Elizabeth Palacios
October 3, 2018
FIQWS HA16
Mr. Crhon
Edgar Allan Aristotle
Edgar Allan Poe is best known for his dark and romantic poems and short stories. Poe’s life can be summarized as unfortunate and pitiful. Poe did not have the best life experiences, battling with alcohol addiction and suffering from depression. Experiencing the loss of loved ones numerous times; at an early age, he had witnessed the death of both his parents and placed in a foster home. Readers can sense a connection and reflection of Poe’s life in his work. In “A Dream within a Dream”, Poe dives into a philosophical idea stating that humans are in a hallucination called reality.
The speaker begins by introducing someone, perhaps a woman. Readers could infer this, when he tries to give a goodbye kiss from someone in the first line, “Take this kiss upon the brow.” (line 1) He begins to express his inner feelings towards reality. “You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream” (line 4-5) The speaker agrees with his lover about her views towards life and whether it’s fantasy or not. The narrator continues to speak on the idea, “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?” (line 6-9) The speaker hoped that life is not an allusion and hopes that there is more than his lover’s interpretation of life. However, due to his acceptance of reality being an allusion, hope is therefore gone, and it makes no difference what time it leaves, day or night. Furthermore, readers can make a connection that hope isn’t the only thing that seems to be departing; he is also saying his attempting to leave his significant other, however, is unable to let go. Which raises questions, to why he is leaving his lover, could it have been due to the loss in hope?
In the next stanza of the poem the speaker changes the setting of the poem, we noticed that he finally had left his significant other. He appears to be alone on an ocean shore. “I stand amid the roar, Of a surf-tormented shore” (line 12-13) He seems to grasp the “golden sand,” questioning to God why he is unable to hold on to it. One can see that the narrator is using the golden sand to symbolize an hourglass, that represents time. The sand slipping between his hands can be depicted to show his inability to hold on to time, that time wait for no one. One has a limited time in this “dream within a dream.”
Yet, this two-stanza poem is short to further elaborate this concept, Poe has written other famous works that allows the reader to analyze their interpretation of reality critically.
In Edgar Allan Poe: The Romantic as Classicist, the author discusses “Poe’s most important philosophical works,’ The Colloquy of Monos and Una’ and ‘Eureka,’ are effort to explain the laws that govern the universe and humankind within it, not altogether different from what ancient mythmakers and classical thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle attempted.” (pg 119) Even though Poe wrote romantic and gothic themes, Poe included philosophical themes in his poetry. “A Dream Within A Dream” is one for his poems that enables the readers to think of their perception of reality, while still involving a romantic interest.
Work Cited
Unrue, Darlene Harbour. “Edgar Allan Poe: The Romantic as Classicist.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition, vol. 1, no. 4, 1995, pp. 112–119. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30221867.
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