Poem of the Day: ‘The Dream’ by David Solway
Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.
From our December 1997 issue, here are the opening lines of David Solway’s “The Dream”:
I dreamed that you had ceased to love me —
not that you had come from other beds
back to mine, or gone from mine to others,
just that something in your heart had stopped.
“The Dream” has stuck with me since I first stumbled across it in our archives. I love the dream-like quality of the poem itself—its haziness and abstraction, the way the beloved woman appears only as a heart, a pair of eyes, and an empty space in the speaker’s bed. And I love the poignant futility of the fear it expresses, of losing a love that’s already lost.
Read the full poem here, and then take a look at some of Solway’s other work in our archives.