Dreamland by Edgar Allan Poe

…because I’m just in the sort of mood where I spend several hours thinking about a poem, and writing a ridiculously long post about it. I’m even feeling contrary enough to leave the whole damn thing without a “more” break in it.

Dreamland

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an EidolonAn eidolon (from Greek eidolon form, shape; a phantom-double of the human form; Latin simulacrum) is the astral double of living beings; the shade or perisprit, the kama-rupa after death before its disintegration. The phantom which can appear under certain conditions to survivors of the deceased. More info, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim ThuleThule or Tile is in classic sources a place, usually an island, in the far north, often Scandinavia. Ultima Thule in medieval geographies may also denote any distant place located beyond the “borders of the known world”. More info. Here, of course, it is meant to indicate that the journey is from a place an immeasureable distance away; a journey that is of a different kind than one that can be measured in miles.—
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE—out of TIME.

Bottomless vales and boundless floodsThe imagery here is very suggestive….

Little attention has been given to the close similarity between the imagery of Poe’s “Dream-Land” (1844) and that of various opium-dream accounts or opium-inspired poetry which, as an avid reader of magazines and contemporary poetry, Poe very easily might have encountered. Alethea Hayter’s Opium and the Romantic Imagination [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970], though demonstrating that opium-dream imagery occurs frequently in other Poe works, makes only a passing reference to the poem. But the landscape of “Dream-Land” — “a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, / Out of SPACE — out of TIME” — has enough in common with recurring images in opium-inspired writings to link it closely with the genre. The “bottomless vales,” the “boundless floods,” the “chasms, and caves,” the “shrouded forms” of the dead, and other elements of Poe’s poem have their counterparts in George Crabbe’s narrative poem “Sir Eustace Grey” (1807), Thomas De Quincey’s The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821-22), and Walter Colton’s “Turkish Sketches: Effects of Opium” in the Knickerbocker Magazine for April 1836 (VII, 421-423). Though all of these accounts describe the pleasures as well as the pains of opium, only the latter have particular relevance here.

Enormous distortions of the sense of time and space, which “Dream-Land” effectively conveys, are characteristic of the opium dream [Hayter, p. 48]. De Quincey’s description is especially memorable:

The sense of space, and in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes &c. were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night, nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience. [Edward Sackville-West, ed., Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, together with Selections from the Autobiography of Thomas De Quincey, (New York: Chanticleer Press, 1950), p. 328.]

Extracted from “Poe’s ‘Dream-Land’ and The Imagery of Opium Dreams” in Poe Studies, vol. VIII, no. 1, June 1975, page 24.,
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods“Titan woods” is one of my favourite phrases from this poem. Webster has this definition for ‘titan’:

1 capitalized : any of a family of giants born of Uranus and Gaea and ruling the earth until overthrown by the Olympian gods
2 : one that is gigantic in size or power : one that stands out for greatness of achievement

I think it’s obvious that “titan woods” would mean the giant forest, and would be used in this kind of poem to conjure images of large trees and the sense of being somewhere that is vastly bigger than you. That sense that your surroundings are happening at a larger scale than you can convey a kind of helplessness and isolation. By using the capitalized form though, Poe makes allusion to the Titans of Greek legend, and suddenly our giant forest becomes the ancient forest; forests older than the gods themselves, and on a scale to dwarf gods, much less we mere mortals. What a great image.
With forms that no man can discover
For the dews that drip all over;
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shoreBeing an old fantasy junkie, when I read about a scene in the dreamland where a mountain topples into “seas without a shore” what I first see is the edge of the world scenario–mountains falling off the edge of the world into the Void, or into Moorcock’s edge of the world Chaos, or whatever. That doesn’t really work with the following lines, though, that paint the picture of a restless and surging sea–hardly the Abyss. However, some reflection on the line, when one assumes a literal sea, suggests to me that a more useful interpretation of “seas without a shore” is “boundless seas”–seas with no other shore. Interestingly, the hymn “The New Patriot” uses this phrase to suggest Heaven–a boundless place that is somehow greater than physical geography. “The soil that bred the pioneers/He loves and guards, yet loves the more/That larger land without frontiers, /Those wider seas without a shore.” I wonder if the hymn’s author was consciously pickpocketing old weird Edgar.

It’s also worth comparing with Paradise Lost, Book II, starting at around line 890:

Before thir eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoarie deep, a dark
Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal Anarchie, amidst the noise
Of endless warrs and by confusion stand.

Of course we quickly leave the surging ocean and Chaos behind, and walk on only with King Night…;
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging, unto skies of fireI am kind of sad to admit that “skies of fire” makes me think about that Flash Gordon movie.

This actually interferes with my enjoyment of the poem. I have to work quite hard to mentally render “skies of fire” as a dream world’s exaggerated view of the ridiculously starry sky one would see on a cloudless and clear night, far from any source of light.;
Lakes that endlessly outspread
Their lone waters—lone and dead,
Their still waters—still and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lilyAnother incredibly powerful image: the placid and undisturbed lake, covered over with a “snow” of drooping lilies. It is silent, lonely, and cold, with the slight touch of cold dampness in the air. In my mind, there’s a large weeping willow alone at the edge of the lake, and the colours of the scene are so muted as to be nearly shades of gray..

By the lakes that thus outspread
Their lone waters, lone and dead,—
Their sad waters, sad and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily,—

By the mountains—near the river
Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever,—
By the gray woods,—by the swamp
Where the toad and the newt encamp,—
By the dismal tarnsThe word “tarn” is of Scandanavian origin and means “A small mountain lake, especially one formed by glaciers.” So we’re still in the terrirtory of still, cold waters. Combined with “gray woods” we’ve come very far from the world of colours. Even the “skies of fire” here are in black and white. and pools
Where dwell the GhoulsA “Ghoul” is a monster from ancient Arabian folklore that dwells in graveyards and other uninhabited places. The English word comes from the Arabic name for the creature: الغول ghūl, which literally means “demon”. So again we’re reinforcing the isolation and loneliness, as these things are only found in uninhabited places. And of course, now we’ve met The Dead.,—
By each spot the most unholy—
In each nookNote how the scale has descended from the mountains, Titan forests, and boundless seas, down to nooks. I’m thinking this is in preparation for the personal to come to the fore. most melancholy,—

There the traveller meets aghastPoe’s probably playing a little word game here. “Aghast” comes from the Middle English gāstēn, “to frighten”, but also conjures up the word “ghastly” which comes from a different root: the Anglo-Saxon gāstlīc, which means “like a ghost”. So our traveller is aghast at the (literally) ghastly sight he meets.
Sheeted Memories of the past“Sheeted Memories of the past” is another of those memorable phrases. Poe is getting personal here: up to this point we’ve been isolated and moving through a colourless, static grandeur that isolates our wanderer and renders him almost irrelevant. Suddenly the sense is that he is being haunted by personal ghosts; memories of his past. I suspect the capitalization here is to suggest proper nouns–to suggest that the memories are not of events and things, but of people.—
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by—
White-robed forms of friendsDefinitely people, and definitely people our wanderer knew. Friends of olden days, &c. long given,
In agony, to the Earth—and Heaven.

For the heart whose woes are legion
’Tis a peaceful, soothing region—These lines seem fairly straight-forward: someone who has had many friends die, and has put them “in agony” into the earth, would see many loved ones in this place. Apparently just that distorted sight is enough to bring pleasure, or at least peace. I’m not sure that seeing shades of dead friends wander in this cold, gray land starting and sighing would be a salve to my woes, but YMMV. An interesting alternate reading is that rather than “people with troubles find this place soothing” he could be saying “the kind of people who find this place soothing are troubled people”. Interesting…
For the spirit that walks in shadow
’Tis—oh, ’tis an EldoradoEldorado, or El Dorado (Spanish for “the gilded one”), is the mythical lost city of gold. El Dorado is also sometimes used as a metaphor to represent an ultimate prize or “Holy Grail” that one might spend their life seeking. It could represent true love, heaven, happiness, or success. It is used sometimes as a figure of speech to represent something much sought after that may not even exist, or at least may not ever be found. Poe has a poem entitled El Dorado where it is used this way. Indeed, there is a suggestion in that poem that El Dorado can only be found after dying–directions given by a ghost send the possibly just dead seeker over the Mountain and into the Valley of Shadow. I wonder if there’s a lily covered lake in that valley.!
But the traveller, travelling through it,
May not—dare not openly view it;
Never its mysteries are exposed
To the weak human eye unclosedI don’t think it’s an accident that the use of the phrasing “never…exposed to the…eye unclosed” suggests that the mysteries might be exposed to the eye that is closed.;
So wills its KingSo, who’s the King who makes these rules? That “Eidolon, named Night”?, The King of Dreamland–a Morpheus like figure? Is that even a different answer? Or maybe the Creator, who someone of Poe’s time might expect to be the obvious allusion for a capital-K King who rules over such a realm?, who hath forbid
The uplifting of the fringed lid;
And thus the sad Soul that here passes
Beholds it but through darkened glassesc.f. I Corinthians 13:12 “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Hmmmm. Seems a lot less happy in this context than in the middle of a wedding..

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only.

Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have wandered homeSo this isn’t just a repetition of the opening stanzas–our wanderer has found his way home. What does that mean? but newly
From this ultimate dim ThuleUse of “this” is a reversal from the opening stanzas. Use of “ultimate” invokes the notion of Ultima Thule very strongly..

So, what do we make of that? There are a few obvious readings:

• it’s the tale of a dreamer’s journey through a land where he can encounter things denied to Day, albeiit in a vague and dreamlike way
• it’s a journey in sleep from the physical world to an unchanging world of permanence, which borders another unchanging world where the dead live
• the dreamer gets a view behind the curtains of the normal world into the world of Plato’s forms, which can not be directly apprehended, but which are available indirectly to the dreaming mind
• a dreamer plagued in life by much pain and many deaths, comes in sleep to soothe himself with ghosts composed of memories (and maybe the implication that there is no afterlife at all outside of memory and dreams)

…and so on.

However, one of the most interesting readings is the one espoused in Dennis W. Eddings’ article ” Poe’s ‘Dream-Land’: Nightmare or Sublime Vision?,” from Poe Studies, vol. VIII, no. 1, June 1975: “A topsy-turvy, nightmare world is indeed the subject of the poem; that world, however, is not the world of dreams but the physical world of everyday affairs.” Now that’s a take on the poem that’s worth chewing over.

Which brings us to “Dream-Land.” I believe that in this poem Poe is setting forth his basic vision that physical life is a dream, a nightmare state of separation from the sublime Unity of the Spiritual Universe. We read the poem correctly only when we realize that the garish landscape it describes is not the nightmare of sleep and the tormented mind, but the inevitable nightmare of physical existence.

…

The poem begins with the speaker awakening, losing contact with the sense of the Ideal which has come to him in sleep, continues with a lengthy description of Dream-Land which is the every-day world of physical reality, and concludes with a return to sleep, to the sense of the Ideal.

If you’ve read this far, you should read Eddings’ full argument. It’s a good one.