When in the down I sink my head,
Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, times my breath;
Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, knows not Death,
Nor can I dream of thee as dead:


I walk as ere I walk’d forlorn,
When all our path was fresh with dew,
And all the bugle breezes blew
Reveillée to the breaking morn.


But what is this? I turn about,
I find a trouble in thine eye,
Which makes me sad I know not why,
Nor can my dream resolve the doubt:


But ere the lark hath left the lea
I wake, and I discern the truth;
It is the trouble of my youth
That foolish sleep transfers to thee.

Although this canto keeps the reader within Tennyson’s dreamworld the content edges towards the world outside him where the ‘bugle breezes blow,/reveillée to the breaking morn’. He wakes and realises that his dreaming self has burdened Hallam with trouble that belongs to himself.

In the poem he begins to challenge the images of his own fantasy.