A Dream within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe - Research Paper Example

Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Dream within a Dream” Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “A Dream within a Dream” is a commentary on reality and on time. The question becomes centered on the perception of time as we experience it, each moment gone before we realize what it held, consisting of nothing but memory and passing very quickly into oblivion. He emotes that he desires to hold onto time, grasp even as much as one grain of time, but laments that he cannot hold onto it, it is gone and cannot be regained. Time passes and fades, leaving memories that are shadowed with the consistency of a dream, making one wonder if anything that is remembered was real or if it was just a dream. The theme of the poem is compelling, evoking the same melancholy that is familiar within most of Poe’s work. The work of Poe makes the reader ache for a world in which such pain doesn’t exist, where time doesn’t pass leaving a hand empty of the falling sand, not one grain remaining. The optimum word to describe Poe’s style is that it is haunting, evoking a longing and sadness that is hard to deny. The poem exemplifies the way in which he desires for a difference, the way in which he tries to change the very fabric of time and fold reality to his own whim. However, he cannot do this so he writes in a way that is poignant, sorrowful, and without mercy to the reality that each person much face when considering such things. In the gothic dream world that has been designed by Poe, he has created a harsh and stark reality that speaks of the mortality that each person must face. The loneliness of this reality is evident in the way in which he makes the poem personal, not about humanity, but about himself alone. He does not comment on the state of time, reality, and aging as if there is a whole world of human beings facing similar fates, giving them all a connectivity that would allow for some space in which to at least feel as if one was not alone facing such things. He speaks in first person, making the experience singular. Therefore, as each person reads the poem, they find themselves alone in the situation that he describes, without relief from the stark world in which the world may or may not be real. The dream is a journey without companions, traveled until its end when reality, memory, and dream all converge into oblivion. According to Sova, a comparison to Plato’s allegory of the cave within The Republic can be made. In the allegory, prisoners define their reality only by the shadows on the wall. The question that Plato brings forth is in wondering how the reality outside of the shadows would be perceived if the whole of reality had been experienced through nothing but shadow (59). In this same way, Poe suggests that reality may or may not be what we remember. Poe is questioning the fabric of his reality, contemplating whether or not he has truly experienced his life or if it has been nothing but a dream. It is possible that his desire to hold onto some of it and the fact that it falls through his fingers anyway has suggested to him that it could not have been real. Poe wrote just previous to a time in which a great time of change within the philosophical contemplations of life and thought was about to take place. About 50 years after his death Freud and Jung were developing their theories about the mind and the way in which the meaning of action and reaction was changed. This was reflected within literature, both in writing and in interpretation. In 1933, Marie Bonaparte wrote a seven-hundred page criticism of Poe titled Edgar Poe: Etude Psychoanalytique, in which the author was analyzed through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis in order to provide insight into the dark recesses of Poe’s mind. There were great debates over the use of psychoanalysis to criticize literature. Peeples quotes Claude Morrison for questioning of Shakespeare about Hamlet, in regard to using psychoanalysis to critique the work, “Was the artist a neurotic individual who found release for his emotional problems in artistic expression, or was he a superior individual endowed with a greater than normal ability to harness unconscious emotional forces and transform them into universally communicable images and themes?” (30). In other words, was he brilliant or was he mad? Whether Poe was brilliant or mad is not the central issue when looking at his work from the point of view of his thought processes as what is abundantly clear is that he held a profound sadness. In another of his poems titled “The Dream” he says “In visions of the dark night/I have dreamed of joy departed - /But a waking dreams of life and light/Hath left me broken hearted”(373). This same theme of the comparison between dreams and reality is situated firmly within his writing. This poem defines the differences between reality and the dream and longs for the truth of the dream against the lie of his life. The differences leave him hurt, alone and without that which he longs to have with him. Reality is not in question, but he desire for the dream to be reality. Analyzing Poe from the point of view of the psychoanalyst provides an interesting opportunity to look into the ways in which the author may have been influenced. According to Peeples, “Theorists and critics quickly recognized the opportunities that Poe presented for psychoanalytical study, given his fiction’s emphasis on hidden motives and detection, altered states of consciousness, sadism, and obsession, as well as the self-destructive tendencies he exhibited in his own life” (30). Peeples suggests that those who psychoanalyze Poe tend to believe that he was perpetually jealous and demanding, was suppressing his tendencies towards necrophilia, sadism, and towards his desire for death, and a tendency towards incest where his mother was concerned. However, this entirely discounts any attempts towards being creative and towards purposely crafting his work (31). Therefore, it may never be clear how much of his work is literary intent and how much is the creative expression of his difficulties in life. Poe is often considered a morose drunk lamenting the loss of his wife, but he was also actively seeking a literary career and wrote with the intent of being a known author. The evidence of this is in the fact that he actively sought to have his work published during his lifetime with “The Raven” being his first published work in 1845, published before the loss of his wife in 1847 of tuberculosis (Bloom 46). The myth that he wrote this work after she died as he lamented her loss and was haunted by her memory has supported the idea that he was mad. Therefore, the direction of much of his work can be considered a part of his aesthetic, driven by his point of view and the type of haunting that he found worthy of his pen. As he laments the losses of his life, the ways in which the sands of his time and memories have slipped through his fingers, one can wonder at his skill in conveying the meaning that humanity has worked to express. He manages to express these thoughts in two verses, simply structured to let the reader know that part of the horror of life is that it all slips away and is never constructed of a firm grasp on what is real and what is the perception of reality. The question of reality has plagued writers for as long as there have been contemplative writings as exampled by the work of Plato who created a metaphor for the concept of perception with his allegory of the cave. This question was examined during the 1990 Wachowski film, “The Matrix” in which the perception of reality was bent until it broke off into a divide between what was injected as reality and what was a true reality. This was further broken when in the sequel that same reality was redefined by the ’creator’ who tells the protagonist that what his whole world perceives to be true apart from the matrix itself, is also a creation in which they live. What the Wachowski brothers do in three films that equal over 6 hours of philosophical meanderings about the nature of reality, Poe sums up in two verses. The poem laments what he has lost, speaking of his life as if all that was most valuable has passed from his life. He asks “If hope has flown away/In a night, or in a day,/In a vision, or in none,/Is it therefore less gone?”(Poe and Ingram 40). What has slipped from his life is gone, so therefore whether it held any reality or not is also a premise that is gone. It is the content of his life that has no substance, gone and intangible as hope has flown from him, no longer framing his future. Therefore, if he is no longer in the midst of reality, if he has no future and only the past remains of what seemed real to him, how then can he believe what he remembers to be more than a dream if it has no connection to his present? The complication of his present is that it appears to contain none of the elements, or the ‘sand’ that made up the moments that he cherished from his past. His life has changed from his perspective on how he remembers what his life should be, so therefore it has no connection to reality. If one believes that his life was once one of a married man with a family and a future, then in the moment of this writing he has lost all of those things and he now resides in a world that holds none of the things that he considers real. They are plagued by the hauntings of his past, the fragments of life that no longer are part of his present. Therefore, they are no longer a part of his reality as nothing of them remains. When one has experienced the death of those who have a significant impact on their daily lives, this feeling can seem very familiar. In the passing of someone who lives in the home, one experiences a loss that has more impact than just the passing of someone one loves. All of the traditions, the impact, and the small ways in which daily life is lived with someone seem to fall apart, each thread slipping away until the entire tapestry of life with that person falls apart within the memory. One loses the feeling of having that person there when you wake up, in the quiet times, and in the ways that matter most, yet held little weight in those moments they were experienced. The memory of those things, the feeling of them, slips away, much like the grains of sand, each one seemingly indistinguishable from another, but holding an individuality that can never be repeated. The theme of the work can be defined through a number of universal themes. The poem speaks of time, reality, and of the nature of memory. The poem speaks of loss and of death, though not directly. The secondary themes can be accessed through an understanding of the emotions that are examined during the elements of the work. The themes are not new, but the way in which they are designed to speak to them through a poignant and economy gives the poem a depth that reaches beyond the well phrased concepts. While one can frame it within the experience of Edgar Allan Poe, it can also be translated to be understood by anyone who has lost a life - not through death, but through the losses of the structure and traditions that make up a life. When those are disrupted, they eventually feel as if they have never been experienced, as if in remembering them it is nothing more than a dream that can never be regained. The skill in which Poe creates this feeling and translates it reveals the skill with which he wrote. Whether he experienced a series of repressed and disturbed desires or he enjoyed evoking the haunting within the soul, the end result is a collection of work that brings forth the dark memories and thoughts of the human soul. In this poem, he evokes a longing and sense of memory in which there is loss in order to touch upon the universality of those feelings. Though the poem creates a sense of singularity and loneliness, it touches upon emotions that most anyone can relate to from their own life. Works Cited Bloom, Harold. Edgar Allan Poe. Bloom's major poets. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1999. Print. Peeples, Scott. The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe. Studies in American literature and culture : literary criticism in perspective. Rochester, NY [u.a.: Camden House, 2007. Print. Poe, Edgar A, The Raven and other Writings. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Print. Poe, Edgar A, and John H. Ingram. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: W.J. Widdleton, 1876. Print. Sova, Dawn B. Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York, NY: Facts on File, 2007. Print. Read More