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.
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.
The poem "Alone" by Edgar Allan Poe perfectly fits the theme of finding oneself. Trough this poem, Poe expresses the feeling of solitude he felt troughout his childhood into his adulthood and how he seeks to find himself and all that other people view as beutiful but cannot see because of the cloud that took the form of a demon in his view. He seems to be searching outside of himself trough nature (cloud, storm, dawn, mountain) for answers that will give him identity and security.
Like Gogol, Poe feels he is different from others. He expresses in the first line of the poem, "As others were; I have not seen". Gogol found no peace in either the American nor the Bengali culture. Poe is not at peace withing his American culture, because his way of thinking is different from most of the people. We can assume from this poem that Edgar Allan Poe felt no one understood him in childhood and he learned to make peace the mystery that bound him--with loneliness, his constant companion.
