ASSIGNMENT NO 1

Romantic, Victorian
and Modern poetry
Submitted by: saima Qasim
Submitted to: ma’am samia Mudasser

FATIMA JINNAH WOMEN UNIVERSITY, RAWALPINDI

Poetry or poem is a kind of literary work which has some special characteristics that make it
different with other literary works. It is a combination of beautiful words that brings some
special messages so through poetry people can easily get the message, besides they can easily
get the message, beside they can be entertained by reading or listening poem
In this assignment I have gathered information from the internet to get the profound analysis
of two selected poems by William Blake and Walt Whitman.
A dream is a poem written by William Blake. He is well known in the youth for his poems. A
dream is one of his famous poems. Blake in the poem tells us about a dream. He conveys a
feeling of abstractism by describing the dream as weaving “a shade” over his bed, which is
guarded by angels, guardians of innocence. A bed, including Blake’s, is probably the place
where imagination can expand at its most. In this dream, while the narrator believes he is
lying on some grass, he sees an ant that has lost her way.
The theme of this poem is about the sadness that can be experienced by anyone when away
from family. It is shown in this poem that a person who figured by a mother emmet who
seems too much worrying about her family. As in the two first lines of the third stanza ; “ Oh
my children ! do they cry, do they hear their father sigh?”
the tone of this poem seems to give a very strong image of someone being lost.we can feel
fairly sympathetic towards character especially as the start of the fourth stanza:
‘’I DROPPED A TEAR’’ and there is also a rheotric question. “do they hear their father
father sigh?”. These two lines show that the traveller IS NOT away from home out of choice
which creates sympathy.
There is also a point of diction in this poem. Blake is using the word emmet preffering for
the ant.the word emmet preffering for the ant “the word emmet came from the old english
era. He uses this word to make this poem full of diverse vocabulary.
The word “glow warm” is used for “fireflies”. This can be reffered to the main character of
the poetry “mother of emmet”.
“Weigh” is the word of Middle English which is used to describe a living creature. The main
use of this word refers to the living human beings.
“HIE” is the word originated from middle english and in the past this word means “to
strive” but now this word can be translated and can be reffered as haste and hurried.
“thee”is the dialect word. It reffers to the meaning as “you” . Thee was common used in the
ancient poetry and other literary works.
All stanzas have the same rhyme. The ryming scheme for AABB for all stanzas. There is a
closed structure of the poem having five stanzas and four lines for Each.
The syntax of the poem shows that, In the first line of the first stanza blake uses simple past
tense “once a dream weave a shade”, which shows that the event happened in the past. In the
second line “O’er my angel-guarded bed” angel-guarded functions as adjectives. We can
assume that my bed is guarded by angels and the word me thought shows my thoughts for
that matter.
In the second stanza, the first two lines donot indicate as complete sentences. Meanwhile, the
third line “over many a tangle spray”,functions as compliment.
And the last sentence blake uses is written in simple past indefinite tense to describe the
situation happened in the past “ I heard her say”.
All these lines in the third stanza are bounded by quotation marks to show that this stanza is
an expression or uttrance so he uses simple present tense.
The symbols used in this poem are Angel-guarded bed it symbolize a best or a safest place
to dream where the dream is on its peak.
The word Emmet symbolizes an animal whichis always in its company. Glow-worm
symbolizes light. Beetle symbolizes noise.
Blake uses literary devices like metaphor personification. Thay are listed below:
Metaphor: O'er my angel-guarded bed ; angel-guarded bed
Personification: I heard her say
So the poem “A Dream" is a five-stanza poem made up of rhyming couplets. The first stanza
sets the scene of the poem as a dream the speaker had while napping. The second stanza
begins to describe the "Emmet," the ant, and her efforts to find her family. The speaker
disappears in the third stanza, leaving the reader alone with the story of the ant's efforts to
rejoin her family. In the fourth stanza, the speaker again interrupts with his weeping reaction
to the ant's plight and the happy realization that help is on the way. Here the mother ant
represents the human soul, longing for the peace and comfort only God can give. God
intervenes in the form of the glowworm, who lights the path, and the beetle, who gives
direction through his humming wings, both of whom reunite the lost ant with her family.

Now considering another poem named as “a dream within a dream” written by Edgar
Allan Poe. This poem was published in 1849, which explores the difference between our
perceptions of life and the effects of time. On the whole, the poem’s structure alters
considerably. It is a juxtaposition of iambic tetrameter. The rhyme schemes in this poem are
also different. The entire scheme can be shown as AAABBCCDDEEFFGGHHHHII. The
entirety of the poem acts as couplets.  Each verse in this poem consists of three feet. The
poem has 9-couplets and 2-triplets.
A Dream within a Dream is purely a poem Edgar Allan Poe. It’s about hope, hopeless and
helpless of man in general. As the poet contends that human has to make compromises. The
first half deals with Edgar Allan Poe’s loss of wife. Crestfallen with pain and bleeding
profusely, he seems the time spent with his fiancée. The gloomy mood reflects poet’s real-
life affairs as his fiancée is taken away from her, leaving him to pick up the pieces.
Struggling with time, loss and helplessness, the poet comes to terms with reality knocking on
his door. For him, he feels he has been betrayed by time, watching indifferently as he
recovers from one loss to another. As the poet embarks on his emotional tirade, he expresses
his undying love for his wife. Her loss has torn him apart, as he attempts to cope with the
pain. He still wonders if all of his experiences were in actuality real or figment of his
subconscious.

Deep down inside, the poem may also refers to travelling, wherein the dreamer was indulged
in body experiences. The dreamer floats near the shore and tries to gather all the wisdom he
wishes to, in the face of sands.

In the second stanza, the poet stands on sea-shore, grasping sand. The ‘roaring waves’ are
refers to his continuous pain and ‘golden sand’ refers to his wife. He lets out a sigh of
desperation, seeking God’s help in his hour of misery. He speculates whether all of his life
was just a dream after all.
As the poem ends, the poet asks only one question to the reader – what if the reader wakes up
and realizes that all that he has gone through, the good and the bad, was nothing but a dream
within another?
The title makes us think the poem is going to be a description of a dream within a dream,
that's not what it is. The poem does seem a little dreamy, sure, but it's really more about a guy
wrestling with the question of whether or not life is real or just an illusion “a dream within a
dream.” The title, then, tells us what the poem's central preoccupation is: the nature of reality,
and if, and how, we can tell if everything around is real or not, especially in the face of
change and loss.
Edgar Allan Poe based this poem on an earlier work, Imitation, published in 1827 in his first
book Tamerlane and Other Poems. In it he explores the idea of the essential mystery of life:
A dark unfathomed tide
Of interminable pride -
A mystery, and a dream,
Should my early life seem;
Again the speaker is looking back in time, using the ocean (water) as a symbol of life. These
simple lines reflect the idea that there is no real grip on reality and time, posing a
philosophical question that is still being debated today.
So through these two poems we can conclude that dreams plays an important role. Everyone
who used to write about the dreams have a strong belief on everything.
The central idea of the poem is that the reality is not permanent and never completely
tangible, and life is essentially a dream.
The diction of the words includes the words wich are not commonly used in today`s English
language. The diction shows the time period of early 1800C.it includes the detailed words
that give the poem the imagery. The word “Avow” sows the time period. “surf-tormented”
allows the reader to feel the crowdedness of the beach.“pitiless wave” shows that how hard
the waves are coming in.
The imagery used in this poem is visual imagery
And through these poems we can compare the elements like the assumption of the events that
happened in the real life. The speaker in the dreams within a dream is a mysterious man who
just departed from a woman and is contemplating life with respect to its reality and fatasy.the
main purpose of the poem is to explain to the women and others that he does agree that life is
all a dream. And one day everyone have to be get departed from this world. And living far
away from the family(as in the poem A dream) and finding family is a very tough job and if
he finds him through dreams he can only get satisfied at some instant but can never get fully
satisfied. So dreams plays a very vital role in a person`s life as reality is not permanent.