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And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avowYou are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of the golden sandHow few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep- while I weep! O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp? O God! can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?
existence of the shore. The narrator regards the wave as "pitiless," but he further associates himself with the temporal nature of the water by weeping in tandem with the falling of the sand. Although the two stanzas are not identical in length, their similar use of an iambic rhythm and of couplets and triplets in their end rhyme scheme creates a pattern that matches the parallel of their ideas. In particular, the refrain lines "All that we see or seem/Is but a dream within a dream" unite the passages in the poem's conclusion of futility and regret at the movement of time. Poe draws attention to "all that we see or seem" with alliteration, and we can view this phrase as the combination of two aspects of reality, where "all that we see" is the external and "all that we seem" is the internal element. By asserting that both sides are the also alliterative phrase "a dream within a dream," Poe suggests that neither is more real than a dream. As the title, the phrase "a dream within a dream" has a special significance to any interpretations of the poem. Poe takes the idea of a daydream and twists it so that the narrator's perception of reality occurs at two degrees of detachment away from reality. Consequently, this reality reflects upon itself through the dream medium, and the narrator can no longer distinguish causality in his perception. By showing the narrator's distress at his observations, Poe magnifies the risks of uncertainty and of the potential changes to his identity. Time is a powerful but mysterious force that promotes cognitive dissonance between the protagonist's self and his abilities of comprehension, and the daydream proves to have ensnared him. Alternatively, the poem itself may be viewed as the outermost dream, where the inner dream is merely a function of the narrator's mind.