not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then--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 autumn 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.

As a poem written in early youth we should not expect this to be as
perfect as "The Raven," for instance. Let us see if we can find some
of its faults, as well as some of its beauties:

First, we notice that it ends rather abruptly, as if it were
unfinished. In his essay on "The Poetic Principle" Poe pointed out
that many a poem fails of its effect by being too short. It must not
be so long that one is wearied out before it can be read through; at
the same time it must be long enough to convey the whole of the idea.
This poem of his own is an example of the fault he himself pointed
out. It is too short to give us clear ideas of all he evidently had in
his mind. We notice, also, that it is rhymed in couplets, that is,
every two lines are rhymed together. Now the couplets in the last half
of the poem seem to strike the ear with more satisfaction than those
in the first part. For instance, we are pleased with the sound of
these lines:

From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain.

But in some of the lines the pauses of punctuation do not come at the
right points to make smooth reading:

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.

The semicolon after "sorrow" should have come at the end of the line
instead of in the middle. Poe had not yet learned the secret of the
rhythmic flow which we find in such perfection in "The Bells," for
instance.

But in the last part of the poem we find a beauty of image and
comparison that thrills us, and something of that strange, weird
suggestiveness which was characteristic of all of Poe's poetry, the
thing he has in common with no other poet.

This weird suggestiveness is found in still greater vividness in
another poem entitled "The Lake." In this, besides,