In “Fantasia,” the speaker imagines building a fragile, intimate dwelling out of straw, clay, and a woman’s hair — scraps of life and desire — and declares a wish to trade the world for a song. The poem feels like a feverish daydream: clouds drift through one window, dancers rush in through another, and their stamping feet wake a “pagan” spirit of painful joy. Making music, the speaker suggests, can reshape reality itself.
But the mood turns. Morality appears only where the song ends, and the final lines gather rags, dreams, leaves, and falling stars toward a grave. The speaker’s hunger for art is mixed with nocturnal fear, ecstasy with mortality. The whole poem moves between creation and collapse, as if singing and dying come from the same impulse — a longing to lose the ordinary world and become something stranger, freer, and more fleeting.