19 pages • 38 minutes read
Helen Hunt JacksonDreams
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1884A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Wand
Taking the poem’s central focus as the devastating impact of dreams that bring to life painful traumas kept under control during the day, it offers vague “[m]ysterious shapes” (Line 1) that conjure these nightmares with “wands of joy and pain” (Line 1) as the symbol of dreams.
The poem thus symbolically depicts dreams as the product of a menacing magician able to create convincing alternate realities that can bring happiness but also, more often than not, pain and sorrow. The suggestion of sorcery shows that for Jackson, dreams are separate from her conscious control. They come from some other entity that she harbors in her brain but cannot influence. Thus, she is passive, able only to watch these images.
Because the poem argues that sleepers are vulnerable and helpless in the face of whatever dreams may haunt their slumber, the symbol of a performing magician positions the sleeper as an audience—an observer without any power to interrupt or alter the program. Like audience members watching a deft performance, the speaker watches these dreams as if watching a magician’s tricks—they seem real and convincing even though the speaker knows in their clearer moments that they are illusions.
Chains
Long before therapists would argue that the lingering impact of emotional traumas is best examined, the poem uses the symbol of chains to suggest what, in Jackson’s time, was considered the ideal response to such life-altering events: stoicism. In 50 years, Jackson lost several members of her family; her challenge was to manage this horrific experience without letting others know about her level of distress.
In the poem, the pain and sorrows revived by dreams are never specified or defined. However, these “secrets [well] hid” (Line 4) allow the dreamer to function during the day. Contemporary readers may find the idea of ignoring emotional traumas self-defeating as a long-term coping strategy. But in Jackson’s era, the willingness to endure life’s most difficult moments without giving into self-pity represented the height of decorum, moral strength, and right living.
Thus, chaining these secrets, symbolically, in dark homes that are never visited symbolizes an exertion of will and moral strength. The speaker holds fast against extraordinary pressure to exhibit pain in public. Chains, thus, symbolically suggest that courage and fortitude.
Heaven
The poem ironizes the traditional Christian symbol of the reward of the afterlife. The eternal rest promised by heaven is used here to suggest not the endless joy and happiness of an eternity spent worshipping God, but rather the chance at last to sleep without the harrowing dreams that have disturbed the speaker’s earthly nights. Heaven, then, is the ability to control and choose one’s dreams: “The proof if heaven be, or only seem / That we forever choose what we will dream” (Lines 13-14).
This conclusion is hardly joyful. The argument hinges on that disturbing “if.” The speaker, troubled for so long by nightmares, has begun to drift from the safety and security of faith. The closing two lines, then, are a prayer of hope that this may be the heaven that the speaker has been promised. All the speaker asks from the afterlife is to finally be free of the dreams that perpetuate their sorrows in an endless loop.
