A Dream Inside an Earlier Poem

A Poetry Tale about Edgar Allan Poe, told by Hello Doggo.

A Dream within a Dream sounds as if it was written in one feverish, sleepless night, in the last year of Poe’s life, with the sand running out.

It’s a lovely picture. It’s also about twenty-two years out.

Yes, the poem was printed in March eighteen forty-nine, in a Boston weekly called the Flag of Our Union. Poe was dead that October. But its roots go back to eighteen twenty-seven, to a poem called Imitation, tucked into a slim pamphlet called Tamerlane and Other Poems.

Poe’s name wasn’t even on it. The title page said simply: by a Bostonian. He was eighteen.

Hardly anyone noticed. Perhaps fifty copies were printed, and only about a dozen survive. In two thousand and nine, one of them sold at auction for six hundred and sixty-two thousand, five hundred dollars.

Not bad for a book nobody wanted.

And Poe simply would not leave that poem alone. He rewrote it, renamed it, folded bits of it into other poems. Early in eighteen forty-nine he copied out the sand-and-surf passage for his friend Annie Richmond. Then, at last, came the poem we know.

Here’s the twist. The great Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott compared the versions. The second keeps exactly one line from the first. The final poem keeps none at all.

Not a single grain.

Which is rather the point. Listen to the poem: “How few! yet how they creep through my fingers to the deep.”

Poe held on to that poem for more than twenty years. And still, every original line slipped away.