What is the theme of ''The Slave's Dream''?

It is clear that this impressive poem discusses the true
nature of freedom and slavery through its content. Note how the poem is built around a
central contrast between the slave at the beginning in his position of chained worker,
with the "ungathered rice" around him and the "sickle in his hand," and then with the
same man but before his capture, as he returns in his dream to his native land. There is
obviously a massive difference between the pitiful figure who lies on the sand in the
first stanza and how he imagines himself back in his home, as in his dream he is able to
stride "once more as a king" and is surrounded by his "dark-eyed queen" and children. He
inhabits a place of freedom, as this stanza
demonstrates:

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The forests, with their myriad
tongues,

Shouted of
liberty;

And the Blast of the Desert cried
aloud,

With a voice so wild and
free,

That he started in his sleep and
smiled

At their tempestuous
glee.

Note how his home is
associated with freedom and with liberty, which ironically is so very far from his
present condition as a shackled slave. The last stanza points towards the tragedy of
slavery, as the man dies in his dream, and his body is described as a "worn-out fetter,
that the soul / Had broken and thrown away!" The poem's theme therefore points towards
the inhumanity of slavery and how it deprived free people of their lives and liberty by
relocating them into strange, alien lands and making them work under terrible
conditions. For these slaves, freedom can only be achieved through their dreams, but
ultimately only through their deaths as their souls break free.