Alone

Alone - fact Summary

Written in 1829, Autobiographical

Edgar Allan Poe's "Alone" is a compact, autobiographical poem in which the speaker recalls feeling fundamentally different from others from childhood. He describes an inward separation: emotions, joys, and sorrows that did not arise from the common springs shared by others, so that his attachments were solitary. Natural and storm imagery—fountains, mountains, sun, lightning, thunder, and a cloud shaped like a demon—are presented as the sources of a persistent, personal mystery. Written in 1829 and published posthumously in 1875, the poem expresses Poe's lifelong sense of being an outsider.

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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 loved, I loved alone. Then - in my childhood, in the dawn of a most stormy life - was drawn from every 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 rolled in its autumn tint of gold, from the lightning in the sky as it passed 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.