Today’s feature is near to my heart; a poem I have loved since I was a teenager and first discovering poetry all the way up until my young adulthood where I’m still appreciating every word of it. I have this poem memorized, it’s the only one I have memorized, and the day I first read it I remember the profound way it seemed to settle on my soul. 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 just come crashing over to sink their teeth in. Perhaps it was the negative nature of my childhood, the trouble experienced as I became older, or maybe just that instinctive draw to the tumultuous unknown…. 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 didn’t know it when I first read the poem, but what I believe draws me most to it is this idea behind the poem that we can 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 that sense, that insight once gained, cannot be 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 the one and only, 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-”
