Please address the potentials symbols in "A Dream Within a Dream." I understand that the sand is his inability to hold onto anything. And the waves are losses from his past maybe. I don't know, i need an interpretation for a paper due in my english class by Wednesday September 11, 2002. All interpretations, critisms, or analysis points would be much appreciated. (If it happens to be after Wednesday the 11th i would still be interested to learn of your interpretations). Thank you for your help, Claire Wilson

-- Anonymous, September 08, 2002

Answers

All about Time and Space... (Vide "Eureka", some of the "Marginalia", as well as many more references among his own various writings, Poe being decidedly the best commentator of his own works!) Yours sincerely, Raven's Shade (Belgium).

-- Anonymous, September 09, 2002

Symbolic borderland between life and death and similar contrasts. See "Annabel Lee" "Silence". The place where the poet is transfixed, a seer but separate from the realities of life(the lost but inescapable past) and death(the afterlife of hope, the unseen revelation). This is key, I think, as opposed to merely defining what the sea and land are in their symbolic qwualities. it is the state of the poet where he stands firmly and unsatisfyingly fixed between. Baudelaire's "The Albatross" really defines the psotion of the poet as key, a soaring spirit in the air but a clumsy tragic clown tied to land. Poe is more ambiguous and tortured by being neither here nor there though certainly on the last edge of life with his best memories lost behind him.

-- Anonymous, September 10, 2002