Symbol Analysis
The Mountains in this poem aren't pretty little hills that sit there and look nice. They are huge, raging peaks that move and crumble and crash all over the place. The whole landscape of Dream-Land is meant to be intense and supernatural. Nothing here is like it is in normal life.
- Line 13: Can you imagine what it would be like to see mountains that were forever ("evermore") falling into the ocean? It's a pretty crazy image, and just the kind of thing Poe would be likely to throw at us. A less intense poet might say that the mountains were really tall, or black or something like that. Not Poe. He gives us mountains that shake and move and collapse in ways we've never even imagined. Lines like this pack his poetry with energy. They make his descriptions dynamic and exciting, and give us a rich sense of what this strange place must be like.
- Line 25: The mountains make another quick cameo here. They're not as super-dramatic as before, but seeing them come up twice like this sets up nice rhythm in the poem. By this point we are starting to get a feeling for the landscape, and starting to see how important the natural world is in this poem.