EDGAR ALLEN POE
269
Edward Shanks shrewdly acknowledges as Poe's spiritual auto–
biography; and throughout the course of telling that remarkable
story, Poe touches depths of psychological reality that have been
distorted or ignored by those who have attempted to explain his
character by a facile use of Freudian analysis. The same pene–
tration into the private world of human experience may be dis–
cerned in the following lines which were posthumously printed
in
1875 and have not received the attention they deserve:
From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
Jis others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy
at
the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
The11r-in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life-was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its au.tumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
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.
Aside from the autobiographical nature of the poem, what
it has to say touches upon an experience common to self-identity
in
adolescence, the secret confession that the individual stands
alone, victorious perhaps, in feeling himself distinct from all other
creatures of God's making, but burdened with the self-love-and–
pity of Narcissus. From this last extremity Poe frees himself
(and the impressionable reader) by the image of a "demon" in
his
view; and the "demon" in his excellent ambiguity may be a
figure of genius or a sight of evil, but probably signifies the two
in
one in a single look directed up toward Heaven.
The "demon" is, of course, Poe's close familiar, and his
appearance in the poem describes the shifting of the newly awak-
