Bill Kerwin's Reviews > A Dream

There was an eclipse on February 12, 1831. Six months later, on August 13, 1831, a short piece entitled “A Dream” was published by an author (identified as “P.”) in the Saturday Evening Post, a journal then edited by E. A. Poe’s friend, Lambert A. Wilmer. In it, the unnamed narrator tells us of falling asleep during his bedtime bible reading—that passage in Matthew where Christ dies on the cross, the sky darkens with an eclipse, the earth shakes, and the graves yield up their dead—and then relates a dream fantasy in which he imagines himself to be one of the Pharisees on that fateful Jerusalem day.

Poe—who would have been twenty-two at the time—never acknowledged authorship of “A Dream,” but Thomas Ollive Mabbott, editor of the authoritative Tales and Sketches (1978) includes the piece, stating that “I too have read much in the old periodicals, and have found nothing else that impresses me so strongly as being possibly Poe’s as this tale.”

It is obviously the work of a young writer learning his craft, but it contains more than a few passages that suggest the dark imagination of the young Poe. My favorite passage—and what convinced me that it is the work of the master—is this description of a dead King of Israel rising from his grave:

I turned to see whither I had wandered. I had come to the burial ground of the monarch of Israel. I gazed with trembling, as I saw the clods which covered the mouldering bones of some tyrant begin to move. I looked at where the last monarch had been laid, in all the splendour and pageantry of death, and the sculptured monument began to tremble. Soon it was overturned, and from it issued the tenant of the grave. ’Twas a hideous, unearthly form, such as Dante, in his wildest flights of terrified fancy, ne’er conjured up. I could not move, for terror had tied up volition. It approached me. I saw the grave-worm twining itself amongst the matted locks which in part covered the rotten scull. The bones creaked on each other as they moved on the hinges, for its flesh was gone. I listened to their horrid music, as this parody on poor mortality stalked along. He came up to me; and, as he passed, he breathed the cold damps of the lonely, narrow house directly in my face. The chasm in the heavens closed….

If you wish to read the entire piece (complete with commentary and notes), you may click on the link below: https://www.eapoe.org/works/mabbott/t...