How was the poem "Alone" by Edgar Allen Poe ment to be read?

-- Anonymous, March 25, 2003

Answers

Well, this poem was not published by Poe but put into a friend's notebook. It is one of those apparaently addressed to another person to explain Poe's state of mind and art, his deepest thought, his life. "A Dream within a Dream" is like that with the same two part structure.

First describing the idea through reflection on the past, then a focussed tableau to bring that idea into a set moment. Many of his stories have that structure as well, philosophy based on past experience then a particular illustration of immediacy.

If you mean how mechanically it was to be read with those interlocking rhymes and lines it seems fairly self-evident. The tendency(unfortunate) in our time is to suppress the musicality of the lines. That was never the intention of poets in Poe's times.

-- Anonymous, March 25, 2003