Alice Meynell

In Sleep

Dream logic

The parenthetical insists this is a real dream, not a metaphor. Meynell is reporting something that actually happened in sleep—important because the ending depends on dream physics.

I dreamt (no "dream" awake—a dream indeed)
A wrathful man was talking in the Park:
"Where are the Higher Powers who know our need,
Yet leave us in the dark?
"There are no Higher Powers; there is no heart
In God, no love"—his oratory here,
Taking the paupers' and the cripples' part,

Victorian atheism

This is the standard Victorian doubt speech—social suffering as proof against God. But notice he's crying while he says it.

Was broken by a tear.

Who invented compassion

The logic trap: if there's no God, where did the atheist's compassion for the poor come from? Meynell's answer: God is the source of the very pity used to argue against Him.

And next it seemed that One who did invent
Compassion, who alone created pity,
Walked, as though called, and hastened as He went
Out from the muttering city;
Threaded the little crowd, trod the brown grass.
Bent o'er the speaker close, saw the tear rise.
And saw Himself, as one looks in a glass,

Mirror reversal

Christ sees Himself reflected in the atheist's compassionate tears. The man's pity for the poor is God's own pity looking back at Him.

In those impassioned eyes.
Alice Meynell
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Atheist's Tears

The poem's entire argument hangs on one detail: the atheist breaks down crying while denouncing God's absence. He's raging about divine indifference to suffering, but his own tears prove he cares. That emotional contradiction is the trap door.

Meynell was a Catholic convert writing in the 1890s, when social atheism—doubt based on observable suffering rather than philosophical materialism—was the fashionable position. The "paupers' and the cripples'" weren't abstractions; Victorian London had visible, massive poverty. The atheist's argument was everywhere: what kind of God permits this?

But Meynell reverses it. If the universe is meaningless, why does this man weep? Where does moral outrage come from in a godless world? The poem suggests that compassion itself is evidence—you can't use God's gift (pity) to prove God's absence. The atheist's tears are God's tears; he just doesn't know it yet.

Dream Physics

The parenthetical in line 1 matters: this is a real dream, not a waking vision or poetic device. Dreams have different rules. In dreams, Christ can walk out of the city because someone is crying. In dreams, you can see yourself in another person's eyes literally, "as one looks in a glass."

The final stanza only works as dream logic. Christ doesn't correct the atheist or speak at all. He just looks into the man's eyes and sees His own face. It's the recognition scene from a fairy tale: the lost prince sees himself in the mirror and remembers who he is. Except here, God is seeing Himself in human compassion, recognizing His own image in the atheist's tears.

Meynell uses the dream frame to dodge argument entirely. There's no debate, no theology, just the surreal image of God bending over a crying atheist and finding Himself there. It's visual proof instead of logical proof—the kind of evidence that only works in sleep.