Two figures stand at opposite ends of Arthur Stringer’s early twentieth-century world: the “Man of blood and iron” and the “dreamer” who sings. Written as industrial cities were roaring into their modern shape, “Dreamers” refuses to keep those figures apart. Stringer, a Canadian-born novelist and poet who moved easily between commercial writing and lyric verse, turns an apparent opposition into a buried kinship. The poem is built on the idea that every practical, hardened person hides an imaginative self, just as every artist hides a forceful, world-building self.
The speaker opens with a startling claim: “There’s a poet tombed in you, / Man of blood and iron!” The man is addressed not as an enemy but as a kind of living grave. Beneath his “cynic frown” and beneath his “toil” lies a dreamer “dead and buried.” That burial language matters. It suggests the city-maker has not simply outgrown poetry; he has sealed it away, perhaps because survival in the market-place demanded cynicism and ceaseless labor. Then the speaker turns inward with the same grammar: “And deep beneath my music, / There’s a strong man stirs in me.” The dreamer, too, contains a ghost of “blood and granite,” a builder’s force “coffined in this madness / Carpentered of Song.” The strange, vivid phrase “Carpentered of Song” makes art sound like a structure—something made, hammered, fitted together—not just an airy escape. If the businessman has buried a poet, the poet has buried an architect.
The poem’s shape reinforces this mirroring. Stringer uses free verse, so the lines flex and contract like thought rather than follow a fixed metrical cage. Rather than a conventional rhyme scheme, he relies on repetition and echo: “deep beneath” returns, “plaintive” is twice sounded, and the parallel openings “There’s a poet... / There’s a strong man” give the free verse a ceremonial pulse. The imagery stays rooted in burial and awakening. “Tombed,” “dead and buried,” “coffined,” “ghost,” “stirs,” and “awakens” run through the poem like an underground current. These are not merely decorative words; they turn the city and the song into places where lost selves might rise.
The third stanza shifts from mirroring to mutual resurrection. “You live your day and drain it; / I weave my dream and lose it,” the speaker admits, as if both ways of living cost something. Then the buried selves begin to stir. The dreamer’s lost “red blood” awakens when he confronts “your city’s sky-line,” the “roaring market-place,” and its “hum of power.” Meanwhile, the practical man’s dead poet stirs at “the plaintive note or two / Of a dreamer’s plaintive song.” Neither figure can revive alone. The man of action needs the artist’s lament to feel what he has buried; the artist needs the city’s power to feel what he has sacrificed. Art and industry, Stringer implies, are not rivals but halves of a divided self.
What makes “Dreamers” significant is its refusal of easy contempt. A lesser poem might mock the businessman as soulless or pity the artist as weak. Stringer instead grants both figures a hidden double. In an age of factories, skylines, and roaring markets, the poem insists that the dreamer is not irrelevant to the man of iron, and the builder is not foreign to the maker of songs. Each carries the other’s ghost, and each can call that ghost awake. That is a generous, almost hopeful vision of modern life—one in which the plaintive note and the hum of power need not cancel each other out, but might, for a moment, resurrect what each has buried.