Poetry

Hey,

Sorry for the late posts, I really want to be asleep but my mind stays awake longer than my body evidently :( :D.

Right now I'm in the mood, not to talk but to learn. When I'm like this and it's too late to have a deep conversation, as most people are sleeping, I think poetry is the best thing.

Having briefly read a few poems, I've picked this one out at random;

'A dream within a dream'
By Edgar Allan Poe

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-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them 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'm just, on first and ever reading, fascinated by the illusiveness that is a 'dream within a dream'. A state that must be entirely certain and positively uncertain at the same time. You grasp for something that is so seemingly unattainable that you have to produce one dream in order to get to the second? Or it may be an entirely different case altogether, that's just my interpretation. I know absolutely nothing about Allan Poe, but the rhythmic pace this poem adapts is somehow comforting. Like a story told many times, both out loud and in thought, deep rhetorical questioning forms the basis for the narrator's understanding of the situation themselves.

I feel it's undoubtedly about lost or unrequited love. It is the grasp of understanding in feelings that are too powerful for the author to comprehend... Or possibly?

I love the sand sliding through the fingers metaphor, being used as a symbol of time passing and powerlessness. I feel that, with this lack of being able to control time, the protagonist just stands,  observing the beauty of everything.

So fascinating...I know I may seem like I'm completely in my own world droning on about poetry at stupid o clock, and I am, but I do find poetry so interesting. I love how my view doesn't really matter as everyone sees the meaning behind each poem differently.

Anyway, I'll sleep now I think! 

Keep dreaming, but maybe in reality :) 

Molly xxx