A Dream Within A Dream by Edgar Allan Poe - Tone

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?


In “A Dream Within A Dream,” the narrator is grieving upon the loss of a loved one and his hopes and dreams. Poe does this in a sarcastic way, claiming even though he’s lost so much, it doesn’t really matter because life is just a dream. He is questioning whether it matters if he lost anything as Nothing is real and “All that we see or seem\ Is but a dream within a dream.” His tone is bitter, and sarcastic and borderline angry. It’s clear that he is bitter over the loss but he conveys it with sarcasm.

The next stanza talks about how everything he hopes to hang onto slips “through my fingers to the deep,” while he can only weep. Poe’s tone is depressing and angry. The use of “O, God” suggests anger over his inability to hang onto the important things in life. He grieves over the loss of the “few” important things in his life (“golden sand”) as he stands on a “surf-tormented shore” which is boundary between him and the rest of the world. At the end, he questions whether anything he does is real, a result of his torment and depression