Analyzing Poe’s A Dream Within A Dream is an exercise in futility. Poe’s intentions can’t be known, but it doesn’t stop people from trying.
Read straightforward you get a sense that Poe is on the verge of loss, he’s kissing his loved one goodbye, and if there’s a sense that he’s accepted it, it’s because accepted the reality, or unreality of life. You can’t live a dream for long, because it’s simply a dream within the dream that is life.
In A Dream Within A Dream, everything slips away, like sand through the fingertips, you can’t hold onto anything, particularly something that is fluid. A dream within a dream is fluid by nature, for dreams aren’t bound by nature’s law. Instead they build upon the imagination, where there are no laws.
Life, like sand held in the fingertips beneath the waves is always being sucked into the deep, washed away by nature’s tides. Man has the ability to imagine anything he wants, and in the imagination those dreams can live. But in life, we are bound by nature’s laws, which deem in the end, all is lost.
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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?
