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?

The title of “A Dream Within A Dream” by Edgar Allan Poe, from my point of view this title brings out the meaning of feelings between facts and fantasy. This poetry was published in the year of 1849, where is the exact same time when Edgar Allan Poe dies. Poe was born on 19th of January, 1809 in Boston, and died on October 7th, 1849. He was the first who create and popularize the method of 'Short Stories' writing prose. He is also renowned as a master literary critic. Poe is also the creator of what is now known as the genre 'horror' and 'detective story'. (Edgar Allan Poe biography-buzzle.com). I brought this poem to analyze how Poe pour his feeling into this poem, where his sadness, love in life can be read as a beautiful yet a sad story in this poem.

From the first I read the poem, it makes me feel so sad. I realized even from the very first stanza that telling about kiss, the feeling of the writer, and the way he delivered its words in each beautiful lines. As the sentences in previous stanza, “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”. The first and the second sentences show the feeling of love, “kiss” can be refer to a person’s heart, the feels of love. After we follow to the next line, it begins to draw sadness, where “kiss” is parting, the girl whom he kiss was not wrong when she talk, in this poem all of his life was just a dream for him. Other lines on the first stanza of this poem is more to desperate, loneliness, we can see from the sentences “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?”. How if hope that we had are starting to dissapear? In our life we don’t have anything to hold nor to guide, that is what it shown in the first stanza “Hope has flown away and therefore the less gone”. On the second stanza from my point of view is about Poe’s life, where the sentences of “I stand amid the roar. Of a surf-tormented shore” shows unpeacefull in his life, there where only disturbances. I say that the “Golden sand” in this poem is refer to Poe’s life, the more he hold it tighter, the more it loss away. Like what Poe said on “O God!can I not grasp Them with a tighter clasp...can I not save”.

The poem’s subject is himself. He using first person point of view, using subject of “I”. Other interesting point from this poem is when Poe put various rhyme on the poem, AAABBCCDDEEFFGGHHHIIJJKK, yet the sound of this poem can still sound very beautiful. Other than that, there are some repetition inside, such as “While I weep--while I weep!, O God! , but a dream within a dream”. There are emphasis in the words while I weep, it describe how deep is his sad feeling. The repetition of a dream within a dream is eliberate on how Poe makes the reader feel how he feel of losing someone he love most, his wife, that after that he feels that his life is like a dream. The author attitude is more to irony, some of it is a bit satire. Irony because he looks like talking about the women that he love, which is his wife is already died. The satire is when he write and he insinuate himself.

So after all of this analysis, I conclude that this poem was successfully achieve its aim to delivered the feeling of sadness, desperate, and losing hope. Poe was so smart in choosing words after words to refer it into meaning that implicit. The words of Golden Sand really have a deep meaning about a precious thing in our life.