How can we separate reality from illusion? What if, to quote from Edgar Allan Poe, ‘All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream’? ‘A Dream within a Dream’ muses on the fragility and fleetingness of everything, and asks whether anything we do has any lasting or real effect. ‘A Dream within a Dream’ by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) is one of Poe’s best-known poems.

‘A Dream within a Dream’ by Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) has often been ridiculed – she features in Nicholas T. Parsons’ The Joy of Bad Verse – but even her detractors have to admit that ‘Solitude’ succeeds, and certainly remains successful as a piece of poetry about solitude. Anthony Burgess memorably rewrote the poem’s opening two lines as ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.’

Solitude

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.

The most remarkable thing about this poem, ‘Ode on Solitude’, is that Alexander Pope (1688-1744) wrote it when he was just 12 years old! A paean to the simple life and a world of peace and quiet, ‘Ode on Solitude’ was an extraordinarily precocious poem by a poet who would go on to define the poetic tastes of the first half of the eighteenth century with longer works such as The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad. This poem was written just as that century was dawning, in 1700.

Ode on Solitude

Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

To celebrate the release of the audio edition of “The Writer’s Pen and Other Poems”, on 29 November, (www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Writers-Pen-and-Other-Poems-Audiobook/B07KPPQ2K2), I am offering 2 free copies of the audio edition to readers who are based in the United Kingdom. I hope to run a similar offer for readers elsewhere in the near future.

The rules:

1. There are 2 free audio downloads of “The Writer’s Pen and Other Poems” available to readers based in the UK.
2. The first 2 people to email me with the correct answer to the question posed at the end of this post will receive a promotional code enabling them to download my book free from audible.co.uk.
3. Emails should be sent to newauthoronline (at) gmail dot com with the subject line “competition to win an audio download of The Writer’s Pen”. Please note, the email address is rendered thus to defeat spammers!
4. Please do not provide…