Sara Teasdale's "Dreams" makes a quiet, unsettling claim: you can give your whole life to one person and still not own your own sleep. In eight lines, a speaker insists she has committed herself completely to a present love, then admits that part of her stays out of reach, and the past keeps a claim on it.
The first line sounds like a vow: "I gave my life to another lover." The word "another" implies an earlier lover without naming anyone. The poem never says who these people are or what happened between them, and that restraint helps it, because the situation could belong to any reader. The second line pushes the vow harder: "I gave my love, and all, and all." The doubled "and all, and all" has the ring of someone repeating something to convince herself. The verb "gave" is plain and final, and it is in the past tense, as though the matter were settled.
Then comes "But," and the poem's grammar changes. "Gave" gives way to "will hover" and "will call." That "will" suggests habit and inevitability: this has happened before, and it will again. The two verbs also make the past a living thing. It hovers like a bird or a spirit, and it calls like a voice from another room. The prepositions are worth noticing too. The past hovers "over a dream" and calls "out of a dream," so it is both above the sleeper and inside her.
The second stanza moves into the present tense and becomes physical. Waking is violent: "I tear myself from sleep with a shiver." Nobody tears themselves away from something harmless, so the verb tells us she is fighting to escape. But escape fails, because "on my breast a kiss is hot." The two sensations pull against each other. The shiver is cold and fearful, the kiss is warm and desirous, and the poem refuses to say which one the speaker feels more. That ambivalence is what keeps the poem from being a simple confession of guilt.
The ending is the most haunting part. The kiss has a "ghostly giver" who "is waiting tho' I see him not." The word "giver" echoes the opening "I gave." The speaker's giving was a choice, but this giving happens to her, without her consent. The last line also leaves her unsure whether he is there. She cannot see him and is certain of him anyway. The old-fashioned phrasing "I see him not" slows the line to a whisper and gives it the feel of a ballad. "Waiting" is the final idea: he is patient, and she is the one who has moved on and who therefore cannot rest.
The form supports all of this. Each stanza rhymes ABAB, and the pairs are well chosen. "Lover" and "hover" and "shiver" and "giver" are two-syllable rhymes that trail off softly, like something fading. The shorter lines end on firm one-syllable rhymes: "all" with "call," and "hot" with "not." The lines alternate between about four beats and about three, which gives the poem a lilting, song-like movement. That sweetness sits oddly against the content, so that the poem seems to be singing a lullaby about being haunted.
What makes "Dreams" worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It does not say the speaker is unfaithful, because she has kept every promise she could keep, and yet the poem suggests that loyalty in action does not guarantee loyalty in feeling. The plural title matters here, since these are recurring dreams, a pattern and not a single bad night. The poem leaves us with an unsettling idea: memory does not behave like a closed door, and the self we give away is never quite the whole self.