Dream - Analysis

A dream where desire is gently immobilized

The poem stages a small, uncanny drama in which the speaker’s heart is drawn toward a cold fountain and gradually loses its human agency. What begins as rest and song ends in a kind of surrender: the heart falls into the cold, and the water takes over the music. The repeated parenthetical voices feel like forces inside the dream—commands, spells, or stage directions—turning a private longing into something muffled, bound, and finally carried away.

The fountain’s song versus the heart’s desires

Early on, the poem keeps the heart and the fountain in a delicate alternation. The fountain-water sang it the song, and then the heart, waking sang its desires. The symmetry matters: both can sing, but they sing different things. The fountain’s song sounds impersonal, like a natural refrain, while the heart’s song is explicitly want-filled. Even before anything violent happens, the dream sets up a tension between a world that already has its own music and a self that tries to insert longing into it.

The spider: silence that also “makes”

The parenthetical refrain Fill it with threads introduces the poem’s strangest figure: the spider of silence. A spider doesn’t erase by smashing; it erases by covering, connecting, webbing over. Silence here is not empty—it is busy, intricate, almost artistic. When the refrain shifts to Spider of nothingness, the threat deepens: the web is no longer just hush but a kind of metaphysical blankness that can still spin your mystery. The poem’s contradiction is sharp: it asks silence and nothingness to produce something—threads, mystery—suggesting that what stifles the heart is also what fascinates it.

The tonal turn: from listening “sombrely” to joy

A subtle turn happens in the fountain’s reaction. At first the fountain-water listened sombrely, as if the heart’s desires have darkened the scene or gone unheard in the way the heart hopes. Then, once the heart falls into the fountain, the water carries it singing with joy. That joy is chilling. It feels less like celebration of the heart and more like the fountain’s delight in absorbing it—nature’s song resuming, strengthened by what it has taken.

White hands “far-out”: rescue, distance, and denial

The final parenthetical images—White hands, far-out—suggest a possibility of intervention: hold back the water. Yet the very next line negates it: nothing there in the water. The hands are distant, perhaps imagined, perhaps symbolic of help that can’t reach the dreamer in time. Their whiteness can read as purity or ghostliness, but either way they fail to grasp anything solid. The poem ends by insisting on an unsettling double truth: the heart has been carried off, and in the place where it vanished there is, officially, nothing.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If the fountain is cold, why does it sing with joy when the heart disappears into it? The dream seems to ask whether the world’s music requires the heart’s erasure—whether desire must be webbed over by the spider of silence so that the larger, indifferent song can continue untroubled.