Poe, alone--

Edgar Allan Poe wrote the poem below at the age of twenty, upon the death of his stepmother who raised him, on the very verge of his move to New York City. Poe was a haunted man, and the deep wellsprings of his passions were tightly wound around a moroseness and longing he harnessed with the exactitude of his verse. See how he breaks up the lines here, tearing apart his own meter he had perfectly established. The effect is as isolating as his words, as isolated as his heart. Poe was born in Boston, raised in Richmond, attended UVA and West Point, wrote Israfel, To Helen, and The City in the Sea in NYC, moved to Philadelphia, and wound up wandering a street in Baltimore where he was hospitalized then died, all and by the age of forty. But not before inventing the detective novel, some precursors to science fiction, and penning some of the most widely-read better-known and hauntingly beautiful American poetry.

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 —