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Overview
“A Dream Within a Dream” is a lyric poem that Edgar Allan Poe wrote in the final year of his life, 1849
. This poem shares many of the hallmarks that have made Poe’s work so beloved. It features a tortured speaker who feels deeply unsettled by their increasing uncertainty about the nature of reality. However, it’s also more existential than some of Poe’s other work. A key image in the poem shows the speaker crying out to God as handfuls of sand slip through their fingers—a powerful symbol for mortality and the unstoppable passage of time.Read the free full text, a summary & analysis, an analysis of the speaker, and explanations of important quotes from “A Dream Within a Dream.”
