"The Waking Dream of Life" is a phrase used on the inside cover of Geoffrey Hill's book-length poem The Orchards of Syon, to describe Hill's enterprise in this volume. What is most striking about the orchards that Hill describes in his poem (not the one on the book's cover) is that they are covered with torched maples, their flaming boughs bent, weighted down with burden. Why has there been a Fall (why is it fall) in the orchards of Syon? Whence this autumnal air, filled with smoke? What is the Waking Dream of Life?