The Full Text of “The Dream”
1Dear love, for nothing less than thee
2Would I have broke this happy dream;
3It was a theme
4For reason, much too strong for fantasy,
5Therefore thou wak'dst me wisely; yet
6My dream thou brok'st not, but continuedst it.
7Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice
8To make dreams truths, and fables histories;
9Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best,
10Not to dream all my dream, let's do the rest.
11 As lightning, or a taper's light,
12Thine eyes, and not thy noise, wak'd me;
13Yet I thought thee
14(For thou lovest truth) an angel, at first sight;
15But when I saw thou sawest my heart,
16And knew'st my thoughts, beyond an angel's art,
17When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when
18Excess of joy would wake me, and cam'st then,
19I must confess, it could not choose but be
20Profane, to think thee anything but thee.
21 Coming and staying show'd thee, thee,
22But rising makes me doubt, that now
23Thou art not thou.
24That love is weak, where fear's as strong as he;
25'Tis not all spirit, pure, and brave,
26If mixture it of fear, shame, honour have.
27Perchance, as torches which must ready be,
28Men light and put out, so thou deal'st with me;
29Thou cam'st to kindle, goest to come; then I
30Will dream that hope again, but else would die.
The Full Text of “The Dream”
1Dear love, for nothing less than thee
2Would I have broke this happy dream;
3It was a theme
4For reason, much too strong for fantasy,
5Therefore thou wak'dst me wisely; yet
6My dream thou brok'st not, but continuedst it.
7Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice
8To make dreams truths, and fables histories;
9Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best,
10Not to dream all my dream, let's do the rest.
11 As lightning, or a taper's light,
12Thine eyes, and not thy noise, wak'd me;
13Yet I thought thee
14(For thou lovest truth) an angel, at first sight;
15But when I saw thou sawest my heart,
16And knew'st my thoughts, beyond an angel's art,
17When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when
18Excess of joy would wake me, and cam'st then,
19I must confess, it could not choose but be
20Profane, to think thee anything but thee.
21 Coming and staying show'd thee, thee,
22But rising makes me doubt, that now
23Thou art not thou.
24That love is weak, where fear's as strong as he;
25'Tis not all spirit, pure, and brave,
26If mixture it of fear, shame, honour have.
27Perchance, as torches which must ready be,
28Men light and put out, so thou deal'st with me;
29Thou cam'st to kindle, goest to come; then I
30Will dream that hope again, but else would die.
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“The Dream” Introduction
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John Donne's "The Dream" explores love, desire, and the tension between fantasy and reality. The speaker wakes up from an intimate dream of his beloved to find that she's right there next to him, making it seem as though his dream has spilled over into real life. This lady must be even more powerful than an angel, the speaker argues, because she was able to see into his dream and wake him up at the perfect time. Yet rather than act out "the rest" of the dream with him (by which the speaker means sleep with him), this lady seems to be about to depart. The poem suggests that one of the joys of love is its ability to blur the boundaries between dreams and the waking world. At the same time, it suggests that one of the disappointments of love is that idealized fantasies rarely match exactly with reality. Like most of Donne's poems, "The Dream" wasn't published until some years after his death; it first appeared in the posthumous collection Poems (1633).
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“The Dream” Summary
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My darling, I wouldn’t have awakened from my wonderful dream for anything less than you. My dream was so intense and believable that it hardly felt like a dream at all. As such, it was wise of you to wake me up. Yet you didn’t actually end my dream—you kept it going. You’re so very real that merely thinking of you makes dreams come true and turns fairy tales to histories. Come into my arms. Given that you thought it was better for me not to finish dreaming my dream, let’s make it real and play out the conclusion.
Much as a lightning flash or a candle might wake one up, the light of your eyes, not the sound you were making, woke me. At first I thought (to tell you the truth, since you love the truth) that you were an angel. But when I saw that you could see into my heart and my dreams—a power that mere angels don’t have; when I saw that you knew what I was dreaming, that you knew exactly when the overflowing intensity of my pleasure was about to wake me up, and that you arrived at exactly that moment: I have to say, with all this evidence, it would be sacrilegious of me to think that you were anything but yourself.
Your arrival and your choice to stay here proved to me that you’re you. But now you’re getting up, and that makes me worry that you’re not you. It’s a weak love indeed that’s not stronger than fear. Love isn’t a thing made of pure spirit if it’s mixed up with fear, shame, and worries about your reputation. Perhaps you’re doing what people do when they light a torch once, then put it out, so it’s easier to light up again later. If that’s the case, you came to set me aflame; now you’re leaving to put me out only so that you can come back and light me up again later. So I’ll return to my dream in the hopes that it will soon come true; otherwise, I’d die.
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“The Dream” Themes
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Fantasy vs. Reality
“The Dream” explores the tension between the ideal and the real, particularly in matters of love. The poem’s speaker is awakened from a dream of the lady he’s smitten with by the lady he’s smitten with. This act delights him, making him feel as if there’s no distinction between the world of fantasy and the world of reality. A sense that a glorious dream has come true, this poem suggests, is one of the delights of love but also one of its risks—because reality can’t always coincide so perfectly with fantasy as one might, well, fantasize.
When his beloved wakes him up, the poem’s speaker is happy to see her but not surprised. Her arrival is just the continuation of the dream he was having about her—a dream that was already “much too strong for fantasy.” The dream, in other words, was real to the speaker.
This lady is “so true,” the speaker continues, that mere “thoughts” of her are enough to “make dreams truths, and fables histories.” She doesn’t simply bring the speaker’s dream to life by happening to be there when he wakes up, but by animating his dreams with her real presence. In other words, the speaker’s passionate love for this lady collapses the barrier between dream and reality. She’s the realest, most solid thing in the world to him, waking or sleeping.
That’s all well and good until the lady starts to do something the speaker would never dream of her doing: she appears to be about to get up and leave without “do[ing] the rest” of the speaker’s dream with him. The speaker objects with this brain-twister: “Coming and staying show'd thee, thee, / But rising makes me doubt, that now / Thou art not thou.” In other words: When you came here and stayed here, you proved that you were yourself. But now that you’re getting up, I begin to doubt that you’re really you. When the real, live lady’s behavior differs from the dream lady’s, then, the speaker sees the divergence as a sign that the living lady might be the false one! Here, the dream takes on a deeper reality than reality: fantasy, to the speaker, becomes “truer” than reality.
This idea has a few complex implications. On one level, this is a tongue-in-cheek poem about the disappointment of discovering that one's beloved isn’t identical to fantasies about them (and about the efforts one might go to in order to keep from admitting that this is the case—as when the speaker imagines that his lady must just be frustrating him now in order to better satisfy them both later on). On another level, the poem is making a claim that a love so strong it blurs the boundaries between fantasy and reality has its own kind of truth, one that can bring tremendous joy to those who honor it.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Love and Desire
In “The Dream” as in many of John Donne’s poems, depicts romantic and sexual love as holy. The poem’s speaker awakes from an intimate dream of his beloved only to find that this woman is indeed right there before him. He says that when she first woke him up, right before his dream reached its climax, he thought she must be an angel. He then expands beyond this moment of clichéd flattery, however. Because his beloved woke him up at the exact moment before his dream reached its conclusion in an “excess of joy” (that is, an orgasm), he reasons, she must have been able to see into his mind and read his thoughts. And that’s “beyond an angel’s art”: that is, angels don’t have the power to read minds, according to the best Renaissance theology. She is, then, above the angels.
The daring implication is that the beloved is close to God. The speaker doesn’t spell this idea out explicitly, but he nonetheless makes it very clear that he sees his beloved as divine when he tells her that it would be “profane” (or sacrilegious) to mistake her for anyone but herself, even for an angel.
The speaker's passionate love, then, makes this lady seem divine to him. This is the crux of his argument for why he and she should “do the rest” of what his dream showed him (that is, go to bed with him): his beloved’s interruption of his dream, he says, reveals that his beloved is divine, that their love is divine, and that any sex they happened to have could only be divine, too. A profound sexual love, to this speaker, is a thing of the "spirit," a "pure," "brave" (or glorious), and transformative expression of the sacred.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Sexual Shame and Honor
This poem’s plot is, at its root, an old and common one in English verse: the story of a man trying to persuade a woman to sleep with him, potentially against her better judgment. For women of Donne’s era, sex was a fraught issue. An intense cultural double standard held that women should remain chaste until marriage, where men could do essentially whatever they liked. It’s no wonder, then, that the poem’s speaker gets the sense his beloved might have some worries about “fear,” “shame,” and “honour.”
This poem’s speaker tries to work around these worries and prohibitions in a novel way. Where other passionate poets have coaxed their ladies into bed with the idea that life is short and people should have fun while they’re young, this speaker makes a grander point about sexual love. “That love is weak, where fear’s as strong as he,” he says: in other words, any love that can be conquered by fear isn’t much of a love at all. And he thinks better of his lady (whom he sees as an embodiment of divine “truth,” loving her so much that she seems near to God) than to imagine that fear might make up any part of her love. True love without fear, he goes on, is “all spirit, pure, and brave”: intimacy is an act, that is, of unadulterated (“pure”) and glorious (“brave”) spirituality, a way for lovers to touch the divine. (That point is only strengthened by Donne’s deployment of a common Renaissance pun here: “spirit” might mean “semen” as well as “soul.”)
This poem thus argues against sexual shame, restriction, and taboo by suggesting that pure sexual love couldn’t possibly be wrong for a true lover, male or female. Sex between true lovers, here, is no defilement, but an approach to the divine. The only meaningful sexual shame would be in fearing and evading such divinity.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Dream”
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Lines 1-6
Dear love, for nothing less than thee
Would I have broke this happy dream;
It was a theme
For reason, much too strong for fantasy,
Therefore thou wak'dst me wisely; yet
My dream thou brok'st not, but continuedst it.“The Dream” begins at the moment a dream ends—a wonderful dream. The speaker addresses his “dear love,” the lady who has just woken him up, telling her that she’s the only person for whom he’s willing to wake from the “happy dream” he was lost in moments ago. That’s because she’s the only person who, in waking him, could “continue[]” the dream: it was she herself, in other words, that he was dreaming of.
And in waking him, she seems to have done the right thing. This dream, he tells her, was a “theme / For reason, much too strong for fantasy.” In other words, this dream was so intense and believable that it didn’t feel like a dream at all but rather like something that was really happening. More than that, it was a vision that should be experienced with the “reason” of the waking, conscious mind, not in the airy, insubstantial realm of “fantasy.”
For this reason, the speaker tells his lady, it was “wise[]” of her to awaken him. That's because, in doing so, she was putting fantasy and reality into the right balance. This dream of her seemed real, should be real, indeed somehow was real; now, the speaker hopes, its reality will be borne out in the waking world.
In these first lines, this poem might seem as if it’s paying a pretty standard-issue compliment: You, the speaker tells this lady, are the woman of my dreams. But John Donne will not leave that compliment unexamined. Rather, across the course of this twisty poem, he will explore what it actually means to love someone so much that they seem like a dream come true: a situation in which figuring out what’s real and what’s fantasy will become a complicated matter.
At the poem's outset, take a moment to notice the rhythm of the verse. Each of this poem’s stanzas will be 10 lines long. And each of the stanzas will begin with a five-line passage whose lines abruptly and surprisingly change length:
- The first two lines of each stanza are in iambic tetrameter: lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “Dear love, | for noth- | ing less | than thee”
- The third line is an abrupt, short line of iambic dimeter—just two iambs, “It was | a theme”
- The fourth line is iambic pentameter—five iambs, “For rea- | son, much | too strong | for fan- | ta sy.”
- Line five drops back into iambic tetrameter.
- Then a steadier rhythm kicks in: the remaining five lines of the stanza are all in iambic pentameter.
In this way, every stanza starts with a dancing, nimble passage, then resolves into a steadier rhythm. These split stanzas might suggest the two worlds this poem unites (or hopes to unite): the world of fantasy and the world of reality.
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Lines 7-10
Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice
To make dreams truths, and fables histories;
Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best,
Not to dream all my dream, let's do the rest. -
Lines 11-14
As lightning, or a taper's light,
Thine eyes, and not thy noise, wak'd me;
Yet I thought thee
(For thou lovest truth) an angel, at first sight; -
Lines 15-20
But when I saw thou sawest my heart,
And knew'st my thoughts, beyond an angel's art,
When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when
Excess of joy would wake me, and cam'st then,
I must confess, it could not choose but be
Profane, to think thee anything but thee. -
Lines 21-23
Coming and staying show'd thee, thee,
But rising makes me doubt, that now
Thou art not thou. -
Lines 24-26
That love is weak, where fear's as strong as he;
'Tis not all spirit, pure, and brave,
If mixture it of fear, shame, honour have. -
Lines 27-30
Perchance, as torches which must ready be,
Men light and put out, so thou deal'st with me;
Thou cam'st to kindle, goest to come; then I
Will dream that hope again, but else would die.
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“The Dream” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Simile
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Repetition
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Pun
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Hyperbole
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Enjambment
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"The Dream" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Thee, thou, thy, thine
- Reason
- Wak'dst
- Brok'st
- True
- Suffice
- Histories
- Taper
- An angel's art
- Excess of joy would wake me
- It could not choose to be profane
- Rising
- Doubt
- Spirit
- Pure, and brave
- Perchance
- Torches
- Kindle
- Die
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Old-fashioned ways of saying "you" and "your":
- "Thou" is the subject form of "you," as in "Thou art so true"
- "Thee" is the object form, as in "I thought thee an angel"
- "Thy" and "thine" both mean "your"; "thine" appears before words that start with a vowel sound (as in "Thine eyes")
Note that "thou" is cognate with the French, Italian, or Spanish "tu": it's an intimate or informal way of addressing someone.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Dream”
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Form
John Donne invents his own poetic form here, as he often did. The poem is built from three ten-line stanzas, each of which begins with five lines of varying length and ends in five lines of regular iambic pentameter (that is, lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “Thou art | so true | that thoughts | of thee | suffice”). Each stanza thus starts out wavering and ends with a more regular pulse.
That division maps onto the poem’s action, in which the speaker—lost in an intimate dream of his beloved—awakes to find that she’s right there, then tries to persuade her to help him finish what the dream started. The flickering rhythms of the first part of each stanza move into the regularity of the second part as dream segues into waking. The poem’s changing rhythms also mirror the poem’s theme of building sexual tension, moving from a weaving dance into a more propulsive, urgent, regular pulse.
In its coaxing tone, this poem has something in common with carpe diem poems like Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.” However, where such poems’ speakers try to talk ladies into bed by reminding them that life is short and they should have fun while they can, this poem’s speaker makes a bolder case. His lady should sleep with him, he argues, because:
- His dream of her was so real that it’s as if it's already happened—so why hold back?
- He knows she’s a true and courageous lover, and true lovers aren’t worried by little things like “fear,” “shame,” and “honour.”
As many of Donne’s poems do, then, “The Dream” makes a more profound case for sexual love than “It’s fun and life is short.” To this speaker, such love can even embody something divine.
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Meter
The English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote that Donne’s poetic muse “on dromedary trots”: in other words, Donne’s verse has the bumpy, surprising rhythms of a ride on camelback. That’s certainly true of the meter in “The Dream,” which is as complex as Donne’s thought.
This poem uses a mixture of iambic meters: that is, its lines are built from iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “perchance” or “profane.” Here’s how the rhythm of each stanza runs:
- The first two lines use iambic tetrameter: a line of four iambs, as in “Dear love, | for noth- | ing less | than thee”
- The third line uses iambic dimeter: a line of two iambs, as in “It was | a theme”
- The fourth line uses iambic pentameter: a line of five iambs, as in “That love | is weak | where fear's | as strong | as he”
- The fifth line uses iambic tetrameter again, as in "'Tis not | all spir- | it, pure, | and brave"
- And the remaining five lines of the stanza return to iambic pentameter.
The opening lines of each stanza, then, flicker like a candle flame, darting from long to short and back; the closing lines take on a steadier and more predictable rhythm, like a heartbeat. (Not fully predictable, of course. Donne often introduces a trochee—the opposite foot to an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm—into his iambic lines, as in “Enter | these arms.”)
This pattern follows the action and mood of the poem: there’s a repeated rhythm of build, urgency, and withdrawal that suggests the speaker’s excitement (and frustration) as he awakes to find his dream true—but not quite as true as he'd like.
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Rhyme Scheme
The basic rhyme scheme of each of this poem’s stanzas runs like this:
ABBACCDDEE
The stanzas, in other words, start out with an enfolding ABBA rhyme pattern, then resolve into a string of three couplets.
Listen to the whole poem, however, and that reliable pattern becomes more complex. Donne reuses certain rhymes across the poem: the long /ee/ of “be,” “thee,” “me,” “he,” and “fantasy” returns in every stanza. Map out the whole rhyme scheme, and it looks like this:
ABBACCDDEE FAAFGGHHAA AIIAJJAAKK
This rhyme scheme might look like a confusing jumble marked out like this, but it doesn't sound confusing. The basic pattern is always consistent—and the return and return of the A rhyme, that long /ee/ sound, feels harmoniously intense. That's especially true because so many of the A rhymes are also identical rhymes on just three words: "me," "thee," and "be." (The only variants are the "he" of line 24 and the "fantasy" of line 4.) The recurrent A rhyme thus keeps the poem's central players—the lover, the beloved, and the nature of reality—at center stage.
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“The Dream” Speaker
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The speaker of this poem is a lot like the speaker of many of Donne’s poems: he’s a passionate lover with a brilliant intellect, and he’s trying to use the latter quality in the service of the former. Here, more specifically, he’s applying his powerful brain to the cause of flattery, trying to sweet-talk his beloved into hopping into bed with him to “do the rest” of the intimate dream she’s just awakened him from.
In making his case, he blurs the boundaries between dream and truth, human and divine. When his lady wakes him up, he tells her that she’s so profoundly true, so deeply real, that a dream of her is real. She literally makes his dreams come true. This cliché is no cliché here, but something deeper and more metaphysical: love makes this lady the truest thing in the world to the speaker, something realer than reality. Of course, this idea also serves a sneaky secondary purpose. If there’s no difference between the dream-lady and the real lady, then they’re already midway through having sex, and there’s no point in the real lady refusing to finish what she began!
In another elaborate bit of flattery, the speaker tells his lady that when he first woke up, he thought she must be an angel—then realized that she couldn’t be a mere angel. That’s because, according to the theology of the great medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas (with whom Donne agreed on this point), angels can’t read thoughts. This lady can: she has clearly seen right into the speaker’s mind to wake him up at the precise moment before his dream reaches its climax. In so saying, the speaker implies that his lady has not an angel’s powers but God’s. Renaissance theology held that only God could see into the human mind and heart. At the very least, then, the lady’s powers of knowing exactly the moment to interrupt his dream are god-like.
Heady praise in which sexual love touches the divine, an undercurrent of tongue-in-cheek coaxing: these qualities are hallmarks of Donne’s verse, and the reader would be well within their rights to read this silver-tongued theologian/seducer as Donne himself.
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“The Dream” Setting
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The poem takes place in its speaker’s bed—a place where he’s just been having a very pleasant dream only to be awakened by the even more pleasant presence of the lady he was dreaming about. A more specific setting only reveals itself through the speaker’s allusions to lighting and to theology. His mention that a “taper’s light” (that is, candlelight) can wake someone up, his awareness that people sometimes “light and put out” torches so that they’re faster to light again later, and his acquaintance with the angelology of Thomas Aquinas all suggest that he lives in John Donne’s own world: England around the turn of the 17th century, a world lit by open flame and by baroque theological theorizing.
The poem also places itself through its mention of the different sexual standards for men and women. This poem’s speaker (like many speakers before and since) is doing his best to coax an apparently reluctant lady into bed with him in spite of the fact that “fear, shame, honour” might all hold her back. Fear, shame, and honor were all greater sexual concerns for 17th-century Englishwomen than for 17th-century Englishmen: women were expected to remain chaste until marriage, and the consequences for not doing so could be severe.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Dream”
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Literary Context
John Donne (1572-1631) is remembered as one of the foremost of the "metaphysical poets"—though he never called himself one. The later writer Samuel Johnson coined the term, using it to describe a set of 17th-century English writers who wrote witty, passionate, intricate, cerebral poetry about love and God; George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne were some others.
Donne was the prototypical metaphysical poet: a master of elaborate conceits and complex sentences, a great writer of love poems (like this one) that mingle images of holiness with filthy puns. But during his lifetime, he was mostly a poet in private. In public life, he was an important clergyman, rising to become Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Like the vast majority of his poetry, "The Dream" didn't appear in print until several years after his death in 1633, when his collection Poems was posthumously published.
Donne's mixture of cynicism, passion, and mysticism fell out of literary favor after his 17th-century heyday; Johnson, for instance, a leading figure of the 18th-century Enlightenment, did not mean "metaphysical poet" as a compliment, seeing Donne and his contemporaries as obscure and irrational. But 19th-century Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge were stirred by Donne's mixture of philosophy and emotion, and their enthusiasm slowly resurrected Donne's reputation. Donne is now remembered as one of the most powerful and influential of poets, and he's inspired later writers from T. S. Eliot to Yeats to A. S. Byatt.
Historical Context
John Donne was a notorious ladies' man who would, over the course of his life, amass plenty of experience breaking hearts and having his heart broken. His sometimes foolhardy decision-making around women came to a head in an oddly touching way: when he fell deeply in love with Anne More, an important official's daughter, he eloped with her without getting her family's permission. This romantic leap of faith backfired on him when his wife's angry father had him thrown in prison.
While Donne was eventually reconciled with his father-in-law, this was a rocky beginning to a marriage that would see many difficulties. The Donnes and their many children lived in relative poverty. In order to stay financially afloat, Donne was forced to be literally afloat: he sailed on endless business trips all over Europe, and was often away from home for long stretches of time. Many of his passionate love poems tell the story of tearful farewells.
It was while Donne was away on one of his many business trips that tragedy struck: Anne Donne died giving birth to a stillborn child in 1617. The heartbroken Donne turned to his religious faith for consolation—and to support his surviving children. Under the patronage of King James I, he became a prominent and successful Anglican clergyman, the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. In that capacity, he wrote devotional verse every bit as passionate as his love poetry.
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More “The Dream” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem (performed in scholars' best approximation of what Donne's 17th-century accent would have sounded like).
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A Portrait of Donne — Admire a portrait of the young Donne in which he poses as the very model of a melancholy Renaissance lover.
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A Short Biography — Read the Poetry Foundation's brief biography of Donne to learn more about his life and work.
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Donne's Legacy — Read a review of a recent Donne biography to learn a little about how contemporary scholars approach Donne.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by John Donne
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