Hi!! i wanted to now what is the main idea or what is happening in the poem " A Dream" and i need a prose statment.

-- Anonymous, February 24, 2004

Answers

Poe swam 6 miles! AGAINST CURRENT!!!!!!!!! when he was fifTEEN!!!!!!!

-- Anonymous, February 24, 2004

i LOVE THIS POEM! it is soo cool, well neways, you know how poetry is supposed to express your feelings and it doesn't have to allways do with what's going on, i think he finds hope or becomes happy somehow, it was probably his birthday that day

-- Anonymous, February 24, 2004

Try www.eapoe.org for the early 1827 longer version with the first stanza discussing his youthful state. Poe tightened it to apply more to his whole life moved on from those days but still definitely having that same eye cast back upon the past as upon a misty ideal. The slight singsong simplicity masks the sonnet like tight complexity of the ideas. Note the questions and answers, the arfggmuent, the comparison between night dreams and waking memory or daydreams. At night the truth of their being gone is hidden. By day the truth makes the ideal departed painful. The interplay becomes deep and complex in the expanded imagery of light.

The beam that wakes one from a night dream becomes the beam of memory itself, truth''s daystar, shimmering distorted by the stormy skies, but stronger than the dark, symbolically stronger than the srorrows of the present. So by a play and twist and a retwist the triumph of light is in the dream which Poe remains turned to for his soul's life. A very neat poem that if it had taken the form of a sonnet would have been given a lot more credit. There is more as to his youthful sources for the poem in Mabbott's "E A Poe Complete Poems" (which I can't find at the moment)Byron I think, but the [poem matures or is reinforced by Poe's lifelong fidelity to his poetic vision.

To see the youth/maturity process see also the little gem "The Lake" which most explicitly images the core of Poe's particular inspiration worth more(in jhis last reassessment) than all fame, money or love. Poe's other poems on dreams or dreaming might be helpful but they are different and may confuse the issue beyond the scope of this particular poem which deals more with his connection to his Ideal and an idealized past connection to it.

-- Anonymous, February 25, 2004

Try this website: http://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poealchl.htm

-- Anonymous, March 02, 2004