Noah Egger
Prof. Joliff
02/13/15
Lit 210
Analysis of “Alone” Edgar Allan Poe's poem “Alone” is a stunning deception of the inward depression its author felt, it was written in 1829; making it one of the first of Poe's poems. Themes of loneliness and isolation come through the poem as Poe is successful in conveying a sense of heaviness in mood and attitude. The prosody of the poem helps effectively express the darkness within Poe, while maintaining a dark and heavy rhythm. The symbolism he included, the metaphors, and the parallelism of how he felt out of place in this world was a strong message he was able to successfully express. The speaker introduces his poem stating that since a child he has not been like the rest. The poem is an iambic tetrameter with a shift to trochaic tetrameter in the thirteenth line Poe's use of anaphora in the next lines reinforce what he is saying by hammering in the words with a type of slow almost chanting beat. Lines 2 and 3 show this beat “As others were—I have not seen / As others saw—I could not bring.” This sort of device reinforces the idea that the author is alone and unlike the rest. Poe will go on to us several more anaphoras in “Alone”. Though he draws his experiences from the same spring as the rest of the world does, he cannot experience life like they can, because of the loss he has felt since a child. The author expresses his lamentation of being unable to let go of the grief and rekindle the spark of happiness and joy. The author is so bogged down by the events in his life that he feels that he is destined for such a doomed existence where he’ll never managed to fit in. Poe can't bring himself to be happy no matter what the circumstances. Poe compares his life to a sky; from the dawn of life he has been tormented by storms. In line 10 and 11 “Of a most stormy life—was drawn / From ev’ry depth of good and ill.” These storms he talks about could be anything, but most likely represents the people that have died around him. Poe has been bound by a single mystery since the start of his life, as a child he began questioning the life around him eventually focusing on the one mystery he was haunted by. That mystery is the very purpose of his existence. Poe describes that he has searched from the sea to the mountains for purpose but has found none. Poe was drawn away from the natural beauty of these things by the "demon" in his view. The language the uses to describe nature is both beautiful and destructive, thunder, storm, torrent, these are all words that one might pair with natural disasters. Right when Poe begins to describe his journey the pattern shifts from iambic to trochaic, this shift, partnered with the symbolism in the language seems to give the allusion of the passage of time. The language then shifts into an even darker mood. He states that while the rest of the world is