What if the crown on your head, the crowd cheering you and the room you stand in all turned out to be a dream? The speaker of "The Dream Called Life" is a king who suspects exactly that. He remembers a dream of a palace that was his "within, and all without it," a dream that ended when his pride grew so large that he "burst the glittering bubble" of his own ambition. Then he wonders whether his present life, with its subjects and its "solemn justice," is another bubble waiting for a pin. The "dark tower" where he fears he might wake, and the note that this is "from the Spanish of Pedro Calderon de la Barca," suggest the play *Life Is a Dream*, in which a prince is kept in a tower. The English poem makes sense without that background, though.
Its central idea is not despair but conduct. The doubt is real: the king can't tell whether he is awake, dreaming that he wakes, or "both waking and both dreaming." Then comes the pivot, "But whether wake or dreaming, this I know." Since "human glories come and go," the sensible response is to behave so well that nothing is left "to upbraid / Dreamer or doer in the part he played." Uncertainty about what is real doesn't cancel responsibility. If anything, it raises the stakes, because the dream might be the only chance we get.
The form carries this movement. The opening is loose iambic pentameter that mostly doesn't rhyme, and sentences spill across line endings. When the king reaches "or dreaming that I wake / From this that waking is; or this and that," the syntax tangles, and the reader gets as lost as he is. Rhyme creeps in first as "pride" and "wide," and then the couplet "doubt" and "about" neatly shuts the confusion. After "this I know," the poem settles into couplets: *know/go*, *break/wake*, *well/quell*, *upbraid/played*. The rhyme is the sound of firmer ground. The last two lines, "Day" and "away," close the poem with a sense of finality.
The imagery is built from a few repeated ideas. The bubble is the most vivid. The king "towered so big and swelled so wide" that he burst, so pride destroys itself without any enemy. Drunkenness works the same way. At first he is "Drunk with excess of majesty," but near the end the advice is to "carry the full cup" steadily and to "quell" insolence and passion. The danger of power is the same in both places, and so is the cure, which is self-control. Theatre runs through the poem as well. His courtiers are "shadows / Who make believe to listen," their "plume and steel" are costumes, and the cheering that "rends" the air leaves nothing behind. By the end power is just "the part he played." Even the word "tenure" is telling. It sounds like a legal lease, and the poem treats glory as something rented for a short time. "Dreamwise" seems to be a compound the poem makes up, and it neatly says that glories come and go in the manner of dreams.
The ending offers two ways the dream might finish: "tomorrow's dawn" or "the last trumpet of the Eternal Day." One is an ordinary awakening, and the other is a religious one that brings judgment. Either way, the poem links dreaming with night and waking with day, so the final line, "When dreaming, with the night, shall pass away," makes the whole of earthly life sound like one long night.
The poem matters because it takes an old philosophical puzzle and turns it into a practical question: how should you act if you can't be sure anything is real? The speaker is a king, so the lesson falls hardest on someone with power to abuse. FitzGerald, best known for his version of the *Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám*, again acts as an interpreter of another writer's thought, and the poem holds up well as English verse. Its answer is simple and still useful: whether or not it is a dream, play your part well.