I know this was last unit, but I forgot to blog about this earlier. In Longfellow's
A Psalm of Life in the first stanza, "life is but an empty dream!" reminded me of "life is but a dream" in the childhood song,
Row, Row, Row Your Boat. I mentioned it to Emily and she noted how
Row, Row, Row Your Boat is often sung in canon and canons are supposed to be never-ending. It made me think about how Romantics write about death and the end of life. And if you've ever tried to sing
Row, Row, Row Your Boat in canon with anybody, it mostly ends in giggles and catastrophe.
The metaphor that life is a dream in both the poem and song also suggests that dreams end, life ends, and we can't live in dreams forever. Rip Van Winkle may have lived in dreams for 18 years, but his stupor eventually ended. The Romantics were very invested in the idea of life turning into a sleeping death, and the dream idea goes well with it. Dreams occur when we sleep, and sleeping is like being dead ("For the soul is dead that slumbers"), so is he saying life is death? That would be the ultimate paradoxical statement.
-- tori
This reminds me of Poe's poem "A Dream Within A Dream". I know we're not reading it in class, but I read it a few years ago for something and it's really close to your post. It ends with the line "Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?" This exploration of the dream-like quality of life and reality seems like one of the Romantics' favorite ideas.
ReplyDelete-Audrey
I suppose in a way life can be compared to death. However, I'm not sure whether that was Longfellow's goal. While he did emphasis that life is like a dream, I think its too far a leap in judgment to go from dreams to sleep to death.
ReplyDelete-Bryce C.
I think the idea of life as a dream is basically the idea that "nothing is ever as it seems". Or more accurately, the question, is everything as it seems? It acknowledges the less concrete, more fantastical aspects of life. This certainly seems to fit with the Romantic ideas. The connection to death comes not by saying that life is death, just that both share this quality. Death is just as mysterious, and dream- like as life.
ReplyDelete~Becca LaRosa