A Dream Within A Dream - Edgar Allen Poe ~ Poetry Anthology #1

A Dream Within A Dream - Edgar Allen Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow--
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Meaning and Theme:
Reading through this poem, I have spotted lines that suggest this poem may be about loss and defeat. For example, lines 21 and 22, “O God! can I not save / One from the pitiless wave?” discuss how the narrator is trying to keep hold of the grains of sand as tightly as possible, but there are still grains of sand that creep through his fingers. This represents how there are moments in life where you can’t hold onto everything.  Even though you may try to hold onto the important things in life, you will fail. Line 22, “One from the pitiless wave?” represents how just when you find something that you truly care about and enjoy, life will send a cruel force to take it away from you. Torment in the narrator is represented by phrases such as, “O God!” He is expressing how much defeat he is facing. A clearly noticeable theme in this poem is how readers shouldn’t spend their life mourning what they couldn’t hold onto; there is always at least one thing that people can’t handle letting go of. An example might be the death of somebody’s grandfather. Everybody has something that will haunt them forever and sometimes it is difficult to understand that there’s nothing you can do about it… Just let the grains of sand creep through your fingers and land in the metaphorical ocean of moving on. The other lesson readers can learn from this is that if you stand, “...amid the roar / Of a surf tormented shore,” you should remember to hold onto the important grains of sand in your life. Don’t just let it creep through your fingers, fight for what it is you want!

Imagery:
The narrator kisses the listener in parting. He tells the listener that he agrees that his life has been a dream, but he suggests that everything, "Is but a dream within a dream." He stands on the shore of the ocean, holding grains of sand as he cries. He can’t keep the sand from running out of his hand, and he wonders if he can’t save even one grain from the surf. All in all, the main image in this poem is a man standing by a body of water with sand slowly running out of his hand. That is why I have chosen this picture.

Rhyme and Meter:
This is a poem using an AAABBCCDDBB EEFFGGGHHIIBB rhyming scheme. All rhymes are perfect end rhymes, except for lines 8 and 9, “In a vision, or in none / Is it therefore the less gone?” Poe may have done that in order to draw attention to those two lines. Most of the poem is composed of couplets with one triplet in each stanza. A random occurring triplet is what sets the rhyme scheme off of from the couplets that are used throughout the majority of this poem. The base meter is iambic trimeter. Although, Poe has lines that break this pattern. Line 11, “Is but a dream within a dream,” is iambic tetrameter. Seeing as this line is the title of the poem, Poe may have done this to represent the importance of the line over all of the other lines. Some lines (such as line 17, “Through my fingers to the deep,”) start off with a stressed syllable. Other readers may view this as trochaic, but seeing as this line ends with a rising meter, I would argue it is more suiting to say that it is an iambic foot.

My Feelings:
I absolutely love this poem because of how relatable it is to my life. Recently I’ve been stressing over school work, albeit, I stress over homework a lot. Due to all of that stress, I’ve thought about if it’s truly worth it. Is it truly worth it to practically break down into tears because of a test? Or a multitude of homework assignments? No! The lines, “O God! can I not save / One from the pitiless wave?” represent the stress over my school work. To explain, my life is what I’m trying to save. If I can’t save it, my life will be engulfed in a wave of large quantities of stress.