Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Dream within a Dream”

Edgar Allan Poes A day- envisage deep down a Dream (1849) is a rime dramatizing the losses of a man, and his reflection if his heart is very or unreal. The cashier is reflecting about the elusiveness of things and people he value, since they all face to disappear. The song questions if reality is fantasy, thus the title, A Dream within a Dream. Since this was make in the year of Poes death, some assume that the cashier is talking about the death of his loved anes, and the troubles in his life.The poem begins with an image of parting and addresses a circumstantial person. This person is only mentioned in the first stanza the southward stanza does non mention any person at all. Others interpret this person as abstract, meaning that the storyteller talks to life or love personified, or any abstract idea, and not a real person. The cashier, talking to this person, ponders whether his days have been a dream (5), and speaks of losing hope. He sees his life as if he is trappe d, as shown in the delimitates, All that we see or reckon/Is but a dream within a dream (10-11).But first, to define the give-and-take dream is applicable in understanding this poem. A dream stern either be images, ideas or sensations while sleeping, an inclination or ambition, or an illusion or trance. Upon discipline the poem, on that point is no question that the definition of the word dream in the poem is the extreme one given above, an illusion, but not necessarily a beautiful or happy illusion. There is no mention of sleeping or daydreaming, so wherefore it is safe to assume that dream meant an illusion.One of Edgar Allan Poes known poems, the poem uses rhyme and meter, but it has inconsistent rhythm. repetition is also used to emphasize the feeling of unhappiness and frustration, as in the fifth, eleventh, and twenty-fourth lines. These poetic elements and sentimentalist characteristics such as the dramatization found in the lines, O God Can I not comprehend/ Them with a tighter clasp? (19-20) and the use of frank but powerful images, make this poem cause when read aloud.The images, especially in the second stanza, ar striking and memorable. The lines, And I hold within my batch/Grains of the golden anchor/How few Yet how they lift/Through my fingers to the deep,/ dapple I call out while I weep (14-18) might be alluding to either time or material wealth. The grains of the golden sand (15) is said to have been referencing to the gold found in California in 1848 (Silverman 402).This image of grains slowly trickling drop evokes a feeling of frustration over the elusiveness of things that the storyteller values, and that might or might not embroil money and personal possessions. Time could also be an allusion due to the fact that Poe had lost his loved ones in the past. The narrator might be saying indirectly that he is already feeling his death nearing.The brave six lines of the poem express the desperation to grasp and save (19, 2 2) the things he value. There is also a feeling of helplessness as the narrator watches the grains weirdie through his fingers, and he cries, as shown in the line, While I weep while I weep (18)However, in the end he seems to question, not to express that he is in a dream within a dream (24). Unlike the ending line of the first stanza in which the line is written as a statement as though the narrator really believes that his life is all a dream, the last line of the poem is written as though the narrator is in doubt, or perhaps there is a little bit of hope in him.Some say that Poe wrote this poem after the death of his married woman from tuberculosis, and that the person that the narrator is talking to in the poem is a woman. But that might not be, because this was published long after his wifes death, unless he did write the poem from way back. Whether or not Poe wrote this because of his troubles or his depression is not certain.What is certain is that the poem tells of a perso ns thoughts about what is real and unreal. Losing all the things he values makes him think, out of sadness, and perhaps, denial, that his life is just a dream within a dream.Works CitedPoe, Edgar Allan. Poetry and Tales. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York Library of America, 1984.Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe plaintive and Never-ending Remembrance. New York Harper Perennial, 1991.Sova, Dawn B. Edgar Allan Poe A to Z. New York Checkmark Books, 2001.