Here Poe is comparing himself in relation to all the rest of the Universe and the other people he knows to be in it. “The rest of Heaven” here does not specifically mean Heaven as the sky or the kingdom of the righteous. The great depth of his mind’s machine has separated him from all the things he witnesses with great wonder of analysis. This distance again increases his isolation. He can see them and judge their distance. To Poe, the dawn-colors are hidden in the depths. Poe draws our attention to the true shades he sees his world in.
In literature, color is often used to elicit a visual emotion. Thus Poe was burdened with a weighty melancholy that led him to a great many addictions and social problems. This only compounds his problem as he, predisposed to despair, cannot find the hopeful variable in this giftedness.
All of his life’s goods and evils have been encased in this code that he cannot crack on his own and neither can anyone else give him the answer to it. In these lines of ‘Alone’, the author discloses the mystery that engulfs him like a storm cloud. All he loves, all he touches, echoes with this same pervasive isolating grief. His isolation is found even in the things he loves. His sorrow was like a deep sleep from which he could not stir. His unique outlook has brought him to the deeply haunted mental pain that is genius. This selfsame peculiarity of his personality has also been a great source of pain to the great author.
Where averagely others saw passions and goodness in only the lighthearted things like spring, he saw the beauty of the dark and the peculiar. This darker tone is a facet of his character. In these lines, the reader sees that Poe relates this trouble differently than those commonly plagued with gloom. We are left to ponder the same intense colors of thought that he has explored in penning this for an autograph album.
He wants us to feel the same distance he has to process. The writer has left an air of ambiguity in this creative work.
The great beauty of ‘Alone’ – or any lyric work-is that there is more than one official interpretation of the author’s full meaning. One is still fully captivated by the melancholy of the man’s childhood reflection. Poe showcases his craftsman ability here in that he changes rhyming patterns mid-structure and yet the reader’s suspension of disbelief is never disenchanted.
Phonetically, you can see this exhibited in words like alone, thunder, or demon. Words with vowels that are lower on the tonal scale such as long “a” or “o” are in the category of phonetically darkened tones. Each pairing rhyme (like the words ill and still) is only used once. This poem has a total of 22 lines with 11 rhyming couplets woven in. The remaining lines change from this metric concept to what is called a trochaic tetrameter. Iambic tetrameter is a rhythmic pattern of four poetic feet in which there is an even pattern of stressed or unstressed syllables throughout all the words in use. The first 12 lines of this poem follow the iambic tetrameter exhibited most clearly by the first 4 lines. A lyric poem has a tone of deep feeling or emotional reflection on the author’s part. It was found and published instead by E.L. Written as an autograph in Lucy Holmes’ album, Poe never published the ‘ Alone’ in his lifetime. Edgar Allan Poe is so commonly associated with Gothic horrors that we often fail to see the charm and humanness found in his work.