All that we see or seem is but a dream…

The line closes the first stanza of the poem. The speaker kisses someone on the brow as they part, and concedes: “You are not wrong, who deem / That my days have been a dream”. If hope has flown away, whether in a night or in a day, in a vision or in none, is it “therefore the less gone?” Then comes the line. In the second stanza, he stands on a “surf-tormented shore”, holding grains of golden sand that creep through his fingers into the deep, and he weeps: “O God! can I not save / One from the pitiless wave?” The poem ends by turning the statement into a question: “Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?”

Edgar Allan Poe published the poem in 1849, the year he died in Baltimore, at forty. The sand slipping through the fingers has become a classic image of time and loss.

A Dream Within a Dream, end of the first stanza, 1849

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work