particularly apt when engaging with nonsense poetry infused with mythic resonance.

The poems The Fisher of Hollow Dreams and The Ballad of Lornley Grieves offer rich explorations of solitude, memory, and the strange spaces between sense and nonsense. At first glance, they might seem like playful grotesqueries, teetering on the absurd. But beneath their cobwebbed surfaces, they shimmer with a quiet melancholy, evoking the interplay of imagination, loss, and inner life.

---

The Fisher of Hollow Dreams

In the twilight hush of the tumbled shore,

Where the ripples unthread the moon’s old seams,

A man in a coat that the gulls once wore

Is fishing for hollow dreams.

He dangles a line through the whispering tide,

And hums in a tongue that the water knows,

With a hook spun fine from the threads of pride

And a reel that unwinds with woes.

But the dreams that he casts for are light as air,

They slip through his fingers like silver mist,

Yet still he lingers, still he stares,

In hope of the dream he missed.

Reflection

Is the Fisher a tragic figure, forever seeking something unattainable? Or is he content in his patient ritual, existing within a world of his own making? There is a profound solitude in his actions, but not necessarily despair. Like an artist, a dreamer, or even a mythic figure such as Tithonus—gifted eternal life but denied eternal youth—he persists in his task, even as his dreams dissolve upon contact.

Perhaps this is an old soul’s pursuit, a grappling with time and memory, where longing is itself a form of purpose.

---

The Ballad of Lornley Grieves

Lornley Grieves was a withering man,

With cobweb hands and a hollowed span,

He measured the hours by the sound of trees,

And the weight of the wind on his buckling knees.

By dusk he unspooled the dreams in his head,

And stitched them to whispers the night-time bred,

As he counted his sighs in the rustling leaves,

For none ever knew the sorrow of Grieves.

Reflection

There is something haunting about Lornley Grieves, a man who moves through time like a shadow, measuring existence in whispers and weight. Is his solitude chosen, or has it been imposed upon him by the slow erosion of years? Unlike the Fisher, who still strives to catch his dreams, Lornley seems to have resigned himself to their unravelling. His dreams do not slip away—he unspools them himself, knowingly releasing them into the night.

Yet, there is no overt tragedy in his tale. Instead, there is an almost ritualistic beauty, a quiet acceptance of the ephemeral. His is not a life of dramatic loss but of subtle relinquishment, of fading gently into the fabric of the world.

---

Nonsense, Myth, and the Reader’s Role

At their heart, both poems function as mirrors. They evoke the grand themes of myth—longing, solitude, the search for meaning in a shifting world—but they do so in ways that refuse to be pinned down. Much like the best nonsense poetry, they invite us to read our own lives into them.

For some, the Fisher might be a cautionary figure, warning against an endless chase for that which cannot be grasped. For others, he might be an artist, a philosopher, a poet—someone who finds meaning not in catching, but in casting. Likewise, Lornley Grieves might be a figure of sorrow, or a man who has simply learned to let go.

In the end, mythic nonsense poetry thrives on its ability to create resonances that shift with each reader. It is in the echoes left behind—like ripples on the tide, or leaves rustling in the wind—that meaning finds its home.

---

What do you see in these poems? And what dreams have slipped through your fingers, only to linger in the mind like whispers on the shore?