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
Analysis:
The structure of “A Dream Within a Dream” by Edgar Allan Poe comprises of two stanzas containing two dissimilar scenes that are connected. The first demonstrates the first-person’s perspective of the protagonist separating from a partner, while the second places the protagonist on a beach, while endeavouring to handle a modest bunch of sand in his grasp, in vain. The juxtaposed scenes differentiate in various ways, from calm through a solemn farewell to a rather passionate second half. While the first stanza includes a thoughtful understanding, the seashore scene contains interjections, for example, “O God!” and anguished outcries with rhetorical questions despairing and reflecting the narrator’s torment.
The transience of the natures connect the two stanzas where in the first, the narrator leaves his sweetheart, demonstrating a feeling of conclusion (and mortality) to their affection. Likewise, the falling grains of sand in the second stanza review the picture of an hourglass, which thus speaks of the progression of time. As the sand streams away until the passage of time, the partners’ time also ends, and the sand and every sentiment transforms into impressions from a dream. The alliteration of “grains of the golden sand,” depicts both love and sand’s desired nature, yet Poe clearly shows that neither are they attainable nor permanent.
Utilizing the ocean and sand as a setting for a dialogue of death and rot to the end of time, the “surf-tormented shore” turns into a second metaphorical similitude for time, as the waters of the ocean gradually yet relentlessly pound away at the physical presence of the shore. The narrator views the wave as “pitiless,” however he associates himself further with the transient way of the water by weeping in tandem with the falling of the sand.
Poe takes the thought of a dream and turns it so that narrator’s reality perception takes place at two degrees of detachment away from reality. Subsequently, this reality reflects upon itself through the medium of a dream, and the narrator can no more distinguish causality in his observation and perception. The function of the narrator’s mind being the inner dream and the poem itself being the outer dream, the risk of potential changes to identity and uncertainty is magnified. Time, being a mysterious yet powerful force, invokes cognitive dissonance between the protagonist’s comprehension ability, his self and the daydream that has captured him.
Through the poem, the strong metaphor of sand portrays the frustration and desperation of wanting time to last; however, drawing a parallel between the inability to grasp even a single grain of sand, nothing in this world is in our control. Eventually, everything slips away as evanescence is inevitable.
Akshada Krishnan
1413476
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