The Dreamer
Read 'The Dreamer' by 'Robert William Service' and provide your summary and literary analysis in the comments section below.
The lone man gazed and gazed upon his gold,
His sweat, his blood, the wage of weary days;
But now how sweet, how doubly sweet to hold
All gay and gleamy to the campfire blaze.
The evening sky was sinister and cold;
The willows shivered, wanly lay the snow;
The uncommiserating land, so old,
So worn, so grey, so niggard in its woe,
Peered through its ragged shroud. The lone man sighed,
Poured back the gaudy dust into its poke,
Gazed at the seething river listless-eyed,
Loaded his corn-cob pipe as if to smoke;
Then crushed with weariness and hardship crept
Into his ragged robe, and swiftly slept.
. . . . .
Hour after hour went by; a shadow slipped
From vasts of shadow to the camp-fire flame;
Gripping a rifle with a deadly aim,
A gaunt and hairy man with wolfish eyes . . .
* * * * * * *
The sleeper dreamed, and lo! this was his dream:
He rode a streaming horse across a moor.
Sudden 'mid pit-black night a lightning gleam
Showed him a way-side inn, forlorn and poor.
A sullen host unbarred the creaking door,
And led him to a dim and dreary room;
Wherein he sat and poked the fire a-roar,
So that weird shadows jigged athwart the gloom.
He ordered wine. 'Od's blood! but he was tired.
What matter! Charles was crushed and George was King;
His party high in power; how he aspired!
Red guineas packed his purse, too tight to ring.
The fire-light gleamed upon his silken hose,
His silver buckles and his powdered wig.
What ho! more wine! He drank, he slowly rose.
What made the shadows dance that madcap jig?
He clutched the candle, steered his way to bed,
And in a trice was sleeping like the dead.
. . . . .
Across the room there crept, so shadow soft,
His sullen host, with naked knife a-gleam,
(A gaunt and hairy man with wolfish eyes.) . . .
And as he lay, the sleeper dreamed a dream.
* * * * * *
'Twas in a ruder land, a wilder day.
A rival princeling sat upon his throne,
Within a dungeon, dark and foul he lay,
With chains that bit and festered to the bone.
They haled him harshly to a vaulted room,
Where One gazed on him with malignant eye;
And in that devil-face he read his doom,
Knowing that ere the dawn-light he must die.
Well, he was sorrow-glutted; let them bring
Their prize assassins to the bloody work.
His kingdom lost, yet would he die a King,
Fearless and proud, as when he faced the Turk.
Ah God! the glory of that great Crusade!
The bannered pomp, the gleam, the splendid urge!
The crash of reeking combat, blade to blade!
The reeling ranks, blood-avid and a-surge!
For long he thought; then feeling o'er him creep
Vast weariness, he fell into a sleep.
. . . . .
The cell door opened; soft the headsman came,
Within his hand a mighty axe a-gleam,
(A gaunt and hairy man with wolfish eyes,) . . .
And as he lay, the sleeper dreamed a dream.
* * * * * *
'Twas in a land unkempt of life's red dawn;
Where in his sanded cave he dwelt alone;
Sleeping by day, or sometimes worked upon
His flint-head arrows and his knives of stone;
By night stole forth and slew the savage boar,
So that he loomed a hunter of loud fame,
And many a skin of wolf and wild-cat wore,
And counted many a flint-head to his name;
Wherefore he walked the envy of the band,
Hated and feared, but matchless in his skill.
Till lo! one night deep in that shaggy land,
He tracked a yearling bear and made his kill;
Then over-worn he rested by a stream,
And sank into a sleep too deep for dream.
. . . . .
Hunting his food a rival caveman crept
Through those dark woods, and marked him where he lay;
Cowered and crawled upon him as he slept,
Poising a mighty stone aloft to slay --
(A gaunt and hairy man with wolfish eyes.) . . .
* * * * * *
The great stone crashed. The Dreamer shrieked and woke,
And saw, fear-blinded, in his dripping cell,
A gaunt and hairy man, who with one stroke
Swung a great ax of steel that flashed and fell . . .
So that he woke amid his bedroom gloom,
And saw, hair-poised, a naked, thirsting knife,
A gaunt and hairy man with eyes of doom --
And then the blade plunged down to drink his life . . .
So that he woke, wrenched back his robe, and looked,
And saw beside his dying fire upstart
A gaunt and hairy man with finger crooked --
A rifle rang, a bullet searched his heart . . .
* * * * * *
The morning sky was sinister and cold.
Grotesque the Dreamer sprawled, and did not rise.
For long and long there gazed upon some gold
A gaunt and hairy man with wolfish eyes.
The Dreamer Summary and Analysis
Robert William Service frames the poem as a restless frontier nightmare in which one man's hard-won gold draws the attention of another, more predatory figure. The opening presents a lonely prospector at the end of a brutal day, staring at his earnings by the fire before falling asleep in exhaustion. From there, the poem swerves into a chain of nested dreams: a highway robbery becomes a political assassination, then a medieval execution, then a prehistoric killing. Each scene repeats the same pattern of a vulnerable sleeper and a gaunt attacker, creating the sense that violence is not accidental but built into human life itself.
The poem's central tension lies between the dreamer's self-justifying visions of power and the stark reality that he is simply prey. In each dream he occupies a different role of status or strength, yet sleep strips those roles away and leaves him exposed. The repeated intruder, described in almost the same terms every time, suggests a single murderous force taking many forms. By the end, the dreamer's final awakening never comes: the last scene returns to the original camp, where the gold remains and the "gaunt and hairy man" stands over the body. The poem leaves readers with a bleak irony-ambition, labor, and dreaming all collapse before greed and death.
Tone in The Dreamer
Service's tone is bleak, ironic, and grimly fatalistic, with a storyteller's sharp control over suspense. The poem never lingers in sentiment; instead, it treats each transformation of the dream as another tightening of the noose. For the reader, the mood grows increasingly eerie and claustrophobic, as if every historical age were just another room in the same nightmare. By the final stanza, the atmosphere is one of complete dread, because the repetitions have made the ending feel both shocking and unavoidable.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in The Dreamer
- Violence as a constant of human life - The poem moves from frontier camp to inn, dungeon, and cave to suggest that killing is not limited to one era or setting. Instead, brutality appears to be a repeating human inheritance.
- Greed and possession - The gold in the opening stanza is the immediate cause of danger, but the poem also shows how desire for power, rank, and victory can harden into the same possessive hunger.
- Dreams as exposure - Sleep does not offer escape here; it reveals hidden fears and makes the dreamer vulnerable. Each dream strips away security until he faces death directly.
- The fragility of status - The dreamer imagines himself as wealthy, political, royal, and even heroic, yet each identity is shattered. Rank and achievement prove powerless against attack.
- Human history as recurrence - By replaying the same deadly scene in different ages, the poem implies that the patterns of envy, theft, and murder have persisted from prehistory onward.
- Exhaustion and fatal weakness - The man's weariness is both physical and symbolic. His need for rest makes him defenseless, turning labor itself into the precondition for his destruction.
Literary Devices in The Dreamer
- Repetition - The recurring figure of the "gaunt and hairy man" links the poem's episodes and creates a chilling sense that the threat is one and the same across all times and settings.
- Nested dream structure - The poem uses dreams within dreams to blur reality and imagination, making the final death feel both sudden and inevitable.
- Imagery - Stark visual details such as the campfire, snow, chains, axe, and knife intensify the sense of isolation and danger.
- Irony - The dreamer seems to gain power in his dreams, yet those visions only delay the moment when he will be killed. His imagined authority is meaningless beside the literal weapon in the killer's hand.
- Allusion - References to kings, Crusades, and primitive hunting widen the poem's scope, placing the frontier story inside a much larger human history.
- Enjambment - The forward-driving lines help the poem feel breathless and unstable, mirroring the movement from one dream to the next.
- Contrast - Service contrasts wealth and poverty, civilization and savagery, sleep and violence to show how thin the boundaries are between them.
- Suspense - The repeated pauses and returns to the attacker's approach build tension and make the final killing feel dreadfully prepared rather than sudden.
Symbolism in The Dreamer
- Gold - The gold represents labor, desire, and the danger that comes with visible wealth.
- Campfire - The fire suggests temporary comfort and human shelter, but it also casts shadows that foreshadow the approach of death.
- Rifle / knife / axe / stone - These weapons symbolize the timeless forms violence can take, from modern theft to primal murder.
- Sleep - Sleep stands for vulnerability, but also for the unconscious mind revealing the poem's deepest truth about human fear.
- Wolfish eyes - The eyes mark the attacker as predatory, making him a symbol of relentless appetite and lethal instinct.
Historical Context of The Dreamer
Robert William Service is strongly associated with writing about frontier life, gold rush camps, hardship, and the rough masculine world of the North. His poetry often uses vivid narrative, accessible language, and dramatic twist endings, which made him widely popular with readers drawn to adventure and campfire storytelling. This poem fits that tradition while also reaching beyond it, using the frontier setting as a starting point for a broader meditation on human violence.
The poem also reflects a long literary habit of linking individual experience to a larger historical pattern. Its movement from modern wilderness to older political, medieval, and prehistoric worlds echoes the way late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing often imagined civilization as only a thin layer over older instincts. The result is a poem that feels both like a frontier tale and like a compressed history of human predation.
Poems Similar to The Dreamer
- The Cremation of Sam McGee - Robert W. Service
- The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Richard Cory - Edwin Arlington Robinson
- The Highwayman - Alfred Noyes