Audiobook · read by volunteers
À Dream within a Dream
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
Read by Clarica, Cori Samuel, Elizabeth Palmer, Ezwa, Howard Dratch, JemmaBlythe, Joe Brenneman, Julian Jamison, Kristin Hughes (1974-2021), Karen Savage · 15 chapters · 18 min
About the book
A Dream within a Dream is among the shortest and most haunting poems of Edgar Allan Poe. A speaker says farewell to a loved one, admits that life itself may be a dream, and then stands on a shore watching grains of sand slip through his fingers, asking whether everything we see and seem is only a dream within a dream. The poem is brief, musical and unsettling, with a rhythm that draws the listener along. Here you can listen to fifteen separate recordings by LibriVox volunteers, all gathered for a weekly poetry project. Some speakers are calm, some anguished, some almost whispering. The whole collection lasts only a few minutes per reading, so it is easy to hear it several times and to notice how each voice changes the meaning. It makes a perfect companion for a dark, quiet hour.
Introduction
Edgar Allan Poe, who lived from 1809 to 1849, was an American writer and critic. He is remembered for his tales of mystery and horror, for his role in the development of the detective story and for poems such as The Raven. A Dream within a Dream was published in 1849, the year of his death.
The poem is short and structured in two stanzas, and it shows his interest in questions of reality and illusion, of loss and of the passing of time. Poe was deeply concerned with sound in poetry, and the poem rewards being heard. Its image of sand falling through the fingers has become one of the most quoted in American verse.
This is a multi-version recording: fifteen readings of the same poem, credited in the section titles to readers such as CJRG and CS. It was produced for the weekly poetry project of mid-April 2007. Hearing so many interpretations in a row is a fine way to explore how performance shapes a poem. It also shows how a text of fewer than two hundred words can be read in many ways. Poe believed that a poem should be read in a single sitting, and this one invites exactly that. Its few lines carry a great weight of feeling, and the repeated phrase at the heart of it takes on new colours with each reading. If you enjoy the sound of poetry spoken aloud, you will find that this small collection offers many ways of hearing the same verse.
Public domain
Edgar Allan Poe died in 1849: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text