Edgar Allan Poe's Loneliest Poem

Although Edgar Allan Poe wrote the poem, Alone, in 1829, when he was 20 years old (the same year that his foster mother, Frances Allan, died), it was not published during his short lifetime. The untitled work was discovered after his death, and was actually first published in 1875.

Poe's most famous poems, The Raven, and Annabel Lee, deal with the loss of a dearly loved woman whom all presume to be his recently departed soulmate and wife, Virginia Clemm Poe. Even if Poe was pouring out his desire to reunite with Virginia in the hereafter into these immortal rhymes, Poe wrote other poems concerning dead lovers well before this. A year after his marriage to Virginia, he composed The Bridal Ballad, which depicts the marriage to someone else of a woman whose true love was lost in a battle. In this sorrowful poem, the woman tries to continue on with life and convince herself she is happy, but it's a losing proposition:

Would God I could awaken!
For I dream I know not how!
And my soul is sorely shaken
Lest an evil step be taken,-
Lest the dead who is forsaken
May not be happy now.

The poem To One in Paradise was written in 1833, when Poe was only 24. It also mourns the death of a lover. Poe was certainly concerned, if not obsessed, with love lost to the Grim Reaper, even before he lost Virginia himself.

Alone expresses reflections on a lonely life that "from childhood's hour," found the writer discovering that he was different than others. He could not relate to what made others happy or sorrowful and, evidently, no one had any interest in things that he loved, because he dolefully says: "All that I loved, I loved alone."

The poem then switches tempo and describes an awareness of a mysterious force that the writer feels still has power over him - "The mystery which binds me still." He describes a series of natural wonders and events that evoke the seasons and powerful forces of nature, and brings us full circle into his isolation, when he concludes:

And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view -

Some people believe that the "demon" represents Poe's foster father, John Allan. Poe's real father abandoned the family and his mother died when he was quite young. Given the procession of people Poe loved during his lifetime who either left him or passed away, it is much more likely that even as a child, he internalized his grief, and felt that a curse was on his life. If he felt this way at age 20, the poem almost takes on a prophetic and ominous foreboding when one considers how Poe's happiness on this earth with his wife was also to be much too brief.

hear an audio of Alone, and other classic poems, on Reely's Poetry Pages.