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?
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?
Review and analysis of the poem by Okoro Amarachi
This is a poem written by By Edgar Allan Poe. It is a poem of two stanzas with twenty four line with rhymes scheme (aa, bb, cc, …) and rhythms. The poem focuses on the theme of dreams versus reality, as the speaker questions where life is just a dream. Other themes are isolation and frustration. The tone and language of the poet is simple and direct. The use of the sea as a symbol of both beauty and destruction adds to the poem's emotional impact. Although, the mood of the poem shifts. In the first stanza the mood in accepting, but in the second stanza, the mood is despairing.
The poem explores the idea that reality is an illusion. The poet/speaker asks if all life—everything that “we see”—is just a “dream within a dream.” In this sense, the poem may be questioning if it’s ever possible to know the objective “reality” of anything at all. And because the world is ultimately unknowable, the poem implies, people aren’t really in control of their own fates.
In the first stanza, the speaker acknowledges that people think he lives in a dream world but also suggests that everybody does. Our perceptions of reality are flawed and all of us have a tenuous grasp on reality. The speaker's tone, or attitude, is one of acceptance, acknowledging that he, but also everyone else, lives in dreams, but that dreams can keep one's hope alive.
The second stanza then finds the speaker suddenly alone. Standing on a beach, the speaker tries to confirm the reality of the world by grasping at the sand—yet this sand keeps slipping through the speaker’s fingers. The constantly shifting shoreline also seems to speak to the speaker’s lack of certainty and control. The speaker wants to find something solid to hold onto, but is faced only with relentless and ongoing change.
Finally, to intensify this sense of doubt and uncertainty, the poem restates its earlier claim—that life is just “a dream within a dream”—as a question. That is, even the speaker’s strongly held intuition about the unreliability of knowledge is uncertain too! All in all, then, this amounts to an argument that human life is built on the shakiest of foundations—and perhaps that the nature of reality is beyond the limit of human understanding.