“Dreams” (1886), a sonnet by New England poet Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885), is a melancholy meditation on the psychology of grief and, specifically, on the lingering impact of traumatic loss.

“Dreams” fuses the gothic vision of Edgar Allan Poe with the emotional vulnerability of Emily Dickinson, both poets whom Jackson admired. The poem explores how painful traumas return in dreams, looping over and over, keeping pain immediate and vivid. Because of dreams, Jackson argues, no one can ever be entirely free of their darkest memories.

Although Jackson is better known to contemporary readers for her 1884 bestseller Ramona, a stinging critique of the federal government’s mistreatment of the Indigenous populations in the West, Jackson was foremost a prolific and accomplished poet. She published more than a dozen collections, which garnered appreciative reviews from Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowell, among others.

As with many of Jackson’s lyrics, “Dreams” is a confessional poem. It reflects Jackson’s life of profound personal tragedies and mental health challenges that today might be diagnosed as depression. Jackson uses dreams to assert the persistence of grief and the vulnerability that people experience when they surrender to sleep. Ultimately, the poem offers the gloomy conclusion that death alone promises release from the haunting memories of life’s tragedies.

Content Warning: The poem and this guide discuss death, grief, and trauma.

Poet Biography

Helen Maria Fiske was born on October 15, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Because her father was a Unitarian minister who taught philosophy and ancient languages at Amherst College, Helen grew up surrounded by books and was encouraged to read widely. She attended the prestigious Amherst Academy, where she met Emily Dickinson and began a lifelong friendship.

Her family, particularly her mother, struggled to deal with the impact of the deaths in childbirth of Helen’s two brothers. Within three years during Helen’s adolescence, both her mother and father died from consumption, a virulent form of pneumonia. An uncle appointed to care for her sent her to an upscale boarding school outside Manhattan. She was lonely and homesick.

In 1852, Helen married Edward Hunt, an army captain. He drowned at the height of the Civil War while leading a team experimenting with a War Department prototype for a submarine. Both their children died at young ages, one from brain fever and the other from diphtheria. She married William Jackson in 1875, and the newlyweds moved West, to Colorado.

An avid reader of Romantic poetry, Jackson began publishing original poetry soon after the war. The poetry, often melancholy and meditative, drew on her many personal tragedies.

In Colorado, Jackson became a passionate advocate for the rights of Indigenous peoples. For her, the federal government’s treatment of these populations was shameful. Jackson drew on her experience serving on numerous advocacy committees for her controversial novel Ramona (1884), the sentimental story of an orphan girl of Indigenous and white heritage. The novel ignited a national debate on Indigenous peoples’ rights and has been compared in its impact to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

Jackson died in 1885 from stomach cancer. When told of the death of her friend, a devastated Emily Dickinson wrote to her surviving husband, “Helen of Troy will die, but Helen of Colorado, never” (“Helen Hunt Jackson [1830-1885], Friend.” Emily Dickinson Museum).

Poem text

Mysterious shapes, with wands of joy and pain,

Which seize us unaware in helpless sleep,

And lead us to the houses where we keep

Our secrets hid, well barred by every chain

That we can forge and bind: the crime whose stain

Is slowly fading ’neath the tears we weep;

Dead bliss which, dead, can make our pulses leap—

Oh, cruelty! To make these live again!

They say that death is sleep, and heaven’s rest

Ends earth’s short day, as, on the last faint gleam

Of sun, our nights shut down, and we are blest.

Let this, then, be of heaven’s joy the test,

The proof if heaven be, or only seem,

That we forever choose what we will dream!

Jackson, Helen Hunt. “Dreams.” 1886. Poets.org.

Summary

Because the poem is a meditation, there is no narrative line, defined characters, or specific setting. The subject of the meditation is identified in the title: dreams, those surreal narratives spun out by the reckless and overactive brain during long, dark nights of apparently restful sleep.

The first eight lines introduce the speaker’s sense of apprehension and fear over recurring dreams. These dreams compel the speaker to relive difficult and painful memories that, during the day, can be controlled, ignored, and even kept hidden. The elements of the dreamscape itself are defined as “[m]ysterious shapes” (Line 1) that can inflict both “joy and pain” (Line 1).

The speaker acknowledges that sometimes dreams are pleasant, but they quickly pivot to point out that more often, dreams return the sleeper, metaphorically, to the “houses” (Line 3) where the darkest secrets are kept. During the day, those secret, painful memories can be carefully monitored: “well barred by every chain / That we can forge and bind” (Lines 4-5). However, in the vulnerability of sleep, people drop their guard. Any sleeper is helpless against whatever comes to haunt their dreams.

The speaker describes these secrets as the “crime whose stain / Is slowly fading ’neath the tears we weep” (Lines 5-6). The word “crime” does not suggest illegal activity, but rather impropriety: A person’s memories of traumas, tragedies, and sorrows are not seen as fit conversation in polite society. These traumatic events are trespasses against norms. Memories of unpleasant and distressing things are best kept quiet and locked away while everyone goes about the busyness of day-to-day routines. Thus, the speaker can never fully confront their sorrows or hope to exorcize their power. Rather, they are managed. During the day, if the speaker weeps over these memories, they weep alone. The tears, their way of coping, can help make the memory seem less immediate and less vivid.

However, in sleep, dreadful dreams, unwanted and unexpected, open the locked doors of the conscious mind and allow dark and unhappy memories to come to life. The speaker indicates that even though these are dreams, they so vividly recreate difficult and painful memories that they seem real enough to make their “pulses leap” (Line 7).

In Line 8, the speaker decries sleep and dreams for being so cruel. Dreams, they conclude, make sleepers relive all these memories over and over again.

The closing eight lines offer the poet’s hope that perhaps death might release the hold of these difficult memories. The reasoning is lawyerly. If death is in fact eternal rest, then heaven represents the ultimate sleep—the earned reward at the end of life, or “earth’s short day” (Line 10). The speaker compares the sweet rest of heaven to the sleep at the end of a day, after the “last faint gleam / Of sun” (Lines 11-12).

The speaker closes with an if/then proposition. If heaven, which is eternal rest, is in fact paradise and does reward the faithful with the prospect of eternal joy, then the proof of that paradise will be if those admitted to heaven will be allowed to choose their dreams. In a true heaven, sleepers will no longer to be subjected to the vulnerability and anxiety that so trouble earthly dreaming.