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Edgar Allan PoeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“A Dream Within a Dream” is a Romantic lyric poem that asks the reader to consider a melancholy philosophical question about the nature of love and reality itself: what is real and what is a dream?
As the poem opens, the poem’s speaker is leaving the person the poem addresses. The speaker offers this person a gentle “kiss upon the brow!” (Line 1). A kiss upon the forehead like this symbolizes friendship and affection. However, using an exclamation mark to create the end line implies that the speaker has more passion for the person they are kissing than friendship.
The speaker and the poem’s addressee seem to be at the end of a meaningful conversation they have been having back and forth for some time. It appears that the speaker is trying to convince the “you” in the poem of something by swearing: “Thus much let me avow—” (Line 3) which echoes the language of a marital promise.
However, the second person in the conversation does not take this proposal seriously. The poem’s addressee suggests to the speaker that he spends too much of his life dreaming and not grounded in material reality: “You are not wrong, who deem / That my days have been a dream;” (Lines 3-4).
By Edgar Allan Poe
Annabel Lee
Edgar Allan Poe
Berenice
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Hop-Frog
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Ligeia
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Tamerlane
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The Black Cat
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The Cask of Amontillado
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The Conqueror Worm
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The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
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The Fall of the House of Usher
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The Gold Bug
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The Haunted Palace
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The Imp of the Perverse
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The Lake
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The Man of the Crowd
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The Masque of the Red Death
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The Murders in the Rue Morgue
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The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
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The Oval Portrait
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The Philosophy of Composition
Edgar Allan Poe