Summary

“A Dream Within a Dream” opens immediately with a command from Poe – “Take this kiss upon the brow!" – and him addressing one of the major concerns of the poem – how he exists in a constant state of “parting” from everything that he loves (1-2). For the rest of the first stanza, the speaker further develops his overwhelming sense of loss resulting from “parting.” He likens his loss filled “days” to a “dream” (5). Subsequently, he emphasizes the totality of loss and the “hope [that] has flown away” with it (6). He admits that the circumstance in which one loses how are multitudinous – “In a night, or in a day, / In a vision, or in none” – but emphasizes, with a rhetorical question, how the disheartening result is always the same regardless of particular circumstances: “Is it [hope] the less gone?” (7-9). The first stanza ends with the...