A Dream Within A Dream

A Dream Within A Dream

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? 

Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘A Dream Within a Dream’, was published on March 31^st 1849, just before his first short story got published.  The poem is fairly short, consisting only of 24 lines divided among 2 stanzas.  The poem debates between reality and fantasy, and whether we can’t distinguish between the two. The first and second stanza’s depict two very different scenes. In the first the narrator is kissing the brow of his love, and bidding her farewell. He is calm but sad and solemn, the entire scene depicting a sense of mortality for their love. The second stanza shows the narrator on the sea shore, holding a handful of sand. He says that the sand starts to slip away between his fingers and that he is unable to stop and hold onto a single grain. This stanza seems to be much more emphatic with phrases such as ‘Oh god!’ and ‘-while I weep’ adding to the dramatic effect of there being a sense of urgency and despair.

The whole poem is about the mortality of things and how nothing ever lasts. The first stanza depicts a love that has weakened and dwindled. The second refers to the passage of time. The sand very easily can be interpreted as the sands of time in the hourglass of life, and how easily they slip through our hands. We are never able to get a hold, to keep some for ourselves. Death is depicted by the surf that wears away the shore and takes away the grains of sand as they fall, never to be returned or seen again. He calls the waves ‘pitiless’ and the shore to be ‘surf-tormented’, referring to how loss and the agents which take things of value away from us always seem to be merciless and unforgiving.

The title seems to portray that the narrator is morphing a normal imagination, or a daydream, and forms two levels of reality, showing that there is a great detachment from the present. Time is the major focus of the poem, and plays a powerful force in conveying the sense of mortality that Poe is trying to instill.