"A Dream Within A Dream," by Edgar Allan Poe is a poem about how it feels to lose the love of one's life and learning how to live with the loss. In typical Poe style, he uses a stream of metaphors to describe the heartbreak and sadness of loss. The poem is 24 lines long, divided into two stanzas consisting of nine couplets (pairs of rhyming lines) and two triplets (groups of three rhyming lines). Poe has strong use of adjectives throughout the poem to help the reader create imagery to visualize what is happening. "The key to this poem by Edgar Allan Poe may lie in the kiss that the speaker has planted on the brow of his internal audience. That it would land not on the lips or neck not only reveals a lack of amorous passion but hints that he considers his audience to be inferior to him in age, status, or wisdom" (Huff) This poem describes not what life is but through the tough times and heartbreaks there is always positive light at the end of each and every dream. "A Dream within a Dream" was written seven months before Poe's death, and during a time in which he felt an increasing frustration with his writing and more intense feelings of loss (Sova). "His use of the imperative mood (take this kiss) in the first line reinforces this sense of the distance between them; it is as if he were hoping to impart knowledge with the kiss but even has to instruct the recipient in how to receive that gift (upon the brow)" (Huff). The narrator has a handful of sand and is struggling gold onto the many grains but cannot do so, "Through my fingers to the deep," (17). The sense of frustration refers to lines nineteen through twenty-four, allowing the reader to feel hopeful after feeling trapped in his own dream with sadness. As an example of Poe's use of metaphors and personification, the sand can be compared to the sand in an hourglass. As the sand passes between his fingers, time is running out, "O God! can I not save One from the pitiless wave?"