My day day dreaming

I seem to have spent most of today reflecting. No – not as a mirror reflects but rather thinking back over things that have stuck in my brain for one reason or another that I am unable to determine. It started off this morning when, for no reason, this snippet of William Blake popped into my head.
A robin red breast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
I used to tie it in with Keats and his Belle Dame
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Then there was the old music hall song (and soldiers’ dirty ditty)
Her beauty was sold for an old man's gold,
She's a bird in a gilded cage.
I always used to wonder at this theme of captivity and the conduct of birds. If a robin red breast in a cage were so terrible, why are there song birds who spend their lives in cages. In my youth, Chinese men would have competitions as to whose caged bird could sing the sweetest note. Surely they would not sing if the caging were so dreadful. Why would a woman sell herself for old mans gold if the down-side was captivity – albeit in a gilded cage?.
My day dream continued. The radio reports of voting in Iraq sent me down this track.
And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like Arabs,
And silently steal away.
What was this about referring to Arabs packing their tents and silently stealing away? Anyone who has watched TV over the last few years can have no concept of Arabs doing a lot of silently doing anything. I can understand that a night with music will deal with cares – I have experienced it often when the horrors and hate of the external world are lost in the musical entertainment of a good sergeants’ mess.
This seemed to drag me into another fragment of a semi-learned past –
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends -
it gives a lovely light.
Together with -
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
No great soul-searching question about either of these. They are sentiments and suggestions I happily accept and, in the past, have adopted as maxims for the way I chose to live my life. There were times when my candle was also lit in the middle. This because I also remember this from that same period -
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.
In my time I had been a mover and shaker. Insignificant in a worldly scope, even in a national relativity but in my own small world – certainly.
Just as I sat down to put this gibberish into the wibbly wobbly world, I had two other themes swimming around in that stuff that works as a shock-absorber for the brain. I shall let these soak and see what answers come to the surface. This is almost as good as meditation………….
Is it better to have dreams that will never come to pass, or to have no dreams at all?
and
If you could only have sex once more in your life, when would you do it, with whom, and where?
This is more than just a hypothesis folks.