Tynan Portillo presents, featuring the works of Edgar Allan Poe and the best horror stories from the 19th century. Welcome to The Poe Show podcast. Music and narration by Tynan Portillo. Please see trigger warnings in this episode description.

Today’s episode, Dreams, a poem by Edgar Allan Poe.

Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream!
My spirit not awakening, till the beam
Of an Eternity should bring the morrow.
Yes! tho’ that long dream were of hopeless sorrow,
’Twere better than the cold reality
Of waking life, to him whose heart must be,
And hath been still, upon the lovely earth,
A chaos of deep passion, from his birth.
But should it be—that dream eternally
Continuing—as dreams have been to me
In my young boyhood—should it thus be given,
’Twere folly still to hope for higher Heaven.
For I have revell’d when the sun was bright
I’ the summer sky, in dreams of living light,
And loveliness,—have left my very heart
In climes of mine imagining, apart
From mine own home, with beings that have been
Of mine own thought—what more could I have seen?
’Twas once—and only once—and the wild hour
From my remembrance shall not pass—some power
Or spell had bound me—’twas the chilly wind
Came o’er me in the night, and left behind
Its image on my spirit—or the moon
Shone on my slumbers in her lofty noon
Too coldly—or the stars—howe’er it was
That dream was as that night-wind—let it pass.

I have been happy, tho’ [but] in a dream.

I have been happy—and I love the theme:
Dreams! in their vivid colouring of life
As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
Of semblance with reality which brings
To the delirious eye, more lovely things
Of Paradise and Love—and all our own!
Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.

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Dreams was one of Edgar Allan Poe’s first ever published poems, included in the collection Tamerlane and Other Poems in 1827. Poe funded that publication with his own money and some donations from fellow cadets he’d connected with while at West Point Military Academy. Years later, that collection, once it became known that it was Edgar Allan Poe’s, received many criticisms that said it was obviously Poe’s first and most rudimentary work, lacking his later literary discipline and skill. But I think this one quote by Poe biographer Arthur Hobson Quinn sums that work up nicely: “it was the trumpet blast announcing that a new poet had stepped upon the stage".

Poe has talked about dreams in other poems, such as A Dream Within a Dream, Dream-Land, and A Dream. Dreams are clearly quite important to Poe, and their thematic use instills an ethereal nature to this poem. As I’ve said before: poems don’t have to have stories, they are journeys in and of themselves. A poem can be about trees, nature, romance, death, religion - nothing is off limits, and nothing has to have closure either. Stories are more satisfying if they have endings, and usually it feels best when those endings are happy. But poems operate outside of those limits. In a strange coincidence, poems usually operate, and can be as interpretive, as dreams.

The desire of our narrator, which is definitely Edgar Allan Poe writing as himself (a point of view he would later abandon for his much preferred “unnamed narrator”), is that if his dream is only about hopeless sorrow he’d prefer it over the cold reality of waking life.

In the melancholic second stanza Poe acknowledges that he has been happy, but only in a dream. This makes Poe love dreams and their themes more than even having Hope in the sunniest hour, because dreams have infinite possibilities, yet they come from our own minds!

Honestly, I can see how this poem lacks some…more mature structure to it that Poe gave his later works. But it can be debated on whether or not that makes this poem “bad.” It goes from a joyous remark of dreams to a lament on dreams’ impermanence, then to a reminiscence on Poe’s past dreams, finally ending with a conclusion that despite all Hope that Life can give, it's better to dwell on dreams. The poem lacks a structural throughline that ties these ideas together or orders them properly. Poe seems to be jumping around and filling the page with whatever is popping into his contemplation.

An equal example would be something like this: “I once went to the store to buy bread. And you know, stores are great. You can get so many things at stores, because there’s so many different kinds! I remember when I once went to the store and got some chocolate. It was very good chocolate, and I want it again, but I can’t remember which store it was in.” Do you see how the common thread in my statements is stores, but that doesn’t give them any direction? It’s almost like I’m writing down any thought I have at the moment about stores. But always remember, if something is able to be criticised it doesn’t make it bad.

It could be a point from Poe to write this poem in this way to better reflect the nature of dreams themselves. I mean, I once had a dream that I was trapped in my house, gremlins were breaking in, a flood of them on the floor ran towards me, then one of them suddenly exploded. I turned and saw a woman holding a shotgun, and I heard an audience cheering like I was on a sitcom as she cocked another round in the gun. None of that is connected in any way. So perhaps Poe writing this poem with that disjointed focus is completely on purpose.

So what’s your interpretation of this poem? Better yet, what’s a weird dream you remember but don’t know what it means? Comment on YouTube, Spotify and more and let me know because I want to know how you interpret…Dreams.

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That’s all for now, but you’ll hear from me again on the next episode of The Poe show.