A Dream Within a Dream: Key Poetic Devices

Metaphor

The poem’s major conceit consists of a metaphor that likens waking life to a dream within a dream. This metaphor is deceptively simple. On the surface, it seems to suggest that life is nothing more than a dream. In dreams, we can’t always control what we do or how we feel. If life is like a dream, it’s because we similarly feel unable to control our reality. However, there’s another layer of complexity involved in the speaker’s assertion at the end of the first stanza: “All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream” (lines 10–11). Consider what it’s like to have a dream within a dream. No doubt you’ve seen a film where a character wakes up from one dream, only to find that they are still dreaming and still haven’t woken up. Perhaps you’ve even experienced this phenomenon yourself. Such an experience is especially disorienting, precisely because waking and dreaming states become radically indistinguishable. Thus, if life isn’t merely a dream, but a dream within a dream, it means that the basic sense of reality has been thoroughly destabilized. The speaker uses this metaphor to express their profound existential crisis.

Personification

A clear example of personification appears in the second stanza, when the speaker laments their inability to save even one grain of sand from “the pitiless wave” (line 22). Personification is a literary device in which a poet or speaker attributes human qualities to an inanimate, nonhuman object. In this case, the speaker attributes the human quality of pitilessness to a wave. Waves may possess an intrinsic dynamism, but describing a wave as “pitiless” falsely implies that it could somehow choose to show pity. Of course, the wave cannot choose, and the speaker’s phrase reveals more about their own mind than it does about the wave. Indeed, the setting of the second stanza serves to reveal the speaker’s state of mind. The whole latter half of the poem could therefore be understood as an example of what’s known as the pathetic fallacy. Though closely related to personification, the pathetic fallacy tends to be less formal and more indirect in its projection of human qualities onto nonhuman entities. Here, the entire beach becomes a projection screen. That is, the shoreline, “tormented” by the violent surf, is a projection of the speaker’s psychological state, which is equally tormented by agitated thoughts.

Rhetorical Questions

The speaker uses rhetorical questions to powerful effect. Generally speaking, rhetorical questions aren’t meant to be answered. Rather, writers and orators use them to make a point or create a dramatic effect. The speaker’s first rhetorical question occurs in the middle of the first stanza (lines 6–9), where they ask:

Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore less the gone?

In these lines, the speaker uses a rhetorical question to make a point. And the point is, basically, that it doesn’t matter whether life is real or a dream if a person has lost hope. Either way, hope is gone. Whereas the speaker addresses this question to an unseen companion, they address their subsequent rhetorical questions, first to God, and then to themselves. The final six lines of the poem consist of three consecutive rhetorical questions, which primarily serve to create a dramatic effect as the speaker becomes increasingly distraught. The intensity reaches its peak when, alone and agitated on a stormy beach, the speaker asks: “Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?” (lines 23–24). These lines rephrase the assertion the speaker made at the close of the first stanza. By reformulating their earlier assertion as a question, the speaker reveals their growing sense of existential uncertainty.

Apostrophe

Apostrophe (uh-PAW-struh-FEE) is a rhetorical figure in which a speaker makes a direct and explicit address, usually to an absent person or to an object or abstract entity. In the case of “A Dream Within a Dream,” apostrophe appears in the second stanza (lines 19–22), where the speaker cries out to God:

O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?

Frustrated by their inability to hold on to the sand that is seeping through their fingers, the speaker makes a conventionally rhetorical exclamation to God. However conventional they may be, the speaker utters these cries of “O God!” in a fit of great existential intensity. The speaker feels pressured by the unstoppable passage of time, as suggested by the veiled reference to sand sifting through an hourglass. Furthermore, the inability to hold on to even one grain of sand makes the speaker feel completely ineffectual, as if they have no agency. The world just passes them by, and they have no ability to take control. In this context, the apostrophe to God expresses a last-ditch attempt on the speaker’s part to bring order to an experience that otherwise feels out of their control.

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