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.
Hi Jessica! I also wrote about Edgar Allen Poe in my blog, but for my opener I did not contextualize his background. I think that was a good writing choice on your part because it helped me better understand the poem.
I feel like you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself on the first readthrough since we barely notice anything about the poem. Unlike other literary excerpts, just looking at a poem is confusing. Hell, sometimes I can’t even tell the main point of the poem on the first readthrough, I have to read it twice just to wrap my head around the idea.
I find that Edgar Allen Poe uses a lot of dashes in his poems for whatever reason. In my poem Spirits of the Dead, commas and hyphens were interchanged constantly, which confused me as I thought about why he did that. I still don’t know why he uses so many hyphens, but maybe you can enlighten me.
I do realize now that the dashes might be points of emphasis. I did not take note of that when I first read through my poem. I focused on the rhyme scheme rather than the actual sound of the poem. Nice analysis!
Hey Jessica,
I appreciate how you initially connected the poem to Edgar Allen Poe’s background, I did not thing of doing that for my poem. The context definitely gave more insight to the poem when I went back and reread it.
When I first read this poem, I immediately thought the speaker was talking about how they are lonely; how their childhood was different because they were alone. Just like you, I was heavily thrown off by the last line when the “demon” was introduced (Poe 22). However, I did not realize that demon was present earlier in the poem. Does the “lightening”, “thunder”, and “storm” represent the presence of the demon? These more uproarious weather descriptions heavily contrasts the blue Heaven that was described further in the poem.
Additionally, there was another punctuation choices that caught my eye. In line 8 Poe chose to italicize “I” and in the next line he italicized the word “Then”. I understood the first time because the he was clarifying that the speaker loved alone, and italicizing the I emphasized that. Yet, I did not understand why he chose to emphasize the “then” in the next line. Maybe it is because the demon suddenly showed up?
Overall, your analysis really helped open my eyes to what Poe could be trying to say and I enjoyed following your train of thought!
Hi Jessica! Edgar Allen Poe is one of the very few poets I am genuinely familiar with, besides Robert Frost and Dr. Suess. I know that a lot of his work have very dark and depressing subject matter but I found it difficult to decipher exactly what that darker meaning could be upon my first read. You’re essay cleared up many of my questions! After reading your first interpretation of the demon being a cloud, I thought that made a lot of sense because early on in the poem, the speaker establishes, as you said, that they do not see or experience the world in the same way as others do. When I was younger and would look for shapes and recognizable symbols in the sky with friends, we would all see different things and I think that it makes sense for someone as pessimistic as this speaker to see demons in the sky where someone else may see something different. I too wonder what the root cause of the speaker’s cynicism may be, what may be causing them to feel so alone and isolated. It could be that it is a result of childhood trauma, inferred from line 1, but I think a more likely answer could be that experiences has caused him to believe that he is better off alone than dependent on a world that seems to be against him. I really enjoyed your analysis because it helped me come to a conclusion about this poem which really had me stumped!