COLLEEN
Night after night I have dreamt of a lion that lives in a tower. I could have slain it with my sword. I call the lion a dancing bear. I call the lion cowardly if it does not perform on stage. I call its mane a beard.
It would be hard to make a peaceful woman dream of a lion. If, while asleep, she heard someone say, “Look at the lion,” she would either wake up or she would not hear. She would not dream of a lion.
I have dreamt of this lion for years. I hear the lion’s approaching steps, as if a part of my dream, even while I have said, “There is no lion in this dream.” But still the lion comes, his face expressing fright. I wake to worry that I cannot slay any creature.
When awake, I pretend the lion’s fur is the same as a dog’s whiskers. I pretend I make the lion roar.
| Alison Strub |
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levelheaded: Colleen
This poem gets its start from old stories. The “lion that lives in a tower” is a kind of reversal of the princess-in-a-tower trope we encounter in old fairy tales like “Rapunzel” (or new fairy tales like Super Mario Bros.). When the speaker tells us, “I call the lion cowardly,” we can’t help but think of another cowardly lion. Perhaps the poem begins in a headspace informed by fairy tales because, like many dreams, it’s rooted in thoughts we have during our waking hours. Whatever the reason, the poem floats off from its initial cultural touchstones into dream analysis. In fact, the entire poem reads like an entry in a dream diary in which the speaker struggles to adapt disparate dream moments into a coherent narrative.
The speaker characterizes herself by contrasting her dream with the dreams of “a peaceful woman.” From this, we can glean that she is not “a peaceful woman.” Because she’s “dreamt of this lion for years,” it’s safe to say she has not been peaceful for years (though her use of “years” implies there was a time before said “years” when she was peaceful). We learn, despite this unrest, it’s the lion that’s afraid. Then in the most telling sentence of the poem, the speaker says, “I wake to worry that I cannot slay any creature.” None of us are trained to interpret dreams, but we might confidently say this speaker is preoccupied with an abstract powerlessness. Structurally, the speaker manifests this powerlessness again in her inability to draw a conclusion from the dream. In addition to the speaker’s powerlessness to “slay” and the lion’s inability to “perform,” the speaker is impotent when it comes to interpreting her own dream. The poem itself is an enactment of the dream’s prophetic message.
The speaker’s inability to tie disparate parts of her dream together creates some mysterious moments. The most mysterious of these is the poem’s enigmatic title. Is the poem addressed to Colleen? Is the speaker Colleen? The title begs the question, what does it mean to have a completely private moment in a poem? Without asking the poet, we’re not sure we could ever understand why (or if) the name Colleen is significant to the dream described and analyzed. It feels too generic to be an unrecognized reference but familiar enough that it isn’t completely confusing. Then at the end of the poem when the speaker is finally awake, she repeats the verb “pretend” twice in two sentences. The waking act of the speaker is to “pretend,” which somehow seems to bring us full circle to the fairy tales of the first stanza.
– The Editors
