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Poem Analysis: Dream

Edgar Allan Poe's poem "A Dream within a Dream" contrasts two disparate scenes through two stanzas. The first depicts a narrator parting from a lover, acknowledging their time together may have been just a dream. The second finds the narrator on a beach, desperately trying to hold grains of sand but watching them slip through his fingers and be lost to the sea, just as time and love are transient. Through rhetorical questions and exclamations, Poe conveys the narrator's agony at things fading that can never be recovered, suggesting all we experience may ultimately only be a dream.

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475 views

Poem Analysis: Dream

Edgar Allan Poe's poem "A Dream within a Dream" contrasts two disparate scenes through two stanzas. The first depicts a narrator parting from a lover, acknowledging their time together may have been just a dream. The second finds the narrator on a beach, desperately trying to hold grains of sand but watching them slip through his fingers and be lost to the sea, just as time and love are transient. Through rhetorical questions and exclamations, Poe conveys the narrator's agony at things fading that can never be recovered, suggesting all we experience may ultimately only be a dream.

Uploaded by

RAKESHARJUN_
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Poem Analysis

Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avowYou 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 sandHow few! yet how they cree 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


The main structure of A Dream within a Dream is made up of two stanzas that incorporate two disparate meaning there is no comparisons. The very first stanza shows the reader the first perspective is portraying what the narrator is becoming very distant from his lover while on the flip side; the second stanza puts the narrator on a beach while attempting to grasp the sand on the beach floor in his hand. The scenes show contrast in many different ways because of the way the poem moves from calm, solemnity and passionate near the second half. Back to the first stanza, we notice the thoughtful agreement and how relieving the beach scene is. It shows many different exclamations along with a variety of rhetorical questions to reflect the agony being felt by the narrators soul. Even though there are differences between the two stanzas, they are ironically similar between the fading natures. In the first mental image, the narrator is blindly addressing his lover and saying that he is leaving and making a sense of an irreversible end in their relationship. The falling grains of sand in the other stanza portray an image on time running out in an hourglass which represents the passage of time. The time with the lovers slowly dissipates the falling sand and romance turn into a dream. Reading the alliteration in grains of the golden sand, Poe tries to emphasize the nature of sand and love. He states that love is not permanently attainable.

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