A dream within a dream

[Kyriakos]

A Dream Within A Dream

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?
Edgar Allan Poe

-I would like to ask you what you think of this poem. What you think it means, what it meant to Poe, what other possible meanings it can have.

A dream can be our life here. The dream which it is part of, another dream we have at the same time, somewhere else, in our real state. That the other dream is one at the end of which we will rise back to the reality seems to me to be signified by the note that this dream here is contained within it, always. They both could end at the same time, or the dream here would end a bit before the other one, but not the other way around :)

It is my favorite poem.

[Drkshadow03]

Since we will inevitably die and be washed away completely, forgotten like those grains of sand he cannot save, our brief lives are of no more value than a dream. Something that is forgotten when we awake and has no real physical existence.Is it all just a big waste of time in the end? Are our lives and the things we hold important, our hopes, nothing more than a dream within a dream? That is what I think Poe is getting at.

[cafolini]

Poe is first of all an atheist and he's convinced that he'll end in nothing. Because of that, he has no hope for life to anything but a dream. And if he could wake up and engage in any thing that would imply success in actuality, it would be no thing but another dream within the previous one. He's a very tortured person for he has no actuality to engage in and he knows that anything like that is a dream. He knows no hope. For him, anyone who doesn't realize he/she's dreaming no matter what, is a fool. Poor guy.

[krishna_lit]

It is my favorite poem.
This is my favourite poem too, next to 'Eldorado' by Edgar Alan Poe..

I fell for these two lines:

All that you see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream..

For me these two lines mean a lot, it means that our whole life is an Illusion in which we drive for desires that would finally end up as nothing by our last breath.. so it is an illusion again within the bigger illusion called Life.. Dream within a dream - Illusion within an illusion..

[mona amon]

I've recently become interested in poetry, or at least I'm trying to, so I gave it a go. I had to read it over several times, and the impression I got is the poet is being dumped by his girl (if hope has flown away), who has accused him of being delusional (You deem that my days have been a dream). He counters with the thought that if she's dumping him anyway, what difference does it make whether he was delusional or not, and that leads to further thoughts about transience and ephemerality.