The Speaker

The speaker is the primary, first-person singular character of “A Dream Within a Dream.” However, despite being the primary character and narrative point of view of the poem, he maintains a somewhat minimal presence in the first stanza, only directly referring to himself in the singular twice, with the first-person pronoun “me” in line 3 and “my” in line 5. Nonetheless, Poe’s tone remains highly personal and emotive, very honest about the despair he feels about loss. Therefore, there is the sense that with his poem, Poe is letting us peer directly into his mind as his emotive language flows through him, without feeling to need to intentionally attach first-person markers to it. This lack of first-person pronoun can be interpreted as an attempt to dissociate himself from his psychological suffering, an attempt to list his despair down honestly as he feels it as a form of catharsis...