Although Helen Hunt Jackson maintained a 40-year friendship with Emily Dickinson, whom she first met growing up in Amherst, Massachusetts, “Dreams” reveals the fundamental difference between the two poets. Despite discussing similar subjects—Christian assurance, the beauty of nature, the struggle to find love and companionship, the sorrow of loneliness, and the terrifying reality of mortality—Jackson practiced disciplined poetic forms that reflected her grounding in the classic expressions of British poetry, while Dickinson experimented with idiosyncratic forms that outright rejected these inherited structures.

In “Dreams,” Jackson uses the familiar poetic form of the sonnet, incorporating the traditional 14-line construction that dates back to the Renaissance: The opening eight lines (called the octave) pose the problem (in this case, the troubling dreams of the speaker), and the closing six lines (the sestet) suggest a viable solution (an eternal rest that will free the speaker from this agony).

Jackson executes the lines in iambic pentameter. Each line (with some subtle variation to avoid monotony) has five two-beat units (DUH-duh). That patterning allows for ear-friendly recitation, encouraged by the tight (and entirely anticipated) rhyme pattern: ABBAABBA CDDCC.