Disillusionment

Rather than a romantic portrayal of young love, the poem represents a period of disillusionment on the part of the speaker. The dream sequence or memory of the poem harkens back to a period of romantic joy and excitement: “I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed / And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane” (Lines 7-8). In the present moment, however, the speaker is reeling from the encroaching loss of this love and is beginning to question whether it truly existed at all — or whether it existed in the way the speaker remembers it. The repeated line “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead” (Line 1) suggests that the speaker is blocking out the intensity of their feelings. Immediately they start asking themselves if their lover was real, or if their connection was an artifice the speaker embellished in order to reach a...