Escape and fantasy: Poems

Escape and fantasy by G. Rostrevor Hamilton is a collection of lyric poems written in the early 20th century. The book turns from everyday routine toward imagination, nature, myth, music, and inward faith, sketching how the mind seeks release from the ordinary into vision and rapture.

Across the collection, the speaker oscillates between workaday constraint and twilight freedom, as in the opening portrait of a clerk who transforms at dusk. Myth enters through Orpheus’ world-stilling lullaby and a visionary hymn to a universal ruler, while the long central ecstasy charts ascent into cosmic song and the sobering return to the body. Nature pieces dwell on rivers, spring rain, birds, and fields, from the still attentiveness of lotus-eating ease to the grey migrant that finds its full song in England. Other poems weigh time and eternity, or stage fables like the sea-maid who envies mortal change. Devotional notes sound in the wish for an inner cell of quiet and a defiant rhyme of faith; the hills’ austere fellowship and a pond’s mirrored calm show how perception becomes prayer. The closing haunted street casts the moonlit city as a realm of paralysis and surging, half-remembered passions, drawing the book’s threads—escape, vision, music, and the peril and sweetness of reverie—into a single, haunting vigil.