In Joseph Mallord William Turner’s engraving Soldier’s Dream, the soldier is shown leaning on his musket among his slumbering comrades, beneath a crescent moon. As he sleeps, his mind travels far from the battlefield with cannons and burning fires, shown to his left and right. He dreams of his peaceful homeland, his wife and children, and his homecoming, all shown below.

This is one of twenty engravings produced by Turner as illustrations for ‘The Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell’, a book published in 1837. McMaster Museum of Art has the complete set of twenty and, by happy coincidence, McMaster University also has a copy of the 1837 book in the Research Collections of Mills Memorial Library.

The poem that inspired Turner was also set to music by Beethoven [WoO 152, no 9] (25 Irish songs). Here is the poem:

The Soldier’s Dream
by Thomas Campbell

Our bugles sung truce – for the night-cloud had lowered.
And the sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;
And thousands had sunk on the ground, overpowered,
The weary to sleep, and the wounded to die.

When reposing that night on my pallet of straw,
By the wolf-scaring faggot that guarded the slain,
At the dead of the night a sweet vision I saw;
And thrice ere the cock-crow I dreamt it again.

Methought from the battlefield’s dreadful array,
Far, far I had roam’d on a desolate track;
‘Twas autumn – and sunshine arose on the way
To the home of my fathers, that welcomed me back.

I flew to the pleasant fields, traversed so oft
In life’s morning march, when my bosom was young;
I heard my own mountain-goats bleating aloft,
And knew the sweet strain the cornreapers sung.

Then pledged we the wine-cup, and fondly I swore.
From my home and my weeping friends never to part;
My little ones kiss’d me a thousand times o’er,
And my wife sobbed aloud in her fullness of heart.

“Stay – stay with us! – rest! – thou art weary and worn;”
(And fain was their war-broken soldier to stay;)
But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn,
And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away.