What is Love?

                People talk of love as if it is a joyous experience. Some view love as a dreamland, a wonderful time that never seems to end. But in reality, love is a terrible, painful experience. To love truly and fully is to open yourself up to another, to become vulnerable. Love is to give away a part of yourself. Love is  consuming fire.  It leaves all wondering “What now?” in its wake. There is no piece of literature that tells of the sense of loss and pain that is felt when your lover leaves you like Edgar Allan Poe’s “Dream Within a Dream.”

                With his own poetic elegance, Poe begins with the end. Poe opens the poem as he is saying his final goodbye to his lover with the lines “Take this kiss upon the brow!/ And in parting from you now” (1-2). Anyone that has ever had to say goodbye to a lover knows a part of his pain. When you are leaving summer camp as a young teenager and you have to leave the person that you just knew you would love forever, your heart is broken, even if it is momentarily. After you graduate high school and you and your lover are going to different colleges in different cities, you must say goodbye to someone you thought you would spend forever with. Throughout your time in college, you will have to say goodbye to people that you loved but you found out later that your views were just too different to have a lasting future together.  Finally, when your lover is passing away, you must say your final goodbye. This last, final goodbye is the hardest thing that you will go through. With every other lover that you left, there was always that chance of a reunion. You knew that there was always a chance of reconciliation or friendship. This time, there is no chance of getting the other back. There will be no future now that your better half has left you. They are gone and you are alone. This is the joyous tone that Poe has laid the ground-works for.

                The speaker even reminds us that “Thus much let me avow/ You are not wrong who deem” (3-4) because he knows that everything our friends and family will tell us will have truth to it. When your friends tell you that you have a right to be heartbroken or  that we’re moping or that we’re losing ourselves in self-pity, they are right on all of these counts. When family members try to tell us that life will move on or time will ease our wounds, this is true. But, in our fragile state, we cannot bring ourselves to admit this. Even when your friends and family try to tell you that you are romanticizing everything in the past, we can’t bring ourselves to admit this. We know that things weren’t perfect, but we can’t help but see everything that once was with this lover as perfect.

                When you are left alone with none but your thoughts, you can’t seem to grasp the fact that what you and your lover had was in fact real. Now that they are gone, you feel as if everything was too good to be true and you think that your “days have been a dream” (5). There will be those that try to convince you that there is more to life, that there is still more to experience, but this doesn’t matter. Poe asks “In a night or in a day/ In a vision or in none/ Is it therefore less gone?” (7-9). After every heartbreak, there are people that will constantly try to cheer you up by reminding you of all the things that you and your lover shared. But you know that these are all in the past, there will be no new memories. Yes, there may be other people out there, but do they replace the one you lost? Yes, you have many wonderful memories of your past, but does this ease the pain of knowing that no new memories can be made? You know in your deepest heart that “All that we see or seem/ Is but a dream within a dream” (10-11). You know that you are looking at the past as if everything was perfect, you are making your memories no more than a dream. You don’t know how to separate reality from your dreams.

                Life is nothing more than noise to you now. You feel as if you “stand amid the roar/ Of a surf-tormented shore” (12-13). You watch people go through life and you just can’t find the energy to care about anything. Without the one you loved, life is meaningless. You watch the waves come and go, you watch the tide rise and fall, but it means nothing to you anymore. You watch others laugh and cry, you watch others grow and move on, but you can’t find it in yourself to care about anything other than the immense pain you find yourself in. As you “hold within [your] hands/Grains of the golden sand” (14-15) you try to at least watch life. You know you can’t participate in life any longer now that your heart has been broken into a thousand pieces, but you can at least be a background prop. You can be the audience that everyone else is performing for. This is all you are now, a prop in the background. You try to watch as other travel through life. With your heart so broken, with your other half gone, you just don’t see how you can continue on with life. This heartbreak is like no other. Your lover has left you alone in this world and without solace or comfort.

                You know it is not good for you to live your life in the background. But you quickly realize trying to be a part of life is worse for you more so than being in the background and being ignored does. You notice “How few! yet how they creep/Through my fingers to the deep” (16-17).  Even when you try to be a part of life, you see how quickly time is passing by. You see how everyone is oblivious to the fact that their time with their own lovers is so limited. You know that your own time was limited with your lover. You wish you could hold on to just one moment and keep it forever. But you begin to ask yourself “can I not grasp/Them with a tighter clasp?” (19-20). You ask yourself why you can’t just have one more moment. You ask yourself why time just can’t stand still. You ask yourself why you can’t just have one moment that will last forever. You know that this will all pass you by. You wonder why “can I not save/ One from the pitiless wave” (21-22) because you just want one moment, one memory, to last.

You want to just save one moment but you know that it is useless to try and hold on to these important moments. The more you try to remember and hold on to something, the faster it slips away from you.  By holding on and grasping at it so tightly, you are forcing it to squirm further out of your grasp.  When you are clutching at memories and dreams and nightmares, you only torment yourself with the past. You do not see any future. You have become nothing more than a shell of the person that you were before. Oh, how your lover would weep for you if only they saw what you had become.  By holding on to the past and your mutated memories, you are now someone that even you don’t recognize.

                Poe knew that to lose your lover, your companion, you other half, would be the most terrible ordeal one could survive. He spoke of the crippling emptiness that fills you when you are the one left. He spoke to us of the madness that clutching at a memory will create. Hopefully, if any of us are left so alone, we can learn how to treasure our past lovers and allow them, as well as ourselves, to move on in life.