Walter de la Mare’s “Dreams” opens as a tender command: “Be gentle, O hands of a child; / Be true.” Those two imperatives ask for a gentleness and honesty the adult speaker associates with childhood, and the poem then gives that association an image: the child’s eyes are “like a shadowy sea / In the starry darkness of night.” The comparison is not merely pretty. A sea is deep, shifting, and hard to know; a night full of stars is both dark and lit. In the child’s gaze, the speaker sees a combination of mystery and clarity that feels larger than ordinary life. The poem’s central subject is the loss of that largeness. It mourns the fading of dreams and youth, and it ends by begging the “lonely dreams of a child” to return.
The form reinforces the mood. Each of the three stanzas has four lines, with three longer lines followed by a shorter, indented one. The second and fourth lines rhyme, so the sound pattern is ABCB: “sea” answers “me,” “knew” answers “too,” and “dumb” answers “come.” The shorter final line in every stanza acts like a sigh or an echo, and the rocking effect is close to a lullaby. But the content darkens that lullaby. The first stanza’s indented line, “Are your eyes to me,” is already ambiguous, as if the speaker can hardly believe in the vision he addresses. The second, “In the dark eyes too,” clinches the sense of loss. By the final stanza, the short line has become an imperative: “Return again, come!” The movement from description to direct plea is the emotional arc of the poem.
The imagery sharpens the sense of loss. In the opening, the sea and starry night are full of hidden depth. In the second stanza, however, “words are shallow,” so adult language is placed in direct opposition to that shadowy sea. What the heart once knew fades, as does youth itself: it fades “out in the mind” and “in the dark eyes too.” The word “dark” returns from the first stanza, but the “starry darkness” has now lost its stars. The child’s depth has become mere darkness. The repeated idea of fading is important because it is gradual; nothing disappears suddenly. That slow dimming is what the poem is trying to reverse.
The speaker’s tired heart is crucial to the final stanza. He asks what such a heart can say, “Which the wise of the world have made dumb.” Adult wisdom, or perhaps the world’s idea of wisdom, has silenced the speaker’s deeper voice. That is why the closing line is so bare and childlike: “Return again, come!” It is not sophisticated language. It is a simple call, full of longing, and it is the only speech left to the heart after everything else has been deemed shallow. The poem therefore does not merely envy childhood; it dramatises the loss of a mode of seeing and feeling. The “lonely dreams of a child” are lonely because they have been left behind, and the speaker’s plea is an attempt to bring them back across the border of time.
What makes the poem significant is its compression. De la Mare often wrote about the edges of perception, where the real world slips into dream or memory. Here that border is internal. The sea, stars, darkness, and fading light are not decorative; they create a small myth of lost vision. The child’s eyes become a doorway, and the three stanzas, with their hushed rhymes and shortened final lines, enact a bidding: a wish that the dreams which fed the heart might return from the dark.