Arthur Stringer, a Canadian-born writer who moved between fiction, journalism, and Hollywood screenwriting in the early twentieth century, composed “The Dream” during the shift toward free verse and psychological realism. Collected in his 1914 volume *Open Water*, on the eve of the First World War, the poem unfolds as a stark first-person nightmare rather than a conventional meditation on loss. Its speaker wakes from a dream of lying dead beside a beloved and spends the rest of the poem trying to shake off the grave’s residue.
At its core, the poem dramatizes how mortality invades intimacy. The speaker does not merely witness death; he shares it: “I was dead with you— / And my bones still ache with Death.” That ache blurs the boundary between dream and body, so the nightmare is not safely over at dawn. The most disturbing moment comes when his hand touches the loved one’s lips and finds them “fallen away, / Wasted and lost!” The shock is not gothic spectacle but intimate decay: the lips “once warm with life” are “eaten and gone,” reducing the beloved to physical corruption. Because this horror arrives through touch, it becomes a kind of knowing, an “intimate blackness of Death” that the soul cannot bear. The poem’s central idea is less about grief for a specific person than about the mind’s terror at death’s nearness, especially in sleep, where it slips past the usual defenses.
Stringer relies on free verse, abandoning regular meter and rhyme to follow the speaker’s agitated consciousness. Instead of a rhyme scheme, internal repetitions bind the lines: “by your side... by you,” “I was dead... arose from the dead,” “ache with Death... still ache with it all.” Short lines and abrupt dashes create a halting, breathless movement, as in “And then I arose from the dead / And returned to the day; / And my bones and my heart still ache with it all.” The repeated “and” mimics the exhausted mind trying to reassemble itself. Tactile imagery dominates the dream: the “damp of the grave,” the aching bones, the wasted lips. Against this decaying body, the poem sets an auditory cityscape—the “relieving babble of life,” the “crowd in the hurrying street,” the “tumult and laughter and talk.” Words like damp, grave, bones, lips, blackness, hunger, babble, and forget pull the reader between two opposing senses: the grave’s cold touch and the street’s loud pulse. The absence of rhyme makes the horror feel unvarnished, as if the speaker is still too shaken to shape the experience into neat stanzas.
What makes “The Dream” significant is its refusal of consolation. A Victorian elegy might find peace in reunion after death or in religious assurance, but Stringer gives neither. Instead, the speaker’s only relief is the crowded street, the modern city’s anonymous noise used as a kind of anesthesia. That turn from private nightmare to public bustle captures an early twentieth-century sensibility: the city as both refuge and distraction from mortality. The poem also anticipates the psychological frankness of later modernism by treating a dream not as allegory but as an experience that leaves a physical and emotional mark. The final verb, “forget,” is not resolution; it is a desperate wish that life’s babble might drown out the intimate blackness still clinging to the speaker’s bones.