Shivani was drawn as the random student posting for this writing assignment. Remember, everyone needs to post their final piece on their blog in addition to the hard copy you turned in during class. Be sure to post the actual poem as well.
A Dream Within a Dream
by Edgar Allan 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?
“A Dream within a Dream” is a poem written by Edgar Allen Poe, and it conveys the narrator’s inner emotional turmoil regarding the evanescence of life and people, through a first-person perspective. The major theme that runs throughout the poem is of loss and death, and the tone of the poem is gloomy and melancholic.
The opening of the poem –“Take this kiss upon the brow! And in parting from you know” –foreshadows the essence of the entire poem. It symbolizes the loss of a loved one or a memory to death or oblivion, and this sense of having everything stripped away from the narrator is continued throughout the poem. A dream, by nature, is a mere illusion from which one awakens to find that it has gone –totally, and with no evidence of its past existence. The narrator compares his life to a fitful dream since just like a dream it has only been an illusion and now that it leaves him, it leaves him wholly with nothing left to hold on to. In the 6th line of the 1st stanza –“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?” –the poet personifies hope and gives it the ability of being able to fly away, to highlight how when once gone, hope completely deserts its master and becomes out of reach. Also, ‘night and day’ are symbolic of life in a physical sense, i.e. the physical seconds and minutes that are its supposed components; and ‘vision’ symbolizes not something physical that we see with our eyes, but an idea that we perceive with our mind –when present it symbolizes a discouraging thought and its absence is symbolic of the lack of ingenuity or ambition. Since the narrator believes that all that he ever achieved in his life has been reduced to zilch due to its transient nature, he questions whether when we ‘lose hope’ do we truly lose it since all that it aimed to achieve in the first place would have been just another illusion that would have eventually been lost or awaken from.
The conclusion of the first stanza –“All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream” –summarizes the idea of how all that we experience and achieve in life and all the people we meet and learn to love, are snatched away by death and this leaves us questioning the reality of our existence and of all that we cherish. So the double illusion that the poet keeps alluding to throughout the poem, refers to the illusionary nature of life as a whole and all that which is a part of it (dreams, hopes, family, loved ones etc.) and hence it is “but a dream within a dream”.
The second stanza employs imagery and evokes the image of a stormy seashore. The image of the narrator helplessly standing in such a turbulent place symbolizes the emotional turmoil within the narrator. The poet uses a metaphor to compare the stormy sea waves to the tribulations of his life; he compares the rhythmic crashing of the waves to the certain monotony of all the problems that one faces. The fact that the narrator is weeping is symbolic of his helplessness in the face of death which is compared to a “pitiless wave” in the sense that it is periodic, expected and yet extremely destructive.
The third line of this stanza –“And I hold within my hand, grains of the golden sand-how few! Yet how they creep, through my fingers to the deep” –compares all that is precious and thus ‘golden’ to the narrator to grains of sand, which escape him quickly and completely and fall into “the deep” which is a metaphor for death and oblivion and is used to convey the shared characteristics of both seeming endless and filled with uncertainties. By giving these grains the ability to ‘creep by’, the poet is personifying them to convey that life skulks by without one’s knowledge, and that time works against man. The poet restates the title of the poem at the end of the second stanza in order to summarize the entire poem.
The poet questions the reality of our existence since man lives and dies in definite moments of indefinite memories –which are all snatched away from him. Just like a dream, from which you awaken to realize that all your actions were inconsequential, life too loses its meaning in the face of death where all is lost. The impartial nature of death exalts none; it renders all men equally powerless.
-Shivani
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