The allegory of “A Dream Within A Dream”

Poe’s “A Dream Within A Dream” (1849) appealed to me when I was a teenager because, having English as my second language, I was drawn in by its simplicity. Not a long poem, no difficult vocabulary, no convoluted imagery, and a very fine, polished, elegant patina on the poem’s two stanzas.

Actually, there are three parts to the poem. First, there is the three-line intro, which I call The Farewell. The poet narrates his farewell kiss to an unnamed interlocutor, apparently someone he is leaving behind.

Then, there is a Soliloquy, which could be addressed to the separated loved one referenced in the first segment, but really appears to be addressed to an unnamed audience: perhaps unknown even to the poet himself—to those “who deem/That my days have been a dream.” It could be all of us.

Finally, there is The Beach. Poe describes himself standing on a “surf tormented shore,” lamenting his inability to securely hold the sand that pours out through his fingers to be savaged by “the pitiless wave.” Is he talking about actually standing on a beach and lamenting the loss of the sand because it reminds him of the furtive nature of existence and the inability to hold on to even miniscule things (sand), or is The Beach itself an allegory for life, and the sand a metaphor for something greater (e.g., his “days,” referenced in the first stanza)? Regardless, The Beach is such a strong visual that one cannot help but picture the setting, and the narrator, like an actor on a stage, playing out the sandy drama, “amidst the roar” of battering waves.

Perhaps what makes the poem work so well is that Poe wrote the first version of it when he was 20 years old, and less sophisticated. But he reworked the material twenty years later, in the last year of his life, adding both a refined hand and an experienced voice to the poem, but without spoiling its original simplicity and unassuming structure and diction.

One can imagine that The Farewell is Poe’s loving send-off of Virginia, his wife, who had died two years earlier, whom he is finally willing to try to let go of, with “a kiss upon the brow.” The Soliloquy is an apostrophe to posterity, an explanation of where the poet is coming from, the backstory, his footprints on the sand. The Beach is Poe’s reconstruction of the arena, a stage for the dramatization of his life.  The “surf-tormented shore” is his very being, which he elsewhere describes as “A chaos of deep passion from his birth” (“Dreams,” 1827). The waves are the unpredictable forces that wreak havoc over his life, the “vast formless things/That shift the scenery to and fro” (“The Conqueror Worm,” 1843). They are, here, as they are in “Annabel Lee” (from the same year), associated with the destructive force of death (a tomb by “the sounding sea”). And the “Grains of the golden sand” are the fragments of his life, his “earthly lot” which “Hath little of earth in it” (“To—," 1828).

And the “Dream Within A Dream” refers to the constant theme in Poe’s poetry: because within this nightmare of his tragic life, he carries this cherished vision of his loved one:

That holy dream—that holy dream,

While all the world were chiding,

Hath cheered me as a lovely beam

A lonely spirit guiding.

(“A Dream,” 1827).

Life is a dream (a very bad one), but, within it, Poe carries a good dream (his memories of a happier past).  “A Dream Within a Dream” synthesizes strands Poe has been developing for his brief lifetime.