Edgar Allan Poe - A Dream Within a Dream (Take this kiss upon the brow)
"Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?" A reading of Edgar Allan Poe's famous poem. The poem expresses the author's feelings of being unable to hold on the things that matter the most to him. We can infer from many of his other works, such as "The Raven", "Annabel Lee", "The Sleeper" and others that he is referring to the death of the important women in his life, and specifically to the death of his wife, Virginia Clemm, who died at the age of twenty-four. For those who have known such a loss, says Poe, love and happiness seem to slip away like a dream, leaving one engulfed by a fog of pain, with nothing left but the memories of the happiness that once was and will be "nevermore". Another poem in which these same ideas are expressed is "To One in Paradise". In that poem, Poe says that love was a "dream too bright to last" and that all his "days are trances", because his "Spirit hovering lies over the Past", while all his "nightly dreams" are filled with visions of the woman he loved, now dead. These themes are echoed all the way back to "A Dream", a poem that Poe published when he was only eighteen. In that poem, the author talks about the "waking dream of life and light" and everything being like "a dream by day to him whose eyes are cast...back upon the past". The poem was first published in March 1849. Poe died six months later. Featured images are free to use under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) License. First image in order of appearance by Stefan Keller from Pixabay (https://pixabay.com/users/kellepics-4.... Second image in order of appearance is a darkened version of a photo by Free-Photos from Pixabay (https://pixabay.com/users/free-photos.... Third image in order of appearance by sabri ismail from Pixabay(https://pixabay.com/users/pok_rie-321.... "A Dream Within a Dream" by Edgar Allan Poe 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?
