Can somebody please explain this poem, A Demon in my view by Edgar Allen Poe.?
The title of the poem is “Alone,” not “Demon in my View.” As always, look to the title for some help. It won’t always get you in the right direction, but in this case, it does. Poe loved long, flowery sentences, so it become the reader’s job to analyze them carefully and get the parts in the right places. This one is further complicated by the use of dashes (a la Emily Dickinson) instead of conventional punctuation. I will leave it to you to work on where the divisions between sentences come. The poem consists of one simple idea, even though its expression is a little complicated. The speaker feels that he has always been “alone.” Since that’s clearly not true literally, we can take it to mean that he was alienated from his peers. He says basically that ever since childhood, he has been emotionally different from everyone else. It seemed to him that the (metaphorical) spring from which everyone else draws happiness, sorrow, etc., is not the one he used. The middle and end of the poem h
