19 pages • 38 minutes read
Dreams
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Background
Cultural Context: The Gothic Imagination
Sleep is supposed to comfort, nurture, and restore. Jackson’s poem takes place in a surreal dreamscape of “[m]ysterious shapes” (Line 1) that instead terrorizes helpless sleepers.
The poem describes how the painful memories that everyone struggles to suppress during the day come swirling out of the dark nothingness of sleep. In this forbidding and terrifying dream world, suffering and anxieties live again, making the sleeper’s heart race from fear. Memories come alive. Emotional pain becomes vivid and palpable. In exposing what is conventionally thought of us as a happy respite from the day’s labors, Jackson reminds readers of the terrifying vulnerability of sleep and the cruelty of dreams.
Although not as lurid or extravagantly vivid as the tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, or as creepy and supernatural as the rustic tales of Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jackson’s sonnet abandons realism and the familiar real-time world to capture the harrowing realm of dreams. As such, Jackson’s sonnet is an expression of the wider 19th-century cultural fascination with the Gothic imagination. Gothicism as a mode focused on atmospheric terror, foreboding despair, and the oppressive weight of long-buried secrets. Writers found a ready market for spooky tales with supernatural elements that, responding to the advances in the new science of psychology, explored uncertain and unmapped psychological interiors. Here, for instance, Jackson uses the terrors unleashed by dreams to suggest how the speaker is coping—or not coping—with their life’s emotional traumas.
Literary Context: Confessional Poetry
Although the emotional wallop of Jackson’s dark poem about the haunted world of sleep can be appreciated on its own merits, its emotional complexity can also be read as at least partially autobiographical.
The tragedies and losses that defined Jackson’s life before her move West—the deaths of her two brothers, the deaths of her parents within months of each other, the death of her first husband in a Navy accident, and then the deaths of her two infant children—deepen the poem’s meaning. Jackson speaks of the recurring images that her dreams release, and her biography illuminates the dimensions of the poet’s suffering and the oppressive reality of her grief. The dreams that she dreads compel her to give way to the sorrows that she manages with fortitude during her waking hours.
The poem’s emotional depth then comes from the poet herself. As such, “Dreams” is an example of what, more than a half century after Jackson’s death, would emerge as one of the defining poetic genres of the new century. Self-described Confessional Poets brought to their poetry intimate and personal subjects long deemed unfit for poetic treatment and more properly examined in diary entries or perhaps in therapy sessions: depression, traumas, suicidal ideation, spiritual and emotional uneasiness, and the unrecoverable impact of family tragedies.
Owing much to the publication in the early decades of the century of the poetry of Jackson’s longtime friend Emily Dickinson, these poets, most prominently Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman, believed, like Jackson, that poetry does not merely reflect the poet; poetry is the poet.
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