American writer, poet, editor and critic Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on Jan. 19, 1809. The Ransom Center’s Edgar Allan Poe collection contains several manuscript works and about 70 letters written by Poe, and works about him.
In 2009, the Center created a digital collection to accompany the Poe Bicentennial exhibition, From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe. The online collection unites images of all of Poe’s manuscripts and letters at the Ransom Center (some with transcriptions by the Poe Society of Baltimore) with a selection of related archival materials, sheet music based on his poems, and portraits from the Center’s collections.
Among the collection items are digitized pages of sheet music, “A Dream Within a Dream,” based on a 24-line, two-stanza poem written by Poe in the early 1800s. According to Project Gutenberg, “A Dream within a Dream” does not appear to have been published as a separate poem during its author’s lifetime. A portion of it was contained, in 1829, in the piece beginning, “Should my early life seem,” and in 1831 some few lines of it were used as a conclusion to “Tamerlane.” In 1849 the poet sent a friend all but the first nine lines of the piece as a separate poem, headed “For Annie.”
The Center’s illustrated sheet music features Poe’s poem set to music composed by Henry Pontet and published in London by John Blockley. The sheet music is part of the William H. Koester collection of Edgar Allan Poe-related sheet music. Much of the materials in this collection are short musical settings of Poe poems, including “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells,” “Eldorado,” and “The Raven.”
A Dream within a Dream
Poem by Edgar Allan Poe, 1849
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?
—Via Project Gutenberg, where you can read “A Dream Within a Dream” and the complete poetical works of Edgar Allan Poe.
