And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy gray eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams—
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.

These lines come from Poe’s lyric poem “To One in Paradise,” a lament spoken by a bereaved lover who addresses an idealized beloved now lost (often read as dead or irretrievably gone). The poem belongs to Poe’s recurring “lost beloved” mode—an intense, musical meditation on memory, grief, and the afterlife—written in the wake of personal losses and emotional instability that frequently shaped his love poetry. In this stanza, the speaker describes waking life as a kind of hypnotic stupor (“trances”) and sleep as a realm where the beloved’s presence is most vivid, imagined in a transcendent landscape of “ethereal dances” and “eternal streams.”

In these lines the speaker describes a life overtaken by obsessive reverie: waking “days” feel like trances and sleep offers no relief, because dreams continually return to the beloved’s image (“thy gray eye”) and imagined presence (“thy footstep”). The diction shifts the beloved into a liminal, otherworldly realm—“ethereal dances” and “eternal streams”—suggesting death, spiritual transcendence, or an idealized afterlife. The effect is characteristic of Poe’s lyric mode: love becomes inseparable from mourning and hallucination, and the mind’s fixation turns ordinary consciousness into a continuous, dreamlike pursuit of an unattainable figure.