A Dream Within American Dream

Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Dream Within A Dream” brings with it a feeling of doubt, and possibly even a little fear; uneasiness at the very least. Using things such as an ambiguous speaker, sort, fast lines, and an increasing rhythm, this poem brings the question: “how can we possibly tell what is real, and what is not?” after all, there is no way to truly know anything is real.

The form in which Edgar created this poem leads you to stress and uneasiness with the short lines and smooth rhyme scheme. These short flowing lines lead you to read faster and faster, increasingly until the end. Accompanying this speed is a sense of almost anxiety, or urgency. All this intensity and stress leads to the ending lines “Is all that we see or seem/ But a dream

In the lines “ Grains of the golden sand--/How few! yet how they creep/ O God! can I not save/

One from the pitiless wave?” tell he cannot even hold onto even a single grain of sand, this leads him to question if reality is actually what it seems. It truly brings to thought what can and can be trusted in our reality as it does have a sometimes malicious way about it.

Tone is something many poets use to great effect on readers, used it to build atmosphere among other things it bring the reader further into a story or poem. In “A Dream Within A Dream” Edgar brings the reader into feeling the narrator's anxiety, anger, and sadness as the poem goes on. Starting in a mild, almost curious and teaching tone that shows an almost idle thought about the subject. This mildness turns into many emotions very quickly, fear, anger, and sadness forming the bulk of these. The word choices get more intense as the poem goes on, to indicate this going from words like “kiss” and “dream” to words like “roar” and “weep” by the end of the first stanza, making the poem feel more intense and scary. This shift in tone serves to draw the reader in further making the reader feel what the narrator