Everyone knows or has heard of the name Edgar Allan Poe. Growing up, Poe had a relatively hard life, so he used his childhood as inspiration for the poems and short stories he would write. Known for talking about darker topics through his writing, “Alone” is not an exception.
Unlike some of the other poems we read in class, I actually found “Alone” by Edgar Allan Poe to be a relatively more straightforward read and slightly easier to comprehend. Not going to lie, I did feel like I screwed myself over with this when I did my first read-through and noticed barely any annotations, but I think it did work out after a couple more read-throughs.
Without reading the poem and just looking at it, the very first thing I took note of was the number of dashes strewn throughout as well as the way the poem didn’t have any stanzas. Upon completing my first read-through, the first thing I noticed was that the general rhyme scheme includes rhyming couplets, which gives the poem a musical flow. For example, line 3 says “As others saw-I could not bring” and line 4 continues by saying “My passions from a common spring-” I later realized that the dashes I took note of pre-read served as places of emphasis and where the reader should take pause, substituting what possibly could have been periods. I also took notice of the tone of the poem, which seemed to be relatively somber and dark, highlighting the isolation that the speaker feels.
The first two lines, “From childhood’s hour I have not been” (1) and “As others were- I have not seen” (2) clearly showed that the speaker was someone who didn’t see the world as others around them did. After reading them, I had a few questions. How did the speaker see the world, if not like their peers? Why do they see 
it the way they do? To see if I could find any answers, I continued on. The next two lines talk about how the speaker “could not bring [their] passions from a common spring” (3,4), which suggests that the passions they have stem from views far different from their peers. Similarly, lines 5 and 6 present the same idea in terms of sorrow. Even in love, the speaker states that “And all I lov’d- I lov’d alone-” (8) The continuing lines stress that although the speaker felt the same emotions as everyone else around them, the drives and the explanations for their emotional responses were vastly different from their peers.
What really confused me on the first read-through was lines 13-22. Maybe it was because I didn’t read it thoroughly enough, I’m not sure. Either way, I didn’t quite understand why the speaker went
from describing the nature around them to suddenly saying that there was “a demon in [their] view” (22) After reading this section, I took a pause, went back
to line 13, and reread it again. The second time around, I realized that it wasn’t just a random idea that had been thrown into the line. Instead, the demon was what the speaker saw from the cloud in the sky. At this point, I was thoroughly baffled by the speaker. Line 21 emphasizes that “the rest of Heaven was blue”, which implies that other than that one supposedly demon-shaped cloud that only the speaker saw, the sky was clear and blue. What a strange character. I realized after taking a break from my poem that the speaker saw the demon everywhere, no matter the weather or the nature around them. It’s consistently in their sight, which I thought could have meant that the demon was a metaphorical idea for something that causes their solitariness and suffering. These 9 lines also were the answer to the question I had at the beginning about how the speaker saw the world. Instead of seeing all of the bright, beautiful things around them like what their peers would see, the speaker saw the world obstructed by a demon. However, the more I think about it, I’m not too sure that I would use the term “obstructed”. While it is true that all the speaker saw was the demon, it could also be a metaphor for a wider worldview. Due to the speaker’s isolation, they see the world not through a bright and colourful lens, but through a more realistic, duller lens.
While I was able to answer one of my earlier questions about how the speaker saw the world, I never got an answer to why it was. It’s one of the questions that leave me thinking, and although there may be possible answers, I don’t think I would ever know for sure.