Problem
Read and annotate the following.
1) "Dreams"
2) "Dream" Imagine Dragons
3) "A Dream Within a Dream" Edgar Allan Poe
Once you have finished reading and annotating each poem, repeat the activity we did in class today. Answer the following questions about the poems individually, and together.
1) Who is the speaker?
2) Who or what is the subject/object to whom they are speaking?
3) What is the overall tone of the poem?
4) How do you know that is the tone? What words or phrases illustrate this?
5) What similarities do you notice between the poems? (this can be a bulleted list)
6) What differences do you notice between the poems? (this can be a bulleted list)
7) What themes do you recognize between the poems? Which ones do they share?
Dreams
Langston Hughes - 1901-1967
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
Dream
Imagine Dragons
In the dark
And I'm right on the middle mark
I'm just in the tier of everything
That rides below the surface
And I watch from a distance seventeen
And I'm short of the others dreams
Of being golden and on top
It's not what you painted in my head
There's so much there instead of all the colors that I saw
Oh, we all are living in a dream
But life ain't what it seems
Oh, everything's a mess
And all these sorrows I have seen
They lead me to believe
That everything's a mess
But I wanna dream
I wanna dream
Leave me to dream
In the eyes of a teenage crystallized
Oh, the prettiest of lights
That hang the hallways of the home
And the cries from the strangers out at night
They don't keep us up at night
We have the curtains drawn and closed
I know all your reasons
To keep me from seeing
Everything is actually a mess
But now I am leaving
All of us were only dreaming
Everything is actually a mess
We all are living in a dream
But life ain't what it seems
Oh, everything's a mess
And all these sorrows I have seen
They lead me to believe
That everything's a mess
But I wanna dream
I wanna dream
Leave me to dream
A Dream Within a Dream
Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
This 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?