Wyatt’s speaker addresses a dream as if it were a person — a fickle, lying lover. He pleads with it to be faithful or at least truthful, because the sweetness it offered, a glimpse of a woman whose affection felt real, has left him aching. That false grace vanished, and he’s stuck in a “tossing mew,” a cage of emotional turmoil where his body clutched at her comfort while his spirit kept feeding its own anxious desire.
Then the dream shifts: the body seems to die, and the spirit finally gets what it craves — painless, pure delight. But instead of holding onto that peace, the spirit “returning, to leap into the fire,” lunges back into suffering. The dream mocks him by letting him taste fulfilment only to snatch it away. What lingers isn’t the joy but the wound, a “deadly pain” that turns the memory of the dream into a torment. The mood is raw and self-lacerating — a man wrestling with a desire that teases and then punishes him.