Quoth The Raven - Poe Poetry Blog

All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream. So asserts Edgar Allan Poe in his immortal poem, “A Dream Within A Dream” (1849) . In an earlier post , we explored the allegorical structure of the poem. In this follow-up, I want to drive home the meaning of the phrase “ A dream within a dream ,” because it has a very precise meaning in Poe’s verse. It doesn’t just mean “ a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! ” ( “JFK,” 1991. ) That works well as a secondary meaning, as connotative reading of the phrase, but Poe has something more explicit in mind. Specifically, Poe is saying that all that he pictures in his mind’s eye is a nostalgic vision (“ dream ” #1, which he “ sees ”), which is contained within the trancelike existence of his waking reality (“ dream ” #2, which is his life as it “ seems ”). Those two poles demarcate the boundaries of “ All ” his experience and the same is true, Poe boldly posits, for every one of us. All of our lives are waking trances

Photo uploaded by user Erisa on Pinterest . June figures in two of Edgar Allan Poe’s poems; in the early piece “A Pæan” (1831) and the later work “The Sleeper” (1841) . Though set a decade apart, both poems deal with the death of a beautiful woman —which Poe famously called “ unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world ”—and, in both pieces, June is used to mark a midway point, a halfway station in the journey of life. In “The Sleeper,” June’s placement in the middle of the calendar is emphasized or heightened by the other temporal references. The poem is set “ at midnight, in the month of June .” Thus, it is not only the middle of the year, but also the middle of the night and, furthermore, the moment straddling the dividing line between one day and the next day. In “A Pæan,” the month is used to characterize the relative youth of the dead heroine: “Thou died’st in thy life’s June.” Poe does this often in other poems—he refers to the human lifespan by reference to t