Aracelis Girmay's "The Dream" is a free-verse poem of thirty-seven lines, consisting of a single long stanza. The first-person speaker describes a dream in which she thought her mother was dead. Howling "like the coyotes," she looked out of the window to see her mother, young, playing with her. The speaker wants to know who wrote this dream, and her brother suggests that their mother wrote it when she was old. After this, the relationship of the mother in the dream to the speaker's mother in the real world becomes less clear. The poem returns to a dreamlike state, as the speaker thinks that her mother could never hear her talking about the dream, since her "dream self," the child with whom she was playing in the dream, was not yet capable of speech. She concludes by saying that the mother she calls to tell the dream
will not remember,...
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after all
she was not born then, yet,
& needed the first mother to die
before she could use her name
& feed her children.
The reference to "the first mother" brings the reader back to the beginning of the poem, with the image of the dead mother in the dream. The poet is therefore writing about three figures, all of whom are her mother: the dead mother in the dream, the young mother in the dream, and her mother in real life, who knows nothing of the dream. Her brother suggests a fourth figure: the mother in old age who might have scripted the dream and sent it to her daughter. Both the speaker and her mother are complex, multiform figures, whose identities are unstable.
The poem is densely written in short lines, most of which are four or five words long. While the diction is simple, the syntax is ambiguous, particularly at the end of the poem, and the ideas discussed are complex, lending themselves to multiple interpretations. The use of ampersands emphasizes the poet's employment of polysyndeton to connect ideas and images.
*Another possible interpretation which the poet leaves open is that this is the speaker's grandmother, her mother's mother. This would change the meaning of the final lines but would not fundamentally alter the meaning of the poem.
Analyze "The Dream" by Aracelis Girmay.
There are several approaches you could take as you analyze Aracelis Girmay’s poem “The Dream.”
If the structure of Girmay’s poem caught your attention, you could talk about how the form links to the tone. As you might have noticed, the lines tend to be short. You might say the clipped lines give the poem an edge. That edge might add to the mysterious and haunting quality of the poem. Remember, the poem features a dead mother, dreams, and “howling.” It’s almost as if the poem is a scary movie. The taut lines seem to make the poem all the more chilling.
You could also analyze the poem in terms of communication. It seems like the speaker’s mother has died. However, her death doesn’t prevent the speaker from trying to get in touch with their mom. At one point, the speaker says that they “called down” to their mom. You might want to discuss the idea that dead people can still be reached or contacted.
A third analysis of the poem could take into account gender. You could discuss the ways in which the poem relays the spiritual, otherworldly traits that are sometimes attributed to women and girls. You could bring up the rather bewitching atmosphere of the poem with the understanding that to call someone or something a witch can be positive and empowering.
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