The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Poe, Edgar Allan. “A Dream Within a Dream,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52829/a-dream-within-a-dream.

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotation comes.

Born in 1809, Edgar Allan Poe was an American poet and writer. He is best known for his invention of detective fiction through his Gothic horror short stories written in the mystery genre. As such, he was a primary figure in American Dark Romanticism, which opposed Transcendentalism. Even though Poe only lived to be forty years old, his life was filled with scandal and tragedy. He was orphaned with his father’s abandonment of his family in 1810 and his mother’s death in 1811. Though John and Francis Allan raised him into young adulthood, Poe and John Allan had a contentious relationship over the use of money for Poe’s education and gambling debts. Eventually, they parted ways completely. Throughout his life, Poe also had numerous troubling romantic relationships with women, the most famous of which was his marriage to his first cousin, Virginia Eliza Clemm when he was twenty-seven years old and she was thirteen years old. Their marriage lasted for eleven years until Clemm’s death from tuberculosis – her death, which caused Poe to despair and turn to alcoholism, was the inspiration behind several of Poe’s poems centered around the death of a beautiful young women, such as “Annabel Lee,” “The Raven,” and “Ligeia.”

Poe’s “A Dream within a Dream” was first published not in a collection of poetry but individually in 1849 in The Flag of Union, a Boston newspaper that focused on publishing stories. The poem opens with its speaker addressing an unnamed “you” about a life that slips away like “a dream within a dream” because it is filled to the brim with loss. In the second and final stanza, Poe’s speaker expands upon this idea of abject loss by focusing on the image of sand slipping away from between his fingers, emphasizing his perceived inability to salvage even the smallest parts of his life that are precious to him. When practicing literary and poetic analysis, one should typically be careful not to equate the speaker of the poem with the viewers of the poem’s author. However, the highly emotional, subjective, and personal lament in Poe’s “A Dream within a Dream” suggests that, in the case of this poem, one could equate the first-person narrator with Poe himself.