"Alone" by Edgar Allen Poe

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.


--Edgar Allen Poe


First poem I memorized, first poet I loved, my personal anthem for almost ten years - from the time I was about sentient and reading until the first or second year of college. I know this poem so well I recite it when I'm swimming or running to keep something in my head. Edgar Allen Poe is the ultimate poet for the little baby goth that I was as a teenager.

As an adult who no longer feels so alone, this poem makes me sad for the adult Poe must have been. I have a thought a little about some of my favorite works, and I worry that the adults who produced it...sacrificed their own personal happinesses and mental health to create them for the rest of us. I'm happy for me, but that feels like a selfish happiness. I am sure that a loved, well-adjusted population might produce ungreat art, but wishing for instability and the screams of the lost to persist is overwhelmingly selfish to me as well.

Fortunately for my kinda new anxiety over 19th-century poets' possible need for therapy, Poe has been dead for a long time, and he would be dead still even if he had been happy while alive. I think this new anxiety is the same thing as my inability to watch any of the Spy Kids movies or Spike Jones's Where the Wild Things Are because of an impulse to call Child Protective Services. It's okay, K.P., the story isn't real.

Anyway, love the poem. Love the mental isolation, love the arrogance in assuming that the poet knows how others' are seeing things, love the meter and rhyme and the relentless depression of it. Love the passion in it - this is not a deadened depression, but a chaotic reeling out of synch with the outer chaos. Great, great poem. Thanks, Poe.