Seven times the speaker says "I had a dream," and seven times the stanza ends on the word "right." Between those two fixed points a love story falls apart. It begins with blue trees and a world where "all the world was right," moves through a declaration of love and a proposal, then turns to dread, a goodbye and a wailing figure. The central idea is that a dream is a fragile place to keep happiness. The imagination that can build a perfect world can also take it apart, and the final stanza suggests the speaker has stopped being surprised by this.
The form looks almost like a nursery rhyme. The lines are short, often only four or five syllables, and every stanza opens with the same refrain. Each has a tidy internal rhyme: *you/blue*, *me/he*, *said/dread*, *prevailed/wailed*. A form this singsong makes the content feel worse as it darkens, because the poem keeps its bouncy tread while the story collapses. Notice too that "right" never rhymes with anything in its own stanza. It hangs at the end of each one, the only unmatched sound, and that suits a word the poem keeps reaching for and never quite holds.
The imagery starts out surreal. Blue trees and a "turquoise rose" announce dream logic at once, yet the speaker insists that "all the world was right." The strangeness feels correct from inside the dream. A rose is the traditional flower of love, but a turquoise one is cool and unnatural. Judging by that image, the proposal may already be slightly artificial, a beautiful thing that doesn't belong to the waking world. The word "right" also shifts meaning along the way. At first it means "all right," content and in harmony. Later it sounds closer to "correct" or "fair," as though the speaker is checking the dream against a standard it can't meet.
The pronouns are unsteady, and that adds to the sense of slipping. The speaker addresses "you" in the first stanza, then talks about "he" in the second, even bending grammar with "I loved he," presumably for the rhyme. "You" returns for the proposal, then the beloved becomes "him." In the fifth stanza the goodbye has no speaker at all: "Where spoke goodbye." By the sixth, a "she" is wailing. It is tempting to read that figure as the dreamer seen from outside, but the poem doesn't say, and the uncertainty is the point. People in dreams swap faces and roles without warning, and the poem lets identities blur the same way.
The causes of the breakup are just as vague. "Where something said / Filled him with dread" never tells us what was said or by whom. "For trust had lied" is a neat paradox, since trust is supposed to be the thing that doesn't deceive. "Riven hearts prevailed" is another odd phrase, because broken hearts shouldn't be able to win. Their victory is an empty one, and it leaves only the wailing.
The negatives pile up as the poem goes on. First we have "everything was right," then "nothing e'er was right," "not at all was right," "not a thing was right," and finally "nothing seemed / Ever / To be right." The last stanza changes the tone completely. "For dreamers dream" is a shrug and almost a tautology, as if dreaming were a habit the speaker can't excuse or break. Then the verb changes from "was" to "seemed." The earlier stanzas stated that things were right as fact, while this one admits that appearance may have been all there ever was. Setting "Ever" alone on its own line stretches the moment out, so that the disappointment sounds permanent rather than a bad night's sleep.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it uses to say this. There is no argument, only a refrain that begins as an invitation and wears down into a sigh. By the end, "I had a dream" no longer sounds like the start of a story. It sounds like a confession, and the poem's quiet suggestion is that hoping itself is the habit that keeps setting the speaker up.