The Text

Dreamed I once of a maiden fair,
Swathed in robes of flowing white,
Watching me, with a hidden care,
Child of woodland's leafy light.

The Form

Dreamed I once of a maiden fair,
Two feet, emphasis on dreamed and maiden.

Swathed in robes of flowing white,
Transference: flowing applied to white from robes, to indicate a dreamlike quality or an holistic scene.

Watching me, with a hidden care,
Hidden has a short first syllable, whereas the first line's maiden is long; conveys hastiness, a desire to know.

Child of woodland's leafy light.
Alliteration on l, suggests playfulness or fondness.

Simple abab rhyming scheme implies a simple message.

The Content

Dreamed I once of a maiden fair,
The cod-Elizabethan phraseology lets us know we're in for a long, long ode, probably romantic in nature since it mentions a maiden, and with supernatural elements because it's explicitly flagged as a dream.

Swathed in robes of flowing white,
Swathed implies covered from head to foot, so not only is she chaste, she means to stay that way. The association of the colour of her robes (white) and their movement (flowing) gives her an early air of mystery.

Watching me, with a hidden care,
So she finds the narrator interesting, but at the same time is wary of him. Is she wary of all men, or just this one? Or is it that he and she are remote in some way - class, age, culture?

Child of woodland's leafy light.
It sounds like she's some kind of spirit creature, maybe a fairy or a dryad. Could it be that she is simply innocent, curious to the ways of mortals? Or is she playing a deeper game?

A nice teasing opening with plenty of unanswered questions, but what happened to the rest of it?

The Subtext

Dreamed I once of a maiden fair,
The fact that this is described as a dream tells us that it's at least metaphorical, and probably allegorical. The maiden, being fair and pure, clearly stands for some abstract ideal: love, perhaps, or peace, or justice (punning on fair).

Swathed in robes of flowing white,
Because it's the whiteness which is flowing, rather than the robes, we know that the presentatation of the ideal represented by the figure of the maiden is itself subject to change, yet also that it always retains its purity (whiteness) and its function (robes for the maiden). The maiden is thus seen as a core ideal which, although it may appear in many guises, nevertheless remains fundamentally the same in its essence.

Watching me, with a hidden care,
That the maiden is watching suggests that whatever she represents is proactive; she is not a passive force. The hidden care caveat is a masked question: is her care for the narrator, or for what the narrator may do to her? The choice is his, in how he treats her.

Child of woodland's leafy light.
This extends the ambiguity of the previous line. Is the maiden the child, or is the narrator? The reference to the woodland's leafy light finally pins her down: she represents love, flickering through humanity as dappled sunlight through an ancient forest.

The author has recently fallen in love, and in this poem expresses his anxiety of how to handle it. He knows love doesn't happen often, and he is afraid that he may blow it, but the possibility and desire is there that he will succeed. His story, as the poem's title suggests, is as yet incomplete.

The Fact

Actually, that's pretty vivid. Maybe I should try write this down so I don't forget. I'll just slap something in at the keyboard and think about it later.

Dreamed I once of a maiden fair,
Fair as in "pretty", not "blonde". I don't want this looking like a cinematic tampon advert...

Swathed in robes of flowing white,
Flowing or glowing? Flowing: out of her and into the wood behind. She's more of a presence than her physical form can hold.

Watching me, with a hidden care,
Well, this is going to be a medieval romance, so she has to be open to courtly love at the very least. The hidden care can hint at what may or may not be coming later once I've thought about it.

Child of woodland's leafy light.
I wonder if anyone will get that reference to Hollywood movies?

Hmm, that's enough for me to be able to recapture the image sometime. No point in doing a whole poem about it, though, it's a still I have in mind, not a 90-minute motion picture. It might be fun to work on a little more some day, if the muse takes me.

Oh, it doesn't have a title. Well, it doesn't need one, it's just
The First Verse of an Unfinished Poem
at the moment.