19 pages • 38 minutes read
Dreams
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Themes
The Vulnerability of Sleep
There is proverbial peace in sleep. Yet Jackson’s poem exposes the reality that a person is helpless when they sleep, without all the safeguards in place during the day to control dark thoughts, unpleasant memories, and the emotional residue of traumas that are sometimes years in the past. To use the metaphor that Jackson offers, sleep frees our darkest and deepest “secrets” (Line 4) from the “houses” (Line 3) where we have chained them up in the sturdiest and stoutest chains we can “forge” (Line 5). That terrifying liberation is what sleep means to the speaker. Moreover, the poem notes, there is nothing a person can do except hope that eternal rest is not disturbed by such dreams.
“Oh, cruelty!” (Line 8), the speaker laments of their recurring bad dreams. Sleep does not provide a happy respite, nor can the sleeper assume that they will awaken refreshed, reanimated, and ready for a new day. Instead, for them, sleep is about negotiating with the past. Thus, each night, the speaker heads off to sleep understanding the reality of this vulnerability and anticipating the aching pain that sleep will inevitably trigger by immersing them in what they so desperately want to keep hidden, the very pain that the person manages to control during the day. Helpless in sleep, the speaker sees in dreams “[m]ysterious shapes” (Line 1) that “seize” (Line 2) dreams. That verb itself suggests unwanted, aggressive, and even violent invasion.
In the vulnerability of sleep, then, the comforting idea that closure from trauma is possible is denied. The idea that the past can somehow eventually be overcome becomes darkly ironic.
The Impact of Grief
Contemporary thinking holds that a person will never entirely heal from emotional trauma without confronting it aggressively and honestly. Only through therapeutic self-expression can traumas be finally dealt with rather than simply buried. In Jackson’s Gilded Age America, however, the conventional wisdom was to handle the impact of grief by not handling the impact of grief.
“Dreams” is a melancholy and very personal reflection on grief. Because Jackson composed the sonnet just months before her death (it was published posthumously), the poem is a psychological case study in the impact of deep loss. Approaching her own death, Jackson reflects on the many people she has had to mourn: her older brothers, her parents, her first husband, and two of her children. Reflecting on a life defined by these deaths, the poem reveals that years, even decades after the traumas, the pain is still vivid enough to animate her dreams.
The poem also examines Jackson’s understanding of and relationship to her stomach cancer. For two years, Jackson attempted to attend to the routine business of her day-to-day world while stoically refusing to allow her illness to upend her life. The reality of her approaching death, however, is among the “[m]ysterious shapes” (Line 1) that haunt her sleep.
The poem argues that in waking life, with stoic courage, people can manage the impact of loss with decorum and dignity. Despite the emotional devastation, people do not need to give in to messy displays of emotion. Rather, people should internalize their grief and maintain the propriety that defined parlor and drawing room behavior in the Gilded Age America. However, cruel dreams release these memories, the only available strategy for handling the impact of loss.
The Comfort of Death
Jackson grew up hearing her beloved father, an ordained Unitarian minister, recite the reassuring prayer of Christian burial: “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord.” That eternal rest, according to religious teachings, is the reward for a life of sorrows and joys, tragedies and triumphs.
However, Jackson’s melancholic poem complicates this simple vision in its closing sestet. In acknowledging that, because of the long reach of dreams, she will never be entirely free of the emotional anguish of her memories, Jackson looks to death as her ultimate escape from her helplessness when she dreams.
If death is akin to “sleep” (Line 9), Jackson reasons, then heaven should be to life as night is to day—the joy and reward of heaven hinges on it. However, the reverse is also possible: If heaven is indeed the eternal rest that Christianity describes, then it might sustain dreams. That, she argues, would significantly qualify the promised reward of heaven.
Jackson hopes that she will have absolute say over what she dreams in heaven. The proof that the afterlife is heaven is if that condition is met. Conversely, if eternal rest can be haunted by harrowing dreams that she cannot control, then she rejects it—a bold assertion given that Jackson was terminally ill when writing.
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