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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

A Dream within a Dream


              1Take this kiss upon the brow!
              2And, in parting from you now,
              3Thus much let me avow--
              4You are not wrong, who deem
              5That my days have been a dream;
              6Yet if hope has flown away
              7In a night, or in a day,
              8In a vision, or in none,
              9Is it therefore the less gone?
            10All that we see or seem
            11Is but a dream within a dream.

            12I stand amid the roar
            13Of a surf-tormented shore,
            14And I hold within my hand
            15Grains of the golden sand--
            16How few! yet how they creep
            17Through my fingers to the deep,
            18While I weep--while I weep!
            19O God! can I not grasp
            20Them with a tighter clasp?
            21O God! can I not save
            22One from the pitiless wave?
            23Is all that we see or seem
            24But a dream within a dream?

Notes

1] Thomas Ollive Mabbott finds Poe's title "in Graham's for October 1848, as the title of a sentimental story by C. A. Washburn which ends, `It was but a dream within a dream'" (Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969]: I, 451).


Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.

Original text: The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, ed. R. W. Griswold (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1850), II, 40.
First publication date: 1850
Publication date note: (but a rewriting of "Should my early life seem" [1829])
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 2.0.
Recent editing: 2:2002/4/10

Form: couplets and triplets


Other poems by Edgar Allan Poe