poem

A Dream Within A Dream, Sep 20, 2026

Edgar Allan Poe

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Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow--
You 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 sand--
How 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?

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📖 About this poem

Poe wrote this as a farewell that keeps second-guessing itself. The speaker kisses someone goodbye, then spends the whole poem wondering whether anything he's lost was ever really his to lose, since life itself might be no more solid than a dream. The music does a lot of the work: short, tight rhyming lines that sound almost like a lullaby, which makes the ache underneath more unsettling. The famous image is the handful of sand slipping through his fingers on the shore, grains he can't hold no matter how hard he grips, sand standing in for moments, people, hope itself. It still lands because everyone knows that feeling of watching something good disappear in slow motion, unable to stop it. Poe doesn't offer comfort, just company in the not-knowing, which somehow feels honest rather than bleak.