Success Quote by Matthew Prior

Hope gets demoted here from virtue to afterimage: not a guiding star, but the daylight residue of last night’s fantasy. Prior’s line turns on that small, surgical “but.” It doesn’t deny hope exists; it insists hope is derivative, a second-order emotion produced when the mind returns to the world and finds it still unfinished. Dreams belong to sleep. Hope, he suggests, belongs to the inconvenient moment after, when you’re conscious enough to compare what is with what might have been.

The sting is in “those who wake.” Waking is usually framed as clarity, maturity, enlightenment. Prior makes it the condition for longing. The sleepers have their illusions intact; the awake inherit the yearning. That’s slyly cynical, and very Restoration: an era fluent in polish, disillusion, and the social theater of pretending you’re unbothered while privately wanting everything. Hope becomes a kind of respectable daydreaming, what you can admit to in public once you’ve swapped the bed for the drawing room.

Subtextually, the couplet also sketches a class of people: not the blissfully ignorant, not the heroic strivers, but the lucid majority who know better and still keep going. If hope is a dream, it’s also a coping technology. Calling it “but the dream” punctures sentimental pieties without quite endorsing despair. Prior doesn’t forbid hope; he exposes its mechanism. It’s what consciousness manufactures to soften the impact of reality, a self-authored fiction that keeps the awake from lying back down.