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Word Gems
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Edgar Allan Poe
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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?
from https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/edgar-allan-poe/a-dream-within-a-dream
"A Dream Within a Dream" is a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1849. The poem expresses doubt and uncertainty about the nature of reality, questioning whether life itself is just an illusion—"a dream within a dream." It begins with a speaker parting from a lover (or at least, from someone with whom the speaker was very close), and ends with the speaker on a beach, attempting to grasp grains of sand that keep slipping through the speaker's fingers. The poem is appropriately riddle-like as its speaker grows increasingly troubled by a lack of certainty.
“A Dream Within a Dream” Summary
I'll kiss you on the forehead to say goodbye. Now that I'm leaving, let me say this: you weren't wrong to say that I have been living in a dream. But what does it matter? I've lost all hope, so whether it is night or day, whether life is a vision or nothing of the sort, would that make me feel any less hopeless? Everything that we perceive is nothing but a dream within a dream.
I stand on the coast, hearing the deafening sound of the surf as it pounds on the shore. And I grasp at grains of golden sand. Even with just a few grains in my hand, they seem to escape my grip and fall back into the water, while I cry and cry. Dear God, can't I hold onto the sand more firmly? Dear God, can't I save a single grain from the water? Is everything we perceive really just a dream within a dream?
“A Dream Within a Dream” Themes
Theme Reality, Illusion, and Control
Reality, Illusion, and Control
The poem explores the idea that reality is an illusion. The speaker asks if all life—everything that “we see”—is just a “dream within a dream.” The speaker might be thinking of reality in the most literal sense here—as in, people are basically living in the Matrix—but also could be thinking about the subtler idea of objectivity. That is, perhaps the speaker is suggesting that people are doomed to view the world through the prism of their own perceptions and experiences. 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.
The poem begins with the speaker saying goodbye to someone, implied to be a lover. This other person has said that the speaker’s “days have been a dream,” and the speaker agrees. It’s not clear if this is meant in a positive sense—as in, this relationship has been really great and dreamy—or in the sense that the relationship, and the speaker’s life itself, is not in line with how things actually are; that is, the speaker has been living in a sort of fantasy world. Either way, the lover’s comments and the pain of saying goodbye lead the speaker to express a kind of hopelessness, rooted in doubt about the nature of reality and control. Indeed, perhaps this doubt stems from the way that something like love can seem so certain before, one day, it’s suddenly gone.
The speaker then introduces another layer of unreality: the speaker claims that all of life is not just a dream, but a dream within a dream. The speaker is anxious about lacking control over the world, so much so that the speaker isn't even sure if they're living in their own dream, or if the speaker's world is just part of someone or something else’s wider dream! Maybe the speaker is talking about being a dream in the mind of some greater being, God perhaps. This is supported by the appeals to God in the second stanza—though these could just be figures of speech, as the speaker grows increasingly distraught (“O God!”). Either way, reality is presented as a kind of illusion—not necessarily in the sense that people are being actively deceived, but that there is no way of knowing for sure what is real. And, either way, the poem implies that this means people are not really in control of their lives.
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.
Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A Dream Within a Dream”
Lines 1-5
"A Dream Within a Dream" poem opens with a kiss, which the speaker gives to an unspecified addressee. It's a kiss "upon the brow," so it isn't necessarily a romantic kiss—but that does seem the most likely scenario given what follows. In other words, the speaker is probably talking to a lover. The gentle consonance and assonance of the line convey the affection of the kiss:
Take this kiss upon the brow!
It's an interesting opening to a poem because it happens without any attempt to establish a context for the kiss—it just happens. There is a sense of urgency, then, and perhaps even desperation. This is confirmed by lines 2 and 3, which reveal that the speaker is "parting" from the addressee—and in fact is doing so right "now." These lines suggest that the rest of the stanza will be the speaker's words of goodbye—the words that the speaker feels most need to be said given that these two people are having to go their separate ways (though, again, the circumstances of this are not clear).
Following the dash at the end of line 3, the speaker offers up some parting words—which themselves are a response to something that the addressee has evidently said before. "You are not wrong," says the speaker, in other words confirming that the addressee was correct to say the following: that the speaker's "days have been a dream." It's worth taking note of the vagueness of this scenario—there is no sense of who the speaker is meant to be, nor the identity of the addressee. It's not even certain whether the addressee is one individual, or many. However, this ambiguity feeds into the poem's central idea: that reality is one some level fundamentally illusory or unknowable. To that end, there is something child-like and wondrous about the alliteration across lines 4 and 5:
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
These /d/ sounds are playful, almost like trickery—like the kind of stuff the Mad Hatter might speak in Alice in Wonderland. At this point, it's also not known if the idea put forward in these lines is meant positively (viewing life as a kind of dream come true) or in the sense of life being a kind of illusion. There's also the possibility of a sort of in between interpretation—that this means the speaker has been living in a sort of fantasy world, not really understanding the reality of the relationship with this unknown addressee.
“A Dream Within a Dream” Symbols
Symbol Sand
Sand
Sand in the poem represents certainty and control—two things the speaker simply cannot grasp. Instead, grains of sand slip through the speaker's fingers, and the speaker cannot stop this process any more than the speaker can stop the waves from pounding on the shoreline. No matter how much the speaker tries to get a firm, solid grip on reality, that reality keeps "creep[ing]" away.
The image of sand slipping through the speaker's fingers also evokes the image of an hourglass, which, of course, is used to mark the passage of time. Indeed, sand is often used to represent time—think of the common phrase, "the sands of time" and how this, in turn, suggests how everything will eventually turn to dust. The invocation of sand here thus suggests that life itself is slipping away from the speaker. The speaker's failure to hold onto the "Grains of golden sand" represents the fact that the speaker feels a total lack of control over time, life, and reality itself.
“A Dream Within a Dream” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
Alliteration
Alliteration is used throughout "A Dream Within a Dream." Note, for instance, the repeated /d/ sounds across lines 4 and 5:
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
The /d/ sounds here link "days"—a word that stands in for life generally—with "dream." Life, therefore, is linked with illusion and unreality. But what's also notable is the way that the alliteration here seems to increase the riddle-like quality of the poem, as though the speaker is trying to figure out some vital puzzle about life. Sounds are repeated and fold in on one another, echoing the speaker's confused vision of reality as an illusion within another illusion.
Similarly, note the alliteration in line 18 of the words "while" and "weep." Not only is the phrase "While I weep" repeated (an example of epizeuxis), but the phrase itself includes repetition of the /w/ sound. Again this creates a sense of circularity, of reality folding in on itself; the speaker wants clarity but just repeats the same thing, returns to the same words and sounds without new understanding.
Later, the /h/ alliteration of "hold" and "hand" lends line 14 a breathy quality, and gives a sense of the speaker's exasperation—contrasting with the two hard /g/ sounds in the following line that emphasize the "golden[ness]" of the sand. And, of course, the poem's last two lines closely imitate the ending of the first stanza—copying the alliteration of /d/ and /s/ sounds found in lines 10 and 11 (now framed as a rhetorical question). The poem thus ends close to where it began, without any newfound clarity or certainty. Again, the speaker returns to the same sounds, as if repeating them will bring about some new understanding—but it doesn't.
“A Dream Within a Dream” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
Brow Avow Deem Amid Surf-tormented Clasp Pitiless
Someone's forehead.
Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “A Dream Within a Dream”
Form
Form-wise, this is a rather complicated poem: the stanzas aren't the same length, the meter varies all over the place, and the rhyme scheme regularly breaks with its established pattern. Altogether, this makes the poem feel unpredictable; it's hard to get a grasp on its form, just like it's hard for the speaker to get a grasp on reality.
Specifically, "A Dream Within a Dream" consists of two stanzas of unequal length, with eleven and thirteen lines respectively. Both stanzas portray the speaker's troubled mind and the worry that reality is an illusion. The first is addressed to an unseen addressee, possibly a lover, whereas the second is altogether more isolated. In this stanza, the speaker stands alone on a shore, weeping at the inability to understand reality and the fleeting nature of life.
Of particular note is the way that the end of the second stanza revises the end of the first. Lines 10 and 11 have an almost confident air about them, in that the speaker puts forward the poem's main idea—that life is a "dream within a dream"—with a degree of authority and belief. Lines 23 and 24 close the poem with identical words, except this time they are phrased as a question. So even the knowledge of uncertainty becomes something to doubt too! This adds another layer of riddle-like confusion to the poem.
Meter
The meter of "A Dream Within a Dream" is not all that precisely defined. The poem probably adheres mostly closely to iambic trimeter—which means there are three feet in each line, each with a da-DUM stress pattern. Lines 3 and 4 follow this pattern neatly:
Thus much | let me | avow —
You are | not wrong, | who deem;
There are lots of variations to this metrical scheme throughout, though, which keeps the poem from becoming boring or too predictable. Often, these tweaks draw emphasis to certain words. Indeed, the first line begins with an extra stress, making it a line of iambic tetrameter with a missing first syllable (technically this is something known as catalexis). Thus gives the line a sense of urgency befitting the farewell kiss between the speaker and the unspecified addressee:
Take | this kiss | upon | the brow!
Much of the poem does this, adding a stressed syllable in the first beat. In fact, all three of the first feet in lines 6-8 can be read in the same way:
Yet | if hope | has flown | away
In | a night, | or in | a day,
In | a vi- | sion, or | in none,
Yet these could just as easily be read as anapests (da-da-DUM): Yet if hope; In a night. There are, in fact, lots of anapests popping up in this poem. This keeps things unpredictable and interesting. These lines in particular have a playful, almost riddle-like quality. This fits well with the sense that the poem is a kind of conundrum, the speaker's troubles implicitly challenging the reader to consider whether their own reality is real or illusory.
Rhyme Scheme
"A Dream Within a Dream" is a rhymed poem, but it doesn't follow a regular rhyme scheme. For the most part, both stanzas consist of couplets (rhyming pairs). But, again, Poe doesn't keep things simple; the stanzas have different lengths, the meter sees anapests popping up all over the place, and there is also an instance in each stanza in which three lines, rather than two, share the same rhyme sound. Making things even more complicated, these triplet rhymes placed at different points in each stanza! The rhyme scheme in the first stanza is:
AAABBCCDDEE
In the second stanza, the rhyme scheme is:
AABBCCCDDEEFF
The lines in this poem are relatively short, though, so the rhymes come thick and fast. These rhymes are almost all perfect rhymes too, except for the slant rhyme of "none"/"gone" in lines 8 and 9. This gives the poem a riddle-like sound, as though the speaker is being tied in metaphorical knots. It's also worth noting the repeated rhyme pair of "seem" and "dream." These two words sum up the speaker's dilemma neatly: is life as it seems, or is it all a dream—or even a dream within a dream!?
“A Dream Within a Dream” Speaker
The speaker in "A Dream Within a Dream" isn't clear—the reader doesn't get any biographical information about this person. What is clear, however, that this person has some serious doubts about the nature of reality. In a way, the speaker's exact identity doesn't matter all that much, since the speaker is pondering more universal questions about the nature of existence.
In the first stanza, the speaker bids goodbye to another character: a "You" that is also left totally ambiguous. Perhaps this person was the speaker's lover, given the "kiss" the speaker gives, but it's hard to tell. The speaker expresses hopelessness, before asserting—with a degree of confidence—that everything people experience is "a dream within a dream." In the second stanza, the speaker cuts a more isolated figure. Gone is the companion from the first stanza, leaving the speaker alone with their troubled doubts about the nature of reality. The speaker grasps at sand in an effort to confirm that something, anything, is real—but even this seems to confirm the fundamental unknowability of life, and the speaker's inability to exert any control over the world.
“A Dream Within a Dream” Setting
Fittingly for a poem that questions the fabric of reality, "A Dream Within a Dream" does not have a stable sense of time or place. The most reliable fact about the setting is that these are thoughts of the speaker's mind, which questions whether life is real or a dream. The first stanza takes place in the world of human relationships, ambiguously depicting some kind of farewell. Is this between two friends? Lovers? Where is this happening? None of that is clear! The second then sees the speaker violently removed from the world of human relationships, however undefined it may be, and now standing along on a shoreline where the "surf" seems to "torment" the sand. This "shore" is intentionally vague, underscoring the speaker's lack of certainty about their reality—indeed, all reality. Perhaps the speaker really is on a beach of some sort, or perhaps this is all happening within the speaker's mind.
Literary and Historical Context of “A Dream Within a Dream”
Literary Context
Edgar Allan Poe was also a prominent critic in American literature, praising work that helped to establish a distinctly American literary tradition (as opposed to copying a British one). Writers whose work Poe praised included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville. He was also a big admirer of Charles Dickens's novels—indeed, Poe's famous poem "The Raven" was directly inspired by Dickens.
Many of Poe's poems portray a troubled speaker, whose sense of certainty about the world—or ability to exert their control on that world—has been diminished. But Poe's literary output was by no means limited to poetry, and many of his short stories are considered classics of the genre. He helped establish the Gothic genre in American literature, and also explored detective fiction and sci-fi. This poem shares a number of elements with the Gothic genre, namely death, the supernatural, and a fantastical setting.
It's also worth noting that Poe is far from the first—or the last—writer to draw a link between the shore and deep questions about the nature of life and reality. William Blake, for example, wrote in his poem "Auguries of Innocence":
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
This doesn't seem far from the sentiment in Poe's poem, though Poe's is far more doubtful. Like Blake's speaker, Poe's interprets the (unknowable) nature of the entire world through something so small as sand. "Dover Beach" by the English poet Matthew Arnold also makes for an interesting comparison.
Historical Context
The poem was first published in 1849 in The Flag of the Union periodical, during the American Antebellum Period. This was a time when the United States was experiencing a period of relative tranquility. Of course, though still a number of years before the American Civil War, the debate around slavery was nevertheless intensifying at the time. Though born in Boston, Poe grew up in slave-owning Richmond, Virginia. His writing, however, does not ever explicitly address the issue of slavery. Indeed, this particular poem deliberately takes place in an ahistorical setting. That said, some interpretations of the poem do draw a link between it and the California Gold Rush in 1848, which brought around 300,000 people to California hoping to find their fortunes (this interpretation is also disputed).
What can't be disputed is the poem's focus on the nature of reality—and whether that reality is real or an illusion. This is an age-old philosophical problem, expressed succinctly in the dream hypothesis. Put crudely, this questions the reliably of waking life by pointing out the apparent realism of dreams—the way that they seem real at the time. Indeed, dreams can even feel real while providing the dreamer with an experience that they know—in their waking mind—is impossible (flying, for example). Plato and Aristotle both considered the problem of dreams, as did later European philosophers like René Descartes and Arthur Schopenhauer. Questioning the nature of reality is by no means confined to philosophy: a film like The Matrix is a good contemporary example of the same line of questioning.
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