Today’s feature is near to my heart; a poem I have loved since I was first discovering poetry. There is something about the nature of the rhyme in this poem, something about the way the words tie in with each other, the sensations crashing over each couplet. This poems starts inward, where we wrestle with our issues and confront our internal quarrels, but then it shifts to the outside, where we find that after time, these non-tangible elements have manifested into something more. I believe there is an expression here that we can sometimes isolate ourselves by projecting our internal pressures and emotions onto everyone and everything we see. That fight that goes on inside the troubled mind can change the way you see the world, where you might not had seen it, you now can find the tragedy in everything and once that sense/insight has been gained it cannot be readily shaken. It becomes an ever-present threatening lurk against the goodness of the days, and there is some part of you that comes to know in all absoluteness that it is inevitable.

Additionally, this poem has an interesting history; it wasn’t put out there for publishing directly by the author, but rather he had written in an autograph book of one of his fans.

Now without further ado, let us enjoy and reflect on the poem “Alone” by Edgar Allen Poe:

“ALONE

From childhood’s hour I have not been

As others were -I have not seen

As others saw -I could not bring

My passions from a common spring-

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow -I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone-

And all I lov’d –I lov’d alone-

Then -in my childhood -in the dawn

Of a most stormy life -was drawn

From ev’ry depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still-

From the torrent, or the fountain-

From the red cliff of the mountain-

From the sun that ’round me roll’d

In its autumn tint of gold-

From the lightning in the sky

As it pass’d me flying by-

From the thunder, and the storm-

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view-“