Romance and Illusion in 'In a dream she meets him again' Amelie Maurice-Jones 12th Grade

In ‘In a dream she meets him again’, Maura Dooley, through a third person narrator, attempts to reconstruct memories of a dream in which a female falls in love. The brief romance between the pair - through the bucolic countryside setting - is indeed proven beautiful and verging on ethereal. However, tone of pathos is created as we learn that the romance was purely illusionary and thus cannot be rekindled in the real world.

Through the idyllic pastoral setting of the countryside, Dooley presents the romantic emotions shared by the pair as both beautiful and genuine. There is a semantic field of natural imagery throughout the poem (‘trees’ ‘leaves’ ‘bubbles’) used to convey the simplicity of the love to the pair. One compelling example of this is the opening line, as trees are personified as they ‘shake their leaves’, a technique used by the poet to suggest that even the natural world is celebrating and praising the love felt by the couple. Indeed, this moment could be read as mirroring the tendency of a marriage audience to shower the bride and groom in confetti, thus highlighting the deep emotional bonds between the couple, an idea furthered by the poet’s frequent use of alliteration: from the alliterated ‘l’ connecting ‘...