can someone help me interpret edgar allan poe's a dream within a dream poem:


Take this kiss upon the brow
and in parting from you now
thus much let me avow
you are not wrong who deem
that my days have been a dream
yet if hope has flown away
in a night or in a day
in a vision or in none
is it therefore the less gone
all that we see or seem
is but a dream within a dream

i stand amid the roar
of a surf-tomented shore
and i hold within my hands
grains of the golden sand
how few yet how they creep
through m fingers to the deep
while i weep, while i weep
O god, can i not grasp
then with a tighter clasp
O god! can I not save
one from the pitiless wave
is all that we see or seem
but a dream within a dream

I think it means that everything you do is basically a dream

its a love poem...he's fallen in love with a woman.....and while everything is dreamlike...and wonderful....the dream has ended and they have parted.....he is grasping at sand....which we know is nearly impossible....and he weeps for his loss. He is saying that life is just a dream, and the good things that happen in our lives are just dreams within it. nothing is real, everything is abstract.

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Check the psychological term 'doppleganger' - like the'dream', this too seems prevailent in much of Poe's writings.

Doppelganger - A ghostly double of a living person, especially one that haunts its fleshly counterpart.

News to me. Got any examples you can provide?

Poe is grasping onto the last few grains of his life, wondering how he much longer he has to live, and if he's even living at all. For all he knows, he could be living inside a dream.

Poe can't connect with the world of reality, and all that he has of this world ( the grains of sand) is slipping away (and he's about to be carried away by the waves). As he tries to connect to the reality that he believes is real, he wonders if it truly is.

it means that life and love is fleeting