William Butler Yeats

Her Dream

Her Dream - meaning Summary

Dream of Lost Adornment

The speaker recounts a vivid dream in which he shaves his hair and places it on Love’s "lettered tomb" as an offering. Before it can remain, a violent upheaval carries the hair away, and it is transformed into the famed image of "Berenice's burning hair" fixed in the night. The poem compresses an intimate act of renunciation into an abrupt, mythic transfiguration that links private loss to cosmic spectacle.

Read Complete Analyses

I dreamed as in my bed I lay, All night's fathomless wisdom come, That I had shorn my locks away And laid them on Love's lettered tomb: But something bore them out of sight In a great tumult of the air, And after nailed upon the night Berenice's burning hair.

default user
PoetryVerse just now

Feel free to be first to leave comment.

8/2200 - 0