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“A Dream Within a Dream” features an unsettled and existential tone. The poem’s unsettled quality stems primarily from its formal features. For instance, the twenty-four lines of the poem are not evenly distributed across its two stanzas. Instead of two balanced 12-line stanzas, we get an unsettling imbalance: one 11-line stanza and one 13-line stanza. The poem’s rhyme scheme also communicates a sense of being unsettled. At two points Poe interrupts the poem’s orderly use of couplets with an unexpected triplet, which disrupts the general sense of order. Finally, the poem’s shifting meter creates an impression of acceleration. As the four-beat lines of the first stanza give way to the three-beat lines of the second stanza, an impression of growing speed amplifies the overall feeling of agitation. In addition to being formally unsettled, the poem also has an existential tone that comes across in the speaker’s increasingly distraught mental state. The shift in the speaker’s psychic well-being manifests dramatically in the transition from the first stanza to the second. Whereas the speaker initially appears confident about their opinions, in the second stanza the speaker loses all sense of surety and calls out desperately to God for existential grounding.

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