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A Dream Within a Dream
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?
Poe's Life
Edgar Allen Poe was born on Jan. 19, 1809, in Boston. Poe's childhood was filled with watching plays his mother was in, including Romeo and Juliet, were his mother played Juliet, and died night after night while Edgar watch from the front row because his mother could not afford child care. Poe's father left his family, which will come back to Poe later in his life. When Poe was 3 his mother died, in front of him, later that day he was adopted by John Allan, whose wife came up with the idea. John Allan never accepted Poe and resented him to the day he left the house. (Poe was never legally adopted, but he changed his middle name to Allen, and that's how we got the name Edgar Allen Poe.) When Poe was 13 he was sent away to boarding school in England, where his headmaster was so cheap he would not buy books for his pupils, instead they would go out to the graveyard and read the names on the tombstones and subtracted the birth and death dates. When John Allen's wife died Poe was kicked out of his room in their home. Poe struggled for many years, till Mrs. Maria Clemm, his father's sister took him in. Mrs. Maria Clemm felt so awful that Poe's father had a banded Poe and his mother, she took him in. At about the same time, the first tour of a writer, Charles Dickson, was passing though Richmond, Virginia. Poe wrote a letter so moving to Dickson, that Dickson set up a lunch meeting. Poe and Dickson talked over lunch and some how Dickson told Poe that his pet had died right before he came to America, Dickson pet was a Raven. Poe wrote a poem about Dickson's pet that night. It was published not long after that. And as they say, The rest was History. Poe died of drunkenness and pure depression on Oct. 7, 1849.
Poe References
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