When I was tasked with finding a poem for my literary analysis essay, I instantly was won over by Edgar Allan Poe’s “Alone.” Poe writes about how he has felt isolated for the majority of his life possibly due to a traumatic childhood experience. Poe expresses his unique personality also comes with the blatant fact that he is fundamentally different then most. The excerpt below highlights Poe’s subjective observations:
“From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw”
Poe goes on to state that he finds his passions and sorrows from a different source and the loneliness from that source fuels him to ask himself why he perceives the world so different.
The poem ultimately ends with an answer to Poe’s rhetorical question with:
“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—”
I personally imagined this last section of the poem as Poe laying in the grass with his friends on a nice spring day where they’re all glancing at the clouds with their early 1800’s sunglasses. Everyone shouts what they see, “That one’s a bird!” “No it’s a grasshopper!” and Poe being the pessimistic friend simply says “It’s actually a raven.” Poe repeatedly emphasize his peculiarity but finally identifies what seems to be a personal demon controlling him at the end of the poem. The purpose of this poem wasn’t to identify Poe’s demon, but to simply recognize it.
Similar to Poe’s cataclysmic childhood, the way the embryos in Brave New World are treated have a lot to do with their future. At meter 150 on the conveyor belt, the future tropical workers, are treated for “typhoid and sleeping sickness,” and then there after around meter 200 the sex of the babies was established with “a T for the males, a circle for the females and for those who were destined to become freemartins a question mark” (Huxley 23). The genetic engineering of these embryos, at the most vulnerable times of their life, have a tremendous impact on what they will become when they are older and how quickly they will develop.
Both Poe and the embryos are a victim to their environment. They did not have a choice to what had happened to them at such a young age, but they had to make best of what they had.
“Alone by Edgar Allan Poe, a Poem Analysis.” Shadow of Iris, 18 July 2015, http://www.shadowofiris.com/alone-edgar-allan-poe-analysis/.
Forhan, Laura. “‘Alone’ by Edgar Allan Poe.” Prezi.com, 2 Aug. 2015, prezi.com/7mvtg3m5oimr/alone-by-edgar-allan-poe/.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World.
Brave New World 