The Full Text of “A Dream”
1Once a dream did weave a shade
2O'er my angel-guarded bed,
3That an emmet lost its way
4Where on grass methought I lay.
5Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,
6Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
7Over many a tangle spray,
8All heart-broke, I heard her say:
9"Oh my children! do they cry,
10Do they hear their father sigh?
11Now they look abroad to see,
12Now return and weep for me."
13Pitying, I dropped a tear:
14But I saw a glow-worm near,
15Who replied, "What wailing wight
16Calls the watchman of the night?
17"I am set to light the ground,
18While the beetle goes his round:
19Follow now the beetle's hum;
20Little wanderer, hie thee home!"
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“A Dream” Introduction
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English Romantic poet William Blake first published "A Dream" in his important 1789 collection Songs of Innocence. In the poem, the speaker describes dreaming of a lost ant crying out for her family. The speaker, relating to the ant's misery, is moved to tears by her plight. But soon a glow-worm responds to the ant's cry and shows her the way home. The poem paints a picture of a benevolent, compassionate natural world, and suggests that help is always available to those who ask for it.
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“A Dream” Summary
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One time, lying in my bed under the protection of my guardian angel, I had this dream: an ant was wandering around lost in the grass where it seemed I was lying.
Anxious, lost, and miserable; confused and weary from traveling; clambering across snarled twigs and branches, heart-broken, I heard her exclaim:
"Oh no, my babies! Are they weeping? Is their dad sighing with worry and fear? One moment they look around to see if I'm there, the next they go home to grieve for me."
Touched by the ant's misfortunes, I cried: but then I caught sight of a glow-worm nearby, who answered the ant, "What weeping creature do I hear calling for the night guardian?
"I'm posted here to illuminate the earth while the beetle walks his usual beat. Listen for the sound of the beetle and follow it; get on home, little traveler!"
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“A Dream” Themes
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Guidance, Protection, and Compassion
William Blake's "A Dream" recounts the speaker’s dream of a lost emmet (or ant) who has been separated from her children and husband. This dilemma, which seems to represent the speaker’s own lonely bewilderment, gets resolved when the ant cries out for pity, and a friendly “glow-worm” guides her home. Told from a trusting, childlike perspective, the poem suggests that those who ask for help will get it: the world is a naturally compassionate place, and guidance and protection are always at hand, even in difficult times.
The speaker paints a picture of a natural world filled with kindly creatures that are readily willing to help one another. When the little ant cries out for her husband and children, a “glow-worm” (or firefly) quickly responds. The glow-worm acts as an illuminator and a protector, “set to light the ground” and guide the “travel-worn” ant.
And this glow-worm isn't the only helpful creature around around! It instructs the ant to “follow [...] the beetle’s hum,” which will lead her home. The beetle, then, is also a source of guidance and protection. The idea that the beetle is “go[ing] his round” (or doing rounds) further suggests that it is simply his job to keep an eye out for those who need help. And, of course, the ant herself is trying to get home to protect her own “children,” to give them the same kind of comfort and care that the glow-worm and beetle offer.
By setting this dream of lost-and-found drama in a version of the natural world filled with benevolent creatures, the speaker suggests that—at least from a perspective of “innocence”—the world is an inherently compassionate place, even and especially when one feels lost.
Of course, all this talk about ants and glow-worms is really an allegory—a story meant to illuminate a truth about the human world. The glow-worm’s readiness to lead and care for the ant makes it much like the protective angel that “guard[s]” the speaker’s bed. In fact, the phrasing of the lines in which the speaker describes the ant as “troubled, wildered, and forlorn” makes it sound as though they could as easily refer to the speaker themselves. And when the ant cries out in sorrow and loneliness, the speaker’s compassionate tears over the ant’s plight suggest that the speaker shares those feelings.
This dream, in other words, is telling the speaker something about their own life and difficulties. This dream has a message: friendly (and, given the nod to the "angel" at the poem's start, divine) guidance is always available to those who ask for it.
At the same time, the poem concludes without the reader ever finding out whether the ant makes it home—so although the poem ends on a hopeful, seemingly all-is-well note, there’s plenty of room for less tidy interpretations.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A Dream”
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Lines 1-4
Once a dream did weave a shade
O'er my angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.The poem opens with the speaker recounting a dream they once had. The speaker personifies the dream as a kind of mysterious weaver, saying that it "w[ove] a shade / O'er [the speaker's] angel-guarded bed."
This moment can be taken literally, suggesting the "shad[y]" darkness of the night. But here, it might be more fitting to think of this "shade" as a kind of enchantment. In other words, a dream cast a spell on the speaker, so that instead of feeling safe and protected in their bed, the speaker thinks they are lying on "grass" in the darkness of night, witnessing the distraught wanderings of a lost "emmet," or ant.
The fact that the speaker is dreaming of the ant (rather than just observing an ant in the real world) suggests that the ant is of some personal significance to the speaker; the speaker, it seems, relates to this little lost ant, wandering in the darkness.
The poem immediately contrasts "shade," or darkness, with the speaker's "angel-guarded bed," suggesting that these two things are at odds. In the dream, it seems, the sleeper is afraid of not being able to find a way back to the waking, benevolent world of their bedroom—or perhaps they're just feeling lost and bewildered in their waking life.
Either way, this dream will work rather like a fable, a morality tale with a cast of anthropomorphized animals. This will be a tale of being lost and found, lonely and protected.
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Lines 5-8
Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangle spray,
All heart-broke, I heard her say:
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Lines 9-12
"Oh my children! do they cry,
Do they hear their father sigh?
Now they look abroad to see,
Now return and weep for me." -
Lines 13-16
Pitying, I dropped a tear:
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied, "What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night? -
Lines 17-20
"I am set to light the ground,
While the beetle goes his round:
Follow now the beetle's hum;
Little wanderer, hie thee home!"
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“A Dream” Symbols
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Darkness and Light
The poem uses darkness to symbolize confusion, loneliness, and being lost, while light represents guidance, protection, compassion, and being found.
The poem contrasts darkness and light right away, with the speaker saying that the lost ant of the dream was "dark, benighted." In other words, darkness is associated with being anxious, lost, and miserable.
Later in the poem, the speaker sees a glow-worm, a kind of insect which sheds light. The glow-worm offers to help the ant, and refers to itself as the "watchman of the night." In other words, the glow-worm, through the act of "light[ing] the ground," is going to help the ant find her way home. In this way, light is associated with guidance, protection, and being found.
Darkness and light may also symbolize ignorance and enlightenment. Early in the poem, the speaker describes the ant as "Dark" and "benighted" (which means ignorant). The ant is unhappy because she is ignorant—i.e. she doesn't know where she is or how to find her way home. However, with divine guidance (i.e. the help of a glow-worm, or an "angel"), the ant finds a way home. In this way, darkness and light relate to knowing and not knowing.
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“A Dream” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration gives the poem musicality and intensity.
In the second stanza, for example, hard, thorny /t/ alliteration ("Troubled," "travel-worn," "tangle") gives way to softer /h/ alliteration:
All heart-broke, I heard her say:
The breathy /h/ sounds evoke the ant's piteous tears—and the speaker's gentle "Pity[]" for her suffering.
In lines 15-16, meanwhile, intense /w/ alliteration draws attention to the glow-worm's speech:
Who replied, "What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?These moments of alliteration suggest the glow-worm's importance in the world of this poem: all those /w/ sounds ring out boldly, highlighting the glow-worm's words. In addition to the more closely packed /w/ alliteration in these lines, there is also spread-out /w/ alliteration (and consonance) in the lines before and after (such as "glow-worm" in line 14).
Finally, in the last two lines of the poem, /h/ alliteration feels both gentle and tidy:
Follow now the beetle's hum;
Little wanderer, hie thee home!This alliteration makes the slant rhyme between "hum" and "home" stand out, making the phrase "hie thee home" feel like a memorable ending.
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Assonance
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Imagery
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Caesura
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Anthropomorphism
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End-Stopped Line
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Parallelism
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“A 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.
- O'er
- Emmet
- Methought
- Wildered
- Forlorn
- Benighted
- Travel-worn
- Many a tangle spray
- Heart-broke
- Glow-worm
- Wight
- Goes his round
- Hie thee home
O'er-
A contraction of the word "Over."
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “A Dream”
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Form
"A Dream" consists of five four-line stanzas, or quatrains. This simple form, coupled with regular meter and rhyme (more on that in minute), gives the poem an almost nursery-rhyme feel—which makes sense, as this is one of Blake's Songs of Innocence, poems meant to evoke the clear-eyed delight of childhood. In fact, Blake felt children would understand his poems better than anyone.
That being said, there is a complexity to the poem that belies the apparent simplicity of the form. The poem may be expressing a childlike trust in the inherent goodness of the world, but trust alone doesn't necessarily make it so. This is why Blake published a second volume of corresponding poems titled Songs of Experience, a volume which expresses a more world-weary, adult perspective in contrast to Song of Innocence.
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Meter
"A Dream" is written in trochaic tetrameter: that is, each line contains four trochees, metrical feet with a DUM-da rhythm.
This is often called "falling meter" because the lines begin forcefully and then end on weaker unstressed syllables. This poem, however, uses catalexis, meaning that lines leave out that last unstressed syllable and end on strong stressed syllables. Take the first line, for example:
Once a | dream did | weave a | shade
Ending most lines on those strong stresses gives the poem a punchier, livelier tone. And in general, this simple, forceful, singsongy meter makes this poem feel like a nursery rhyme—fitting for a childlike "Song of Innocence."
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem's simple rhyme scheme runs like this:
AABB
This uncomplicated pattern contributes to the poem's childlike tone: by tying each couplet into a neat little bow, the poem matches its rhymes to its reassuring tale of guidance and compassion. For example, the quick end-rhyme between "tear" and "near" in lines 13 and 14 suggests that the speaker barely has time to shed a single tear in response to the ant's plight before someone (in this case a "glow-worm") comes along to offer help.
While the majority of the end rhymes in this poem use full rhyme (that is, they rhyme exactly), the first and last rhymes are both slant. In lines 1 and 2, "shade" rhymes with "bed," contrasting the safety and comfort of a warm place to sleep with the uncertainty and fear children often associate with darkness.
And in the last two lines of the poem, the slant rhyme between "hum" and "home" perhaps complicates the simple idea that the ant can just follow the sound of the beetle home—the lack of a perfect rhyme might suggest that the ant might not make it back to her family so easily, after all.
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“A Dream” Speaker
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The speaker of this poem is a child or a childlike figure remembering a dream they once had. In the dream, the speaker sees a lost ant crying out for her family, and a glow-worm coming to her aid. While the speaker mostly seems concerned with telling the ant's tale, the reader gets a sense of the speaker's own fears and preoccupations through that tale: the speaker, too, seems "troubled, wildered, and forlorn" and is quick to sympathetically "drop[] a tear" over the ant's plight.
In the final stanza, the glow-worm gives the ant instructions on how to return home, and its instructions ("Little wanderer, hie thee home!") feel applicable to the speaker as well. Because the poem ends with this line, readers might imagine that the speaker awakes in their own "angel-guarded bed," no longer frightened and far from home.
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“A Dream” Setting
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The poem is set inside the speaker's dreaming mind.
In the dream, the speaker is lying "on grass" and encounters an ant that has "lost its way" in the dark night and is now separated from its family. Down at the ant's level, the landscape is rugged: the ant is weary from traveling "Over many a tangle spray" (that is, the wild, daunting plants and grasses).
Hearing the ant's pitiful cries, a "glow-worm" emerges and offers advice on how she might return home. It tells her to "Follow now the beetle's hum." The glow-worm and beetle's light and "hum" become a comforting presence in a wilderness, a source of guidance in a strange land.
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Literary and Historical Context of “A Dream”
Literary Context
William Blake (1757-1827) is revered as one of the most unique and influential figures in the history of English literature. Though he is now often considered the first of the Romantic poets because of his ideals regarding nature, the imagination, and creativity, he was considered peculiar and even deranged in his own time. Unlike contemporaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, he struggled to find an audience—either popular or critical—that understood or appreciated his work.
Part of this is due to the visionary quality of Blake’s poetry. Blake spoke of witnessing angels and other spiritual phenomena since his early childhood, and these experiences informed his work to such a degree that even Coleridge, himself a visionary, remarked that he was quite “common-place” compared to Blake.
Blake first published "A Dream" in his 1789 book Songs of Innocence, which in 1794 he republished as an expanded collection called Songs of Innocence and Experience. As a whole, this two-part collection explores the contrasting sides of human nature, and can be seen as a reenvisioning of the Biblical tale of the Garden of Eden and humanity’s fall from grace.
Blake’s writing was meant to instill moral lessons, but not simple ones: the deceptively plainspoken poems of Innocence and Experience can be interpreted in many ways. Many of the poems in Innocence correspond directly to a poem in Experience; for instance, "A Dream" is paralleled by "The Angel," which also details a dream and the guardianship of angels. But while “A Dream” depicts compassion as a connection to the divine, nature, and each other, “The Angel” has a more world-weary tone, and explores what happens when people lose this connection.
One of Blake’s most important influences was John Milton, whose Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained influence this poem's lost-and-found narrative. Blake revered Milton: not only did he create four different sets of illustrations for Paradise Lost, he wrote an epic poem called “Milton” in which Milton's spirit enters Blake’s foot and leads him into “The City of Art.” In other words, Blake credited Milton with his very creativity, and felt an intensely personal connection to his work.
Historical Context
Blake didn't just write poetry: he illustrated, hand-engraved, printed, and distributed his own poems. His illustrations often deepen, complicate, or even contradict the narratives they accompany.
He used an original, ground-breaking method to create his books: rather than carving into the copper plates used in printing, he would paint both poems and pictures directly onto his plates with a resilient ink, then submerge them in an acid bath, so that the material around the images was seared away. His process was an expression of his belief that the artist's job is to "melt[] apparent surfaces away" so that everything "appear[s] to man as it is, infinite."
This belief was at the heart of Blake's work and life. Blake was profoundly religious, but critical of organized religion, which he saw as detrimental to a more natural and direct relationship between human beings and the divine. He was also influenced by the revolutions (French and American) taking place around him. Seeing that societal and religious constructs could be broken down and new liberties gained, Blake used his work to address social issues like the mistreatment of children and racism.
The Industrial Revolution was also heavy on Blake's mind. He worried human beings were losing touch with nature, and therefore with God, themselves, and one another. In "A Dream," for instance, humanity and nature are all in communion with the divine. Just as the glow-worm’s light and "the beetle's hum" are a lifeline for the lost ant, nature, Blake believed, could provide guidance and instruction. In his view, feeling (i.e. the ant’s cries, the speaker’s tears), not intellect, allows one to access the earth’s inherent wisdom.
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More “A Dream” Resources
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External Resources
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A Reading of the Poem — Listen to the poem read aloud.
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The Poem Illuminated — See the poem in its original form: a hand-engraved, illuminated print made by Blake himself.
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A Short Biography — Learn more about Blake's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.
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Songs of Innocence and Experience — Take a look at images of the first edition of Songs of Innocence and Experience, the lavishly illustrated collection this poem comes from.
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Blake's Legacy — Read author Philip Pullman's reflection on Blake's continuing influence.
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Blake's Printing Method — A look at Blake's print-making process and how it relates to his poetry and visual art.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Blake
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