Six short lines, one dream, and a result that most readers would not expect: the speaker wins. Anna M. Johnson's "A Dream" stages a duel between a human being and Death itself, and rather than ending in the grave, it ends in liberation. Nothing is known here about who Johnson was or what prompted the poem, so the best way to understand it is to look closely at what the words themselves do.
The opening is almost casual. "I had a dream; / I thought I fenced with Death." The phrasing is careful and a little hedged: the speaker does not say "I fenced with Death" but "I thought I fenced," as if even inside the dream she is half-aware that she is watching herself. That small distance gives the poem a calm, reportorial tone, which makes the violence that follows feel stranger. We are told of a fight with the most feared opponent imaginable in the voice of someone describing a slightly odd night.
The choice of fencing is the poem's first clever move. Death is usually imagined as something that simply happens to us, a scythe, a sudden blow, an unstoppable tide. Fencing, by contrast, is a contest of skill, timing and wit. It has rules, feints and counterstrokes. By turning mortality into a sporting match, the speaker gives herself agency. Death becomes an opponent who can be outmaneuvered, not a force to be endured.
The turning point comes in the fourth line's mirror: "And when he tripped me, / I sent a blow with stealth." Here the poem admits that Death plays rough. He does not beat the speaker in fair combat; he trips her, a sly, undignified move. The speaker answers in kind. The word "stealth" matters: her winning stroke is not a heroic charge but a concealed, patient strike, delivered from a position of apparent weakness. The poem suggests that the way to defeat Death is not strength but cunning, and that being knocked down is not the same as being beaten.
The most intriguing word is "arrantry," which the poem says the blow "pierced." It is a rare and slightly archaic term, related to "arrant," meaning thoroughgoing or out-and-out, as in "an arrant knave." Johnson seems to have coined or stretched it into a noun, so that Death's whole nature becomes pure, unmixed villainy. What is pierced, then, is not just a body but a quality, an absolute wickedness. The unusual word makes the reader pause exactly where the poem lands its decisive hit, and its sound, with that hard, clipped "arr" and the pointed "try" ending, feels sharp enough to puncture something.
The structure reinforces the action. The lines are short and uneven in length, which gives the poem a darting, thrust-and-parry feel, though they are not governed by a strict meter. The rhyme is irregular too: "stealth" and "Death" chime together near the start and middle, while "arrantry" and "free" close the poem with a loose echo, an ending sound that arrives like a gate opening. The final line is the shortest and plainest of all: "And set me free." After the elaborate vocabulary of the previous line, this simplicity lands like an exhale.
The central surprise is what the victory buys. The speaker does not gain life, glory or revenge; she gains freedom. That implies Death was not merely an enemy but a kind of captor, something that held her in fear. To strike him down is to be released from dread itself, which may be the poem's real point: the fear of dying confines us more than dying does.
That is what makes this tiny poem worth remembering. It takes one of literature's oldest subjects and reverses its usual outcome, using a dream as a safe space to rehearse a victory no waking person can have. It is brief, a little strange, and bold enough to let the human side win.