A Dream Within a Dream
A Dream Within a Dream - meaning Summary
Reality as a Fading Dream
The poem presents a speaker saying farewell and admitting that life feels dreamlike while hope can disappear without clear cause. It shifts from an intimate address to a stark image of standing on a surf-tormented shore as grains of sand slip through the speaker’s hand. The slipping sand dramatizes loss and the impossibility of holding on, suggesting perception itself may be illusory. Repeated questions about saving even one grain frame existential doubt and grief. The closing refrain insists on the unsettling idea that all we perceive might be a dream within a dream
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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?
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