Arthur Stringer’s “The Man of Dreams” reads like a compressed parable of artistic sacrifice, written by a Canadian novelist and poet whose career straddled the practical worlds of journalism and Hollywood and the less lucrative country of the imagination. Stringer published the poem in his 1914 collection Open Water, a volume that often returns to questions of spiritual hunger and the unseen value of imaginative work, during an era of rapid industrial expansion and material ambition. The title itself confers a quiet identity: he is not the man of grain or property but the man of dreams, as though his inner life were his defining possession. The poem speaks from the position of a speaker the world has judged poor: “All my lean life / I garnered nothing but a dream or two.” Beside him, others “gathered harvests / And grew fat with grain.” The contrast is deliberately stark—the solitary dreamer’s meager store set against the crowd’s full barns.
But the poem pivots on a truth economics cannot measure: “no man lives by bread, / And bread alone.” That biblical echo reframes the scene entirely. The fat harvesters are not truly secure; they are starved in a deeper way. When they “cried for life,” they do not ask for more grain but for what the dreamer carries in his chest. His response reverses worldly logic: “So, forgetful of their scorn, / When starved, they cried for life, / I gave them my last dreams, / I bared for them my heart, / That they might eat!” The speaker becomes a provider not in spite of his poverty but because of it. His dreams, worthless in the marketplace, become the only food for those who are spiritually starving. The phrase “my last dreams” is crucial—it signals that this is not surplus generosity but total self-giving.
The form is as lean as the life it describes. Stringer avoids end rhyme and regular meter, yet the lines carry a faint biblical cadence, especially in the final sequence where the repeated “I gave... / I bared...” phrases build toward the exclamation “That they might eat!” The short lines force pauses after each image, so words such as “scorn,” “life,” “heart,” and “eat” land heavily. The isolation of “And bread alone” gives the line the weight of a pronouncement, while the opening’s “lean life” uses alliteration to make the speaker’s very existence sound underfed. The verbs “garnered” and “gathered” are nearly synonymous but assigned to different groups: the dreamer garners only dreams, the others gather grain. “Fat with grain” makes their abundance physical and slightly grotesque. Later, “starved” and “eat” complete the nutritional metaphor, but the nourishment has shifted from the stomach to the heart. The image of baring his heart for the hungry carries a sacrificial, almost Eucharistic overtone; a man offers his inner life as food.
Stringer himself knew the pull between commercial work and creative ambition, and the speaker may be a kind of self-portrait of the writer who feels scorned by practical society yet still believes his dreams are necessities, not luxuries. What makes “The Man of Dreams” significant is its compact reversal of value. In a culture that measures worth by accumulated wealth, the poem quietly overturns the balance: those “fat with grain” are the ones who starve, and the “lean” dreamer is the one who feeds them. It is not a protest against material success so much as a reminder that human beings hunger for more than bread, and that the artist’s inventions, affections, and acts of imagining can answer that hunger.