Before we can speak, the poem argues, we already want. "The Dream" begins in the blur of a newborn's perception, when colour is still only a "shimmer" and "noise" has not yet become "language". Its central idea is that the deepest human craving is wordless: "to touch & to be touched". Language arrives later, and instead of satisfying that craving it quietly admits defeat.
The construction of the first stanza enacts this. It is a single suspended sentence, built on the repeated "before" and delayed until the main clause finally lands: "the craving begins". Everything in the stanza is a process still incomplete, with senses not yet synchronised and objects not yet permanent. The sibilance of "senses synchronise" gives the line a soft, hissing smoothness, as if the world were still slipping into focus. Then the "first scream of protest" cuts through, and the craving gets a line to itself, short and plain after all that scaffolding. The poem returns to it at the very end, which makes it a kind of refrain.
The second stanza widens from infancy to a whole emotional life. The triple "through" ("through sadness, through elation, / through bitter-sweet isolation") carries the dream along, and the poem's only real rhyme gathers here: elation, isolation, revelation. Free verse elsewhere, it lets these -ation endings chime exactly where feeling peaks. The "revelation" is a lovely image: noticing "the symmetry / between our veins & those / of the leaves". The branching of a body and the branching of a leaf are the same pattern, so touch might be less a reaching across a gap than a recognition of kinship. The word "aleatory", meaning governed by chance, matters too. Such moments of insight cannot be summoned, only stumbled upon. The stanza ends on a hopeful, over-reaching wish to touch "not just the surface but / the ineffable essence". The line break after "but" leaves the reader briefly hanging, mimicking the reach itself.
Then comes the poem's sharpest turn. After the elevated vocabulary of "aleatory" and "ineffable", it gives us "fucking". The shock is deliberate. The sentence is carefully balanced ("Melancholia is our mourning for, / & fucking our delirious affirmation of"), with each dangling preposition holding back its object until "this dream". Grief and sex become two opposite answers to the same longing, one mourning that the dream fails and the other insisting on it with the body. The bluntness of the word keeps desire physical rather than ornamental.
"Speech" sits alone on its own line, then gets defined as "our abstract acceptance / that the dream is impossible". That is a cruel irony, since the poem is itself made of speech. The word "abstract" is the opposite of touch, and it takes us back to the first stanza, where "noise becomes language" and the child begins to lose what it first wanted. Yet the poem refuses to settle for despair. Its pronouns shift from the collective "we" and "our" to an intimate "I" and "your". A smile is the one thing that makes the speaker "sometimes still believe". The hedging words "sometimes" and "still" keep this honest, since it is no triumphant claim but a tired, stubborn hope.
The ending is quiet. "Because / there are more ways than one" feels almost conversational, as though the speaker is talking himself or herself round. A smile touches without contact, crossing the gap that speech only measures. The closing ellipsis leaves the thought open, and the repeated line now carries a new meaning, since touching has become wider than skin.
Small typographic choices support this. The ampersand, used throughout in place of "and", is itself a joined shape, two loops linked, so even the punctuation of "touch & be touched" looks like contact.
The poem is significant for how much it holds in so few lines: a theory of childhood perception, a view of language as loss, and a love poem that doesn't pretend love solves the problem. Its comfort comes from admitting the dream's impossibility and then finding, in one smile, a different kind of reach.