The speaker kisses someone farewell, admitting his days have felt like a dream, with hope now flown away. He questions whether it matters if hope vanished in a moment or slowly—it’s gone just the same. That thought sets up the poem’s haunting refrain: everything we see or seem is only a dream within a dream.
Then we’re on a surf-tormented shore. He holds a few grains of golden sand, watching them creep through his fingers into the deep, weeping uncontrollably. He cries out to God, desperate to tighten his grip, to save even one grain from the pitiless wave. It’s a wrenching image of trying and failing to hold onto something real. Every certainty crumbles. The poem leaves us inside that ache—the dread that hope, love, and reality itself might be nothing more than a fleeting dream.