Formal Analysis: “Reveries and Ambitions”
Poem: “Reveries and Ambitions”
Poet: Dr. Alireza Bemanian
Date of Composition: April 12, 2026
Copyright: ©www.bemanian.com
Chapter: V — Reveries and Ambitions
I. Introduction
“Reveries and Ambitions” confronts the foundational paradox of the inner life: that dreams solidify — that what begins in reverie crystallizes into what claims the world. The poem’s opening triadic verb sequence — “solidify, grant, and defy” — refuses from its first line the conventional treatment of dreams as ephemeral, as the passive antithesis of the active and real. Reveries here are agents: they consolidate into substance, they bestow upon what they touch, and they resist what presses against them. This triple assertion — made before the poem has named a single image — establishes the claim that the next ten stanzas will sustain, test, and ultimately confirm.
The poem moves through three distinct movements. In the first movement (Stanzas 1–4), the reverie is established as active force and architectural principle: a “salutary, secretive perpetuator” whose harmonics are simultaneously solo and ensemble, whose “ambits and purviews ponderously disseminate and preserve.” The pendulum marks temporal continuity, and the red rose enters the parade — beauty adorned and armored simultaneously, its redness a gaudy gaze that entails synesthesia: “seeing vivid sounds.” In the second movement (Stanzas 5–8), the epistemological challenge arrives with full force: are these reveries real, or are they “mirages, phantasms and figments”? The triple em-dash suspends the question open, and the response is not resolution but pursuit — jiffies to tail and hunt, willing selves to delve. The journey through self-submitted tales, chimney smoke and turbulence, hurdles and abandonments, sorrows surging against the while-hinge of blooming — all test whether the reverie holds against the pressure of the actual. In the third movement (Stanzas 9–10), the epicenter is named: dedications and fervors, fate and fortune, timepieces and water clocks and grain mills measuring the thrust that zooms the skies. And the poem closes in direct address — “it is you to surf, it is you to seek” — naming the self as the adoring entity whose wholeness and entireness sways the pulse.
The poem’s grammatical signature is the list interrupted by imperative and question. The opening stanza moves through nouns and verbs — “dreams, reveries, ambitions and desires, solidify, grant, and defy” — before settling into atmospheric description. The epistemological stanza pivots to direct question: “Are they mirages, phantasms and figments, or, the existence, presence, attendances—” The closing stanza turns to command: “do not tilt and tip, tend and incline.” This movement from assertion through question to imperative enacts the poem’s philosophical arc: confidence, epistemological challenge, resolution through action. The deepest question the poem poses: can reveries — those interior weathers that are secretive, salutary, and potentially seditious — achieve the force of ambition? Can the dream solidify into what the world must reckon with?
II. Stanza-by-Stanza Analysis
Stanza One — The Reverie as Agent
“Dreams, reveries, ambitions and desires, solidify, grant, and defy.
salutary, secretive perpetuators and entities, the dance of skies, surrounding thoughts,
reverberate, resound murmuring solos and echoing soli harmonies,
the ambits and purviews, ponderously disseminate and preserve.”
The opening stanza refuses to treat dreams as passive states. The triadic verb sequence — “solidify, grant, and defy” — is the poem’s first and most consequential claim: reverie is not floating but crystallizing, not merely receiving but bestowing, not yielding but resisting. These three verbs encompass the full range of active agency: material consolidation, generous production, and defiant resistance. Together they dismantle the standard opposition between dreaming (passive, interior) and acting (active, exterior).
“Salutary, secretive perpetuators and entities” — health-giving, hidden, and continuous. The perpetuators are entities: they have being, they persist across time, they are not momentary states but ongoing presences with their own ontological weight. And they dance — not on the ground but in the “dance of skies,” movement at celestial scale, the turning of spheres far above the merely personal and contingent.
“Soli harmonies” is among the stanza’s most precise achievements. In orchestral writing, soli marks a passage where all players in a given section perform together — distinct from the single soloist (solo) and from the full orchestra (tutti). The soli passage is the middle term: ensemble without absorption, distinctness without isolation. Each voice maintains its individual character while contributing to the combined sound. Dr. Bemanian applies this exact musical category to the harmonics of reverie: the “murmuring solos” do not dissolve into choral blur but achieve “soli harmonies” — ensemble that preserves distinctness. This is the constellation logic rendered acoustic: each voice its own, all voices together, the combination not reducing either.
“Ambits and purviews” — both terms for scope, jurisdiction, the range of what falls within a given domain — ponderously disseminate and preserve. The heaviness of “ponderously” is crucial: this is not light, airy dreaming but weighty, deliberate spread. What the reverie disseminates it also preserves — spread and kept simultaneously, the dual action of a force that does not exhaust itself in extension.
Stanza Two — From Tumult to Ocean’s Calm
“Inquiries and reviews, endurances, fortitudes, and endowments,
sustain and persist, regard and believe, the humming of the wings, splashes to congeal,
tumults, clamor, mayhem and chaos, the waves on the surface,
the surge and spill, foretell and perceive,
oceans’ calming rings, smooth lurid curves, smash hurried waves.”
The second stanza moves from intellectual and moral capacities — “inquiries and reviews, endurances, fortitudes, and endowments” — through the chaos of the surface to the ocean’s deeper ordering. The capacities sustain and persist; they regard and believe. This is not passive reception but active epistemic and moral practice: endurance is not merely suffering but the maintained exercise of fortitude. Endowment is not merely gift received but capacity held and deployed.
“The humming of the wings, splashes to congeal” — flight made audible, water made solid. The hum is both insect and angelic; the congeal is precise: to congeal is to undergo a phase transition, to transform from fluid into solid. The chaotic splashes of experience are not escaped or evaded but transmuted — the very disorder is the raw material that reverie categorizes and crystallizes into structure. These companion images — the small wingbeat, the crystallizing splash — prepare for the tumult that follows by establishing the poem’s governing principle: the elemental and the miniature are not opposed to the pattern but are its ingredients.
Tumults arrive in full accumulation: “clamor, mayhem and chaos, the waves on the surface.” The surface is where chaos is visible; below, ordering continues. “The surge and spill, foretell and perceive” — the oceanic motion has prophetic capacity. It is not merely disruptive but prescient; the surge that spills also sees forward.
“Oceans’ calming rings, smooth lurid curves, smash hurried waves” — the resolution is both gentle and violent. The calming rings of ocean are concentric, spreading from center outward: the structural opposite of the hurried wave, which breaks toward and is spent at the shore. “Smooth lurid curves” — lurid preserves its original Latin sense (luridus: pale, ghastly brightness) rather than merely its modern sensational meaning. The smooth pale curves of wave-form meet and smash the hurried. Depth defeats haste. The calming rings expand with geometric patience — each concentric circle the mind’s organized response to surface chaos, moving through and past the hurried wave not by force of opposition but by the sheer authority of its own deeper rhythm.
Stanza Three — Zeal Against Thin Air
“Counter the thin air, assign, impute and ascribe,
the winds to hollow, the gales swallow, and squalls to swill,
though the sun to follow, the warmth, tenderness and kindliness to stand,
while, the zeal and fervor, vitality, vibe, vivacity and verve,
deeply, profoundly and penetratingly, spread, span and traverse.”
The third stanza presses reverie against emptiness itself. “Counter the thin air” — not counter the opposition, not counter the adversary, but counter the very thinness of the atmosphere, the near-nothingness that offers no purchase, no resistance to push against. To counter thin air requires a force that does not need opposing pressure to define itself: the reverie that solidifies, grants, and defies does not require an enemy to constitute its strength.
The winds triple and alliterate with consummate precision: “to hollow, the gales swallow, and squalls to swill.” Each wind-form carries its own mode of consumption — three verbs of the wind’s carnivorous appetite. To hollow is to consume from within, leaving the shell intact but emptied; to swallow is to consume entire, the complete ingestion of what was present; to swill is to consume greedily and without precision. These are the three modes of the void’s appetite, escalating in their totality of destruction. Yet “though the sun to follow”: the solar is adversative. Though the winds consume, the sun follows — and with it the warmth, tenderness, and kindliness that “stand.” Standing is the key word: not merely accompany but hold position, maintain vertical presence, withstand.
“Zeal and fervor, vitality, vibe, vivacity and verve” — five terms in escalating alliterative intensity, all sharing the “v” sound and all naming the same animating force. This is Dr. Bemanian’s semantic architecture at its most elaborate: the accumulation does not present five different qualities but five facets of one vital principle, each facet adding resonance without contradiction. Crucially, the alliterative acceleration mimics the kinetic energy it names: each successive “v” adds velocity to the utterance, the sonic architecture enacting the physical force required to traverse thin air. The alliteration is not ornamental but thermodynamic — the line accelerates as the energy it describes accelerates. And this force — accumulated, resonant, kinetic — “deeply, profoundly and penetratingly, spread, span and traverse.” Three adverbs, three verbs: the force goes down before it goes across, depth preceding extension.
Stanza Four — The Rose Parade
“Pendulums yield, perpetuations adhere and abide,
and, the red roses participate in the parade,
the redness astounds, adorned by thorns, quills and spines,
it is gaudy gaze, the purling entails, seeing vivid sounds.”
The fourth stanza pivots between striving and spectacle. The pendulum — the mechanical timekeeper, the embodiment of regularity within oscillation — yields: it gives way, it concedes, it produces. What it yields is perpetuation: the abiding, adhering continuation of what has been set in motion. Time’s regular swing produces the ongoing.
“The red roses participate in the parade” — not stand by, not merely bloom, but participate, with the full weight of civic and social engagement that the word carries. The red rose enters the public procession, takes its deliberate place in the ordered march. Its redness — the deepest chromatic declaration, the color of blood, of passion, of announcement — astounds. Not merely pleases or decorates: stops, arrests, astonishes.
“Adorned by thorns, quills and spines” — the rose’s armature is here reframed as adornment rather than armament. The thorns do not mar beauty; they complete it. “Quills and spines” extend the sharp-pointed defensive structure: quill carries both the writing instrument and the porcupine’s defense; spine carries both vertebral column and botanical thorn. In Dr. Bemanian’s parade, beauty must be structurally fortified to endure the friction of reality — what is armored can sustain the procession, while what is merely delicate cannot. The thorns, quills, and spines are not impediments to the rose’s participation but the fundamental armor required to march. The rose enters the parade not despite its armature but because of it. The distinction between protection and ornament is dissolved: the armature is the adornment, and the adornment is what makes public existence in the procession possible.
“It is gaudy gaze, the purling entails, seeing vivid sounds.” “Gaudy” preserves both its modern sense (excessively bright, ostentatious) and its etymological origin in Old French gaudir — to rejoice. The gaze that takes in the rose is simultaneously excessive and rejoicing. “Purling” — the murmur of a brook, or the inward spiral of a knitting stitch — entails synesthesia: “seeing vivid sounds.” The senses cross. The integration of perception at the peak of beauty is the stanza’s closing claim: the rose does not merely appear but sounds; the sound is not merely heard but seen; vivid is both chromatic and acoustic.
Stanza Five — The Epistemological Question
“Puzzles, speculations, postulations and hypotheses;
Are they mirages, phantasms and figments, or, the existence, presence, attendances—
moments to pursue, jiffies to tail and hunt; it is willing selves to delve, to reply,
to urge and spur, inflame and goad, shaken itches to incline, horizons need to unveil.”
The fifth stanza poses the poem’s central epistemological challenge directly. After four stanzas of confident assertion — reveries that solidify, zeal that traverses, roses that astonish — the poem pauses and asks: are these real? The triad “puzzles, speculations, postulations and hypotheses” frames the reverie as inquiry rather than certainty, as the object of investigation rather than the ground of confidence.
“Are they mirages, phantasms and figments, or, the existence, presence, attendances—” The triple em-dash does not answer; it suspends. The question holds open between the illusory (mirages, phantasms, figments — three traditions of naming the unreal) and the real (existence, presence, attendances). “Attendances” is a precise and unusual choice: not merely presence as a state, but the act of attending — the sustained turning of attention, the presence that shows up and maintains itself through time. The real, in this poem, attends.
The answer arrives not as resolution of the question but as practice: “moments to pursue, jiffies to tail and hunt.” The jiffie — the informal term for the briefest measurable interval — is here elevated to quarry. Time’s smallest units are hunted: the reverie pursues the vanishingly small. “It is willing selves to delve” — not the willing self (singular) but willing selves (plural): the one who pursues reverie is internally multiple, comprised of aspects that are each willing in their own right. The self that chases the reverie is not unified but composite and consenting.
“Shaken itches to incline, horizons need to unveil” — the physical and the spatial frame the desire. The itch shaken into inclination is bodily desire made directional; the horizon that requires unveiling is the external limit that waits for the self to approach it. Reverie and ambition meet in this double movement: the shaken inner longing inclines toward the horizon that, in turn, needs the approaching self to reveal it.
Stanza Six — The Journey Through Self-Submitted Tales
“it is the smoke chimneys, the surrounding sounds, and the turbulence dance,
the journey, lingering omens, curtailing signs, which, twist and twirl
the whirl and circle, traces and tracks, ponderously infer,
and, the merging, fusing, infringements of the self submitted tales,
stir the scenes, fold and swirl; twigs and trickles, ensue ebbing webs,
illusions to set sand, would seldom to stand.”
The sixth stanza — the poem’s longest and most labyrinthine — traces the journey through the landscape of accumulated self-narrative. The smoke chimneys do not merely smoke: they surround with sound, they dance in turbulence. The industrial image is immediately animated, given acoustic and kinetic dimensions. The journey through this landscape carries “lingering omens” and “curtailing signs” — signals that both persist beyond their moment (linger) and abbreviate what follows them (curtail), that stay and simultaneously cut short.
“The merging, fusing, infringements of the self submitted tales” names a precise psychological phenomenon. The stories the self constructs about itself — submitted, offered, claimed as one’s own narrative property — infringe upon ongoing experience. They cross jurisdictional boundaries. The tales are submitted (handed in, claimed, presented as one’s own) and then they infringe (they exceed their granted territory, they trespass). This is more exact than the standard psychological account of narrative self-construction: the self-tale is named as a potential trespasser within its own domain, claiming more present territory than its past warrant allows.
“Stir the scenes, fold and swirl” — the tales set the scenes in motion, then compress and send them swirling. “Twigs and trickles, ensue ebbing webs” — the diminutive natural forms that succeed the swirling: the smallest scales, the miniature, following from the turbulent. And the webs are ebbing — receding, losing their hold — which means the labyrinth of self-narrative is not permanent.
“Illusions to set sand, would seldom to stand” — to set sand is to fix, to embed, to attempt to establish in sand. Illusions that anchor themselves in the unstable seldom hold standing. The near-rhyme of “sand” and “stand” closes the stanza with compressed judgment: the foundation that cannot hold is named and the result stated without elaboration.
Stanza Seven — The Compact Catalog of Obstruction
“Hurdles, obstruct and hinder, notions, beliefs; interrupt and surprise,
abandonments, rejections, and neglects, unwished gesticulations, disasters and disdains,
contempt and despite, facing merging heights, sinking shallow minds.”
The seventh stanza is the poem’s most concentrated — three lines that catalog the full range of external and relational obstruction without analysis or elaboration. The compression is itself a formal statement: these forces are named without being dignified with interpretation. They are hurdles, obstructions, hindrances, interruptions, surprises, abandonments, rejections, neglects, unwished gesticulations, disasters, disdains, contempt, and despite.
“Unwished gesticulations” — undesired expressions, bodily or social, forced upon the self by others or by circumstance. The word “unwished” carries precise weight: not unwanted in the general sense but not wished for — the negation of wishing, the absence of desire for what nevertheless arrives.
“Facing merging heights, sinking shallow minds” — two simultaneous realities in opposition. The heights merge — they approach, they converge, they increase as the self faces them. The minds sink — they descend into shallowness, downward motion that is also motion toward diminishment. What rises and what descends exist in the same field of experience, simultaneously. The facing self confronts heights while the shallow sink around it.
Stanza Eight — The While Hinge and the Setting Seals
“Neglectful, heedless, and oblivious realms and ranges,
the sorrows, laments and mourns do surge and dismay,
while, blossoms form to bud, blooms joy to thrive,
twisting, claiming and insisting fuss, the hassles and concerns,
void to persist, would fade to invoke; the entwined deeds, sail their setting seals.”
The eighth stanza employs the collection’s characteristic “while” hinge — the adversative pivot that refuses to allow two simultaneous realities to resolve into one another or to cancel each other out. The neglectful, heedless, oblivious realms — ranges of inattention and ignorance — produce sorrows that surge and dismay. While: blossoms form to bud, blooms to thrive. The “while” does not negate the sorrows; it holds them in simultaneous existence with the blooming. Both are true. Neither cancels the other.
“Void to persist, would fade to invoke” — the void’s persistence eventually exhausts itself into invocation. What holds out in emptiness, maintaining its persistence without content, finally fades into the act of summoning what can fill it. The void, in its very persistence, calls forth what was waited for: the fade is productive, the end of holding out becomes the beginning of invocation.
“The entwined deeds, sail their setting seals” — deeds that are entwined — bound to one another, inseparable in their mutual implication — sail: they move, they navigate, they bear forward. And they sail their “setting seals”: the authenticating marks being formally affixed as the movement proceeds. The entwined deeds are their own authorization; they carry and affix their credentials as they go, the act of sailing simultaneously the act of sealing.
Stanza Nine — The Epicenters of Dedication
“And, at core, center, crux and hub,
the erected epicenters of dedications and fervors, fate, fatality and fortune,
or, the hallmarks, pledges, the vows and promises, susurrate, sustain and surmise,
timepieces, water clocks, the grain mills, tick, flow and turn,
the thrust, restlessly and twitchily, zoom the skies, whizz the symphony of stars.”
The ninth stanza arrives at the poem’s structural center — and names it fourfold: “core, center, crux and hub.” The four terms each approach the same location from a different angle: core is material and organic (the innermost substance), center is geometric (the equidistant point), crux is logical and evaluative (the decisive element), hub is mechanical and relational (the point from which spokes radiate). Together they locate the place where all forces converge with precision from four different vocabularies.
What stands at this center are not abstract ideals but “erected epicenters” — built, raised, deliberately constructed. The epicenter is itself a point of maximal force; an epicenter of dedications is a concentrated field of commitment raised to its highest intensity. And around it: “fate, fatality and fortune” — the trilogy that ranges from what is decreed through what finally arrives to what fortune brings. All three temporal registers of the fated.
“Hallmarks, pledges, the vows and promises, susurrate, sustain and surmise” — the vocabulary of authentication and commitment speaks in whisper: susurrate is the poem’s chosen verb for all these formal acts. Hallmarks and pledges and vows and promises, all murmuring, all sustaining, all surmising. The surmise — the conjecture held with incomplete evidence — appears alongside the formal vow: certainty and conjecture coexist at the center without contradiction.
“Timepieces, water clocks, the grain mills, tick, flow and turn” — three instruments of temporal measurement from three ages of human civilization, each with its own medium and signature: the mechanical timepiece (oscillation, the tick), the clepsydra or water clock (fluid dynamics, the flow, used from ancient Egypt through medieval Islamic civilization), the grain mill (gravitational and seasonal rhythm, the turn of stone, the oldest measure tied to agricultural time). Time is measured differently in each epoch, but always measured. The reverie inhabits all three temporal frameworks simultaneously.
“The thrust, restlessly and twitchily, zoom the skies, whizz the symphony of stars” — the accumulated energy of the epicenter releases as propulsive force. “Thrust” is the term of rocketry and jet mechanics: not push but the specific force generated by mass expelled in one direction propelling movement in the other. And the adverbs — “restlessly and twitchily” — name involuntary, compelled motion: the thrust does not choose to be restless but cannot be otherwise. The symphony of stars — the entire stellar ensemble, not a single star — is what this thrust navigates through, whizzing through cosmic music.
Stanza Ten — The Direct Address and the Adoring Entity
“Being, the verve, the vim and surge, pinch and smidgen, shall entrust the sum,
prodding and nudging, lucidity, rationality and soundness,
do not tilt and tip, tend and incline, to tumbling idleness, or, lurching apathy,
it is your counts; it is you to surf, it is you to seek;
the adoring entity, the wholeness and entireness, whom sway the pulse.”
The tenth and final stanza turns directly to address the self — the second-person imperative that closes the poem’s philosophical arc. The being that has passed through reverie, tumult, epistemological questioning, self-narrative trespass, obstruction, and dedication arrives at its own direct address.
“Being, the verve, the vim and surge, pinch and smidgen, shall entrust the sum” — even the smallest quantities (pinch and smidgen: the most diminutive measures of amount, the culinary and informal terms for what is barely quantifiable) shall entrust the totality. The whole sum is held in the smallest possible portion; the entirety is what even the most minute particle carries and commits. This is the poem’s most compact cosmological statement: the infinitesimal carries the infinite, the smidgen bears the sum.
“Prodding and nudging, lucidity, rationality and soundness” — the gentle mechanical forces (not driving but prodding, not pushing but nudging) accompany clarity, rational capacity, and psychological wholeness. The trio of capacities — lucidity, rationality, soundness — are not separate virtues but aspects of a single engaged attentiveness, the same capacity seen through three lenses.
“Do not tilt and tip, tend and incline, to tumbling idleness, or, lurching apathy” — the physical metaphors for mental states are exact. Tilt and tip, tend and incline: the gradual loss of vertical stability, the movement away from upright engagement. Tumbling idleness — not calm inactivity but idleness in downward motion, falling without arrest. Lurching apathy — not still indifference but apathy that moves erratically through the world, without the coordination of intention. Both idleness and apathy are here kinetic, in motion — which makes them more insidious: the danger is not that they stop the self but that they move it without direction.
“It is your counts; it is you to surf, it is you to seek” — the three “it is you” clauses arrive as the poem’s most direct assignment. The counts are yours (the measurements, the tallies, the enumerations — what matters is registered by you). The surfing is yours (navigation on the wave’s surface, using the momentum of what would overwhelm). The seeking is yours. Not given, not imposed, not discovered externally but attributed, claimed, assigned to the specific second-person self.
“The adoring entity, the wholeness and entireness, whom sway the pulse” — the closing image names the self as adoring entity: not merely the one who perceives or reasons or pursues but the one who adores. And this adoring whole — the entireness held together by its capacity to adore — sways the pulse. Not only the body’s pulse but whatever has a rhythm: the pulse of commitment, the pulse of time measured by the three instruments of the ninth stanza, the pulse of the stellar symphony through which the thrust whizzes. The adoring entity is the final consolidation of “solidify, grant, and defy”: the reverie that solidified, granted, and defied across ten stanzas arrives as the wholeness that adores and by adoring moves what has a pulse.
III. Conceptual Innovations: Departures from Existing Literary Treatment
1. The Triple Mode of Reverie: Solidify, Grant, and Defy
Conventional literary treatment places dreams and reverie in opposition to the real: dreams dissolve at waking, resist materialization, must be surrendered to the practical. Dr. Bemanian’s poem opens by dismantling this opposition through three verbs: “solidify, grant, and defy.” The reverie solidifies — it achieves material density, it crystallizes into structure. It grants — it bestows; the reverie is generative, not merely receptive. And it defies — it is not passive to the world’s pressure but actively resistant. This triple mode refuses both the standard elevation of dreams as pure and uncompromised and the standard deprecation of them as mere illusion. The reverie is an agent operating simultaneously in three modes: consolidating, giving, resisting.
2. Soli Harmonies as Architecture of Reverie
In orchestral writing, soli designates a passage where all members of a given section perform the same material together — distinct from the single soloist and from the full orchestra. The soli passage is the precise middle term: ensemble without absorption, distinctness without isolation. Each voice maintains its individual character while the combined sound achieves something no single voice could. Dr. Bemanian applies this technical musical concept to the problem of how multiple impulses of reverie achieve coherence without uniformity. The “murmuring solos” do not dissolve into choral blur but achieve “soli harmonies” — the ensemble that preserves its constituent voices. This is the constellation principle rendered acoustic: pattern constituted through the maintained distinctness of its elements.
3. Time’s Smallest Units as Quarry: The Jiffie Hunted
“Moments to pursue, jiffies to tail and hunt” elevates temporal micro-increments to the status of quarry. The jiffie — the informal name for the briefest measurable interval, an almost-nothing of time — is not experienced passively but pursued, tailed, and hunted with the active intentionality of predation. This is a fundamental reversal of the lyric tradition’s standard relationship to time, where time typically passes over or through the experiencing self, flowing or eroding or accumulating. Here the self is the pursuer and time’s smallest particles are the game. The hunting vocabulary assigns to the reverie a predatory, asymmetric relationship to the moment: the self that reveries does not drift through time but attacks its most minute instances.
4. The Infringement of Self-Submitted Tales
“The merging, fusing, infringements of the self submitted tales” applies the vocabulary of legal trespass to the self’s relationship to its own narratives. The stories the self constructs and submits — offers, claims, presents as its own account — infringe upon ongoing experience: they cross jurisdictional limits, they claim more present territory than their past warrant allows. The innovation is the precision of “infringement”: not simply that narrative shapes experience (the standard claim of narrative psychology) but that the self’s own tale can violate the rights of the present moment. The tale exceeds its granted scope. This frames the self’s relationship to self-narrative as juridical, requiring active limitation rather than passive inhabitation.
5. The Temporal Triad: Timepieces, Water Clocks, Grain Mills
“Timepieces, water clocks, the grain mills, tick, flow and turn” assembles three instruments of temporal measurement from three distinct civilizational epochs and three different physical principles. The mechanical timepiece (governed by oscillation and escapement), the clepsydra or water clock (governed by fluid dynamics, used from ancient Egypt through medieval Islamic and Chinese civilizations), and the grain mill (governed by gravitational and seasonal rhythm, the oldest measure tied to the agricultural year). Each has its own temporal medium and signature sound: the tick, the flow, the turn. The reverie inhabits all three temporal frameworks simultaneously — it is not confined to any single epoch’s account of time but moves through all three modes of measuring it. This temporal plurality is the poem’s account of how reverie relates to time: it occupies and measures itself by all available instruments at once.
6. Apathy and Idleness as Kinetic States
“Tumbling idleness, or, lurching apathy” rescues both conditions from their conventional static representations. Idleness is normally conceived as stillness — the absence of productive motion. Apathy is normally conceived as flat affect — the absence of engagement. Dr. Bemanian makes both kinetic: idleness tumbles (it falls downward through its own lack of direction, moving without orientation); apathy lurches (it moves through the world erratically, without the coordination of intention). Both are in motion — which makes them more precisely dangerous. The peril of tumbling idleness and lurching apathy is not that they halt the self but that they move the self without direction, without the propulsive thrust of the reverie’s “zoom the skies.” The poem’s warning is against misdirected motion, not against motion itself.
IV. Comparative Literary Context
The poem’s central epistemological moment — “Are they mirages, phantasms and figments, or, the existence, presence, attendances—” — places it within the long tradition of questioning the ontological status of dreams and vision. In Book XIX of Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope describes the two gates through which dreams enter the waking world: the gate of horn, through which true dreams pass, and the gate of ivory, through which the false and flattering ones come. Homer’s gates do not resolve the question of any given dream’s truth; they name the structure of the problem. Dr. Bemanian’s triple em-dash performs the same function: the question remains open, both gates possible, the distinction unverifiable in advance. But where Homer’s dreamer awaits the dream’s arrival and can only speculate afterward about its provenance, Dr. Bemanian’s “willing selves” are active: they pursue, they tail and hunt, they delve. The Homeric epistemology of waiting and retrospective judgment becomes a pragmatist epistemology of engagement: the question of reality is answered not by inspection but by the quality and persistence of the pursuit.
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” encodes the interrupted reverie within its own form: the vision breaks — the man from Porlock arrives — and what remains is the fragment of what was glimpsed. The Abyssinian maid with her dulcimer is the image the poem cannot hold, the regenerative vision that slips. Dr. Bemanian’s poem refuses this structure of interruption and loss. The reverie does not break; it solidifies, grants, and defies. What Coleridge loses to interruption, Dr. Bemanian holds in the “soli harmonies” that maintain each voice without losing the ensemble, in the “willing selves” whose plurality provides multiple points of grip on what a singular subject might lose. Where Coleridge’s poet is left crying “could I revive within me / Her symphony and song,” Dr. Bemanian’s speaker is told: “it is you to surf, it is you to seek” — not mourning a reverie that has fled but assigned the active pursuit of the one that persists.
Keats’s great ode to the nightingale poses the same question as Stanza Five but cannot sustain its own answer: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?” The flight into the nightingale’s world — “not born for death,” permanent where the human is mortal — ends in the “sole self” ‘s return. The return is loss. Dr. Bemanian restructures this entirely: the “willing selves” — plural, not the Keatsian sole self — are the ones who pursue and delve, and the closing stanza does not record the end of the reverie as loss but assigns ongoing action. There is no single self to which one returns after the song; the adoring entity whose “wholeness and entireness” sways the pulse is not a diminishment from the flight but its culmination.
Where Hafez in the ghazal form circles the beloved within and beyond the idol house — genuine fortune always slightly beyond the prescribed forms, the wine always more than the wine — Dr. Bemanian’s “zeal and fervor, vitality, vibe, vivacity and verve” sustains through accumulated alliterative force what Hafez sustains through the beloved’s elusive presence. In classical Persian poetry, Hafez deploys the rose and the thorn as figures for the beloved’s beauty and the lover’s suffering — the rose unreachably perfect, the thorn the pain of proximity that cannot be closed. Dr. Bemanian fundamentally transforms this imagery in Stanza Four: the rose that “participates in the parade” is not the beloved at an impossible remove but the human spirit itself, armored and marching. The thorns are reclaimed as the armor required for participation — the structural fortification that enables the rose to take its place in the procession of existence. What Hafez holds at the boundary of the idol house — beauty that wounds by its very presence — Dr. Bemanian places inside the parade as the marching self’s own armed redness. The Persian classical tradition’s figure of the beloved as the absolute toward which all movement is oriented finds its structural transformation in “the adoring entity, the wholeness and entireness, whom sway the pulse”: the adoring entity does not seek the rose from outside; it is the rose, adorned by its own necessary armature, and the Hafezian orientation is internalized — becoming not the search for the beloved but the discovery that the capacity to adore is what the self most essentially is.
Rumi’s reed flute in the Masnavi’s opening — crying from separation, its song the pure expression of longing for the reed-bed of origin — resonates with the poem’s “murmuring solos and echoing soli harmonies.” But where Rumi’s reed is defined by the wound of cutting (it has been separated, and its music is that separation voiced), Dr. Bemanian’s solos achieve harmony without the wound as their organizing principle. The soli harmonies are not the sound of loss but of maintained distinctness within ensemble. The Masnavi’s longing for return and unity is here transformed: not unity (the reed restored to its bed) but the more precise achievement of soli — not absorption but harmonic plurality, each voice its own within the pattern.
Wordsworth’s “spots of time” in The Prelude — concentrated memories whose “renovating virtue” the poet draws upon through adult life — share the structural function of Dr. Bemanian’s reverie as preservative agent. The “ambits and purviews ponderously disseminate and preserve” perform the same office as Wordsworth’s spots: spreading through the mind’s territory while preserving what they carry. But where Wordsworth’s spots are retrospective resources (they are accessed from the past, drawn upon), Dr. Bemanian’s reverie acts in the present tense: it solidifies now, grants now, defies now. The Wordsworthian preserved resource is in memory; the Bemanianian reverie is operative in the continuing moment.
Bergson’s philosophical distinction between durée réelle — lived time as continuous flow — and mechanically measured, spatialized time finds its structural commentary in the temporal triad of Stanza Nine. Bergson argues in Time and Free Will and Creative Evolution that clock-time imposes spatial categories on what is inherently flowing and cannot be genuinely measured without falsification. Dr. Bemanian’s three instruments — timepiece, water clock, grain mill — hold all three modes of measurement simultaneously without subordinating any to the others. This is not Bergson’s opposition of lived time to measured time but their simultaneity: the tick, the flow, and the turn are all real, all concurrent frameworks through which the thrust that “restlessly and twitchily zooms the skies” measures its passage. The reverie is not anti-mechanical but multi-temporal: it inhabits all clocks at once.
Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological studies of the poetic imagination — in The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Water and Dreams, Air and Dreams, and Earth and Reveries of Will — propose that the human imagination is fundamentally organized by its elemental encounters: fire, water, air, and earth each generating distinct modes of reverie and distinct poetic possibilities. For Bachelard, the imagination is shaped by its elemental encounters, the reverie taking on the form and character of the element that moves it — gracefully assuming the fluidity of water, the volatility of fire, the expansiveness of air. Dr. Bemanian’s elemental engagement is of a categorically different disposition: the reverie does not receive its shape from the element but contests it. The waters of Stanza Two are not the backdrop of reverie but adversarial forces — their “tumults, clamor, mayhem and chaos” are what the reverie must congeal, transmuting fluid disorder into solid structure. The winds of Stanza Three are not the medium of imagination’s flight but actively carnivorous forces to be countered. Where Bachelard’s imagination is phenomenologically shaped by its elements, Dr. Bemanian’s reverie is thermodynamically defined by its defiance of them. The poem is one of elemental confrontation, not elemental reception — the imagination not moved by the elements but pressing back against them.
Wallace Stevens argued in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” and throughout his poetic practice that poetry must provide the ordering fiction that replaces the absent gods — the “supreme fiction” that makes existence habitable without metaphysical certainty. The epistemological crisis of Stanza Five — “Are they mirages, phantasms and figments, or, the existence, presence, attendances—” — engages this Stevensian question directly: are the reverie’s highest objects merely fiction? Stevens’s answer is that the fiction is the point; the supreme fiction is what the imagination offers as consolation and structure, and its acknowledged fictionality is precisely what gives it its power. Dr. Bemanian refuses this resolution. The triple em-dash does not settle into the comfort of acknowledged fiction; instead, the “willing selves” are deployed to pursue and hunt, to demand not the fiction that organizes experience but the actual — the genuine existence, presence, attendance that the question holds open as possibility. Where Stevens finds sufficient dignity in the supreme fiction, Dr. Bemanian insists on the kinetic effort of the search itself as the only answer to a question the fiction would prematurely close. The jiffie is not hunted as a fiction but as a quarry that is genuinely there.
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets — among the twentieth century’s most sustained meditations on time and the human capacity to inhabit it — builds toward the “still point of the turning world”: the transcendent moment of simultaneous stasis and motion that Eliot identifies as the only position from which genuine experience is possible. “Neither flesh nor fleshless; / Neither from nor towards” — the still point is the escape from the turning, the pause at the center that is outside of time. The temporal triad of Stanza Nine engages Eliot’s temporal philosophy from a fundamentally different premise. Where Eliot seeks the still point — the arrest of the turning, the moment freed from the flux — Dr. Bemanian assembles all three ages of temporal measurement and sets them simultaneously in motion: “tick, flow and turn.” The timepiece ticks, the water clock flows, the grain mill turns — and the accumulated momentum of all three generates not the still point but the “thrust” that restlessly zooms the skies and whizzes the symphony of stars. For Eliot, time in its turning is the problem and the still point is its resolution; for Dr. Bemanian, time in all its modes is the engine. What Eliot seeks to step outside of, Dr. Bemanian harnesses. The turning world is not the obstacle to genuine experience but its propulsive source.
V. Philosophical Claims
1. Reverie Is Active: It Solidifies, Grants, and Defies
The dream and the reverie are not passive states of reception but modes of action. To solidify is to achieve density and structure in the world; to grant is to bestow upon what one touches; to defy is to resist what presses. The reverie operates as agent in all three modes simultaneously. This claim dismantles the foundational opposition between the active (waking, practical, outer) and the passive (dreaming, interior, withdrawn). The interior life does not merely experience; it acts.
2. The Self That Reveries Is Plural
“It is willing selves to delve” — the reverie engages not a unified self but multiple aspects, multiple willingnesses. The singularity of the Romantic lyric subject — the “I” installed as the dreaming center — is replaced by the plural “selves” whose multiplicity enables rather than complicates the pursuit. The reverie does not require a unified subject; it requires willing plurality. The composite self is better equipped for the hunt of the jiffie than any unified singular could be.
3. Epistemological Uncertainty Is Answered by Practice, Not Verification
“Are they mirages, phantasms and figments, or, the existence, presence, attendances—” is not answered through evidence, argument, or retrospective classification. It is answered by the decision to pursue: moments to chase, jiffies to hunt. What cannot be verified by inspection can be engaged by practice. The truth-status of the reverie is determined not by its ontological classification (mirage or presence?) but by the quality and persistence of the engagement with it. This is a pragmatist epistemology of the interior life: the real is what rewards pursuit.
4. The Self’s Own Narratives Can Trespass on Its Experience
The “infringements of the self submitted tales” establish that the self’s relationship to its own story is juridical: the narrative has scope, but it oversteps when it encroaches on the present. The self is not merely the author of its tales but potentially their victim when those tales exceed their granted territory. Reverie requires protection not only from external disturbance but from the self’s own excessive and encroaching story-telling.
5. Time Is Hunted in Its Smallest Units
The jiffie is quarry. The reverie’s orientation toward time is not the patient reception of duration but the active hunting of the minimal interval. The self most fully alive to the present is the self that pursues time’s smallest particles rather than being passively borne through its larger blocks. This reframes the problem of time in reverie from the question of how much time one has to the question of how precisely one can locate and pursue what is almost too small to catch.
6. The Adoring Entity Is the Self, and Its Adoration Sways the Pulse
“The adoring entity, the wholeness and entireness, whom sway the pulse” — the self is not merely the one who knows, seeks, or produces. It is the one who adores. And the adoring whole — its entireness constituted by its capacity to adore — sways the pulse of what has a rhythm: commitment, time, the stellar symphony. Adoration is not an emotional supplement to the self’s cognitive and practical functions but the constitutive posture that holds the self together as wholeness and, in holding, moves what it touches. To adore is not a feeling but a structuring power.
VI. Conclusion
“Reveries and Ambitions” demonstrates across ten stanzas that its title’s “and” is not conjunctive but constitutive: reveries and ambitions are not two separate orientations held together but the same force in two registers — the interior and its world-claiming extension. The reverie that solidifies, grants, and defies is the ambition. The poem makes this demonstration rigorously, moving through the full terrain of the claim: the acoustic structure of soli harmonies that preserve each voice within ensemble, the oceanic smashing of hurried waves by depth, the alliterative vital force that counters thin air and counters it without requiring an opponent, the rose parade adorned by its own thorns, the epistemological suspension answered by hunting the jiffie, the journey through trespassing self-narrative, the compact catalog of obstruction enumerated without analysis, the while-hinge holding sorrow and blooming in simultaneous reality, the epicenter of dedications attended by three temporal instruments, and the direct address to the self as adoring entity.
The philosophical positions the poem advances are genuine and exact: reverie acts in three modes, the self that reveries is plural, epistemological uncertainty yields to practice, the self-narrative trespasses, time is hunted in its smallest units, and adoration is the structuring power of the whole self. These are not decorative positions but working claims, demonstrated through the poem’s formal and semantic means — its accumulative synonymic architecture, its “while” hinge, its triple em-dashes, its alliterative series, its second-person imperative, its movement from confident list through question to direct assignment.
The poem’s closing image — “the adoring entity, the wholeness and entireness, whom sway the pulse” — consolidates the opening triadic verb. The reverie that solidified, granted, and defied across ten stanzas arrives as adoring wholeness: not a conclusion but a constitution, not an ending but the posture that the poem has been demonstrating was always already the starting point. The smidgen entrusts the sum; the wholeness sways the pulse. These are the same claim at different scales — and across those scales, the reverie has become the ambition it always was.
VII. About the Poet
Dr. Alireza Bemanian is a physicist, engineer, and poet whose creative work bridges classical Persian literary traditions and contemporary English-language poetry. Holding doctoral degrees in Electrical Engineering — one in Electromagnetic Waves and Fields and a second in Control Systems — Dr. Bemanian’s formation as a physicist shapes the conceptual architecture of his verse with particular depth: the wave, the field, the orbit, the system — these are not borrowed metaphors but working categories of his scientific practice, brought into the poem as living structures. His background as a physicist informs the poem’s imagery with rigorous precision: the “thrust” of Stanza Nine is the term of aerospace and jet mechanics; the “pendulums” of Stanza Four are the physicist’s timekeeper; the “oceans’ calming rings” of Stanza Two carry the exact physics of wave interference and damping. These are not casual images but precise deployments of scientific understanding into poetic context.
His poetry is characterized by philosophical rigor, formal innovation, and sustained engagement with questions of fate, resilience, and transcendence. Dr. Bemanian’s signature technique of semantic architecture — building meaning through layered synonyms and near-synonyms, accumulating facets of a single concept rather than listing different concepts — creates works that are simultaneously dense with implication and precise in their conceptual content. His bilingual poetic practice allows him to compose original Persian verses that serve as philosophical anchors for his English-language poems, the classical Persian literary tradition and the contemporary English-language tradition informing one another as equally primary resources.
For more information, visit www.bemanian.com.
© Dr. Alireza Bemanian, www.bemanian.com
