The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (64 page)

But two other early poems deliver notable meditations on the poetic imagination itself. “Sonnet—To Science” asks why systematic knowledge, suggestively portrayed as a “vulture,” preys upon “the poet’s heart,” substituting “dull realities” for romantic illusions. Poe based “Israfel” on a reference in the Koran to an angel possessing “the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures.” Inhabiting a sphere of “perfect bliss,” Israfel derives the “fire” of his “burning measures” from a lute strung by his own “heart-strings,” and the poet envisions changing places with the angel so that he might sound a “bolder note” in heaven.

The 1831
Poems
also reveal a developing fascination with unreal landscapes. “The Valley of Unrest” depicts a “silent dell” depopulated by war and changed from an idyllic place into a restless “sad valley” where trees “palpitate” supernaturally and lilies wave over “a nameless grave.” “The City in the Sea” envisions a necropolis surrounded by “melancholy waters,” where from a “proud tower . . . Death looks gigantically down.” Perhaps alluding to an ancient natural catastrophe, the poet depicts the hellish sinking of the city beneath a reddened wave.

In several short verses composed between 1831 and 1845, Poe elaborated the notion of death as a place. The surreal terrain of an early prose-poem (“Silence—A Fable”) anticipates this progression. The later “Sonnet—Silence” succinctly maps dual regions of silence—one corporeal, encountered in “lonely places / Newly with grass o’ergrown” (cemeteries) and the other situated in the “lone regions” of the soul. His poem “The Haunted Palace,” ascribed in his famous tale to Roderick Usher, also evokes the symbolic topography of a “happy valley” where a “radiant” palace is irreversibly transformed by “evil things in robes of sorrow.” Perhaps Poe’s greatest deathscape, “Dream-Land,” evokes a “wild weird clime . . . Out of SPACE—out of TIME,” unmistakably identified as the realm of death when a traveler meets “shrouded forms” of long-dead friends. This “ultimate dim Thule” cannot be observed by the living or reported by the dead and must remain terra incognita.

During his last years, Poe’s preoccupation with Virginia’s illness and subsequent death as well as his struggle for survival gave his poems a sharper urgency. “Lenore” signals his return to the death-of-a-beautiful-woman motif and builds on an early poem (“A Paean”) as Poe insinuates that the “sweet Lenore” dies unmourned by her plighted husband (Guy de Vere) and despised by his family, while an unnamed speaker “wild” with grief weeps for the “dear child” who should have been
his
bride. Both the title and long poetic lines of the 1844 version of “Lenore” anticipate the extraordinary narrative poem composed later that year, “The Raven.” A sustained meditation on memory and forgetting, this much parodied verse stages a fantastic dialogue between a speaker trying to escape his grief in scholarship and a seemingly diabolical bird whose refrain of “Nevermore” leads the writer to pose insidious questions that finally betray his anxieties about a spiritual afterlife and reunion with his dead beloved. Much as the speaker wishes to “forget this lost Lenore,” the bird’s presence ensures his excruciating remembrance, traced in octosyllabic stanzas with relentless internal rhyming. If “The Raven” rehearses Poe’s anticipated loss of Virginia, the mystical “Ulalume,” written three years later, dramatizes his experience after her demise. Using esoteric astronomical imagery, the poem stages a dialogue between the poet and his soul as it represents the speaker’s unconscious, compulsive return to Ulalume’s tomb on the anniversary of her death.

Something of the despair that menaced Poe can be glimpsed in the short but affecting “A Dream Within a Dream,” which concludes with the question, “Is
all
that we see or seem / But a dream within an dream?” The poet’s inability to save one grain of sand from time’s “pitiless wave” epitomizes the futile transience of mortal life. In its final incarnation “The Bells” dates from the same period and represents a tour de force of sonority, a performance piece that evolved into a four-part poem defining a succession of bells, each representing a season of life. Alliteration, repetition, and rhyme complement the headlong metrical effect that simulates a mounting frenzy approaching derangement. By contrast, the restrained lyric “Eldorado” expresses a philosophy of defiance: The seeker of riches must “boldly ride,” according to the “pilgrim shadow” who exhorts an aging, dispirited knight. In Poe’s symbolic landscape, Eldorado lies not in California (the poem’s implied inspiration) but “Over the Mountains / Of the Moon, / Down the Valley of the Shadow”—implicitly, beyond love and death.

Poe’s last poems reflect his grasping for emotional support. “To My Mother” suggests that after his wife’s death, Mrs. Clemm became his principal source of affection. Yet his insistence on his love for Virginia must also be read in the context of his feverish quest for a second wife. In addition to the unremarkable verses composed for Sarah Helen Whitman, briefly his fiancée in 1848, he wrote “For Annie” as a token of devotion to Annie Richmond, his young confidante of the same period. Apparently penned after an overdose of laudanum, the poem mirrors his emotional confusion and self-pity, contrasting the hectic “fever called ‘Living’ ” (perhaps his multiple courtships) with the deathlike serenity he achieves in a vision of intimacy with Mrs. Richmond. The much cited “Annabel Lee” may also owe its inspiration to Annie Richmond, or to Virginia’s recent death, although there is reason to suspect that Poe was recalling his childhood love, Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton, by then a widow still living in Richmond. The poet’s visit there in 1848 fanned the embers of early passion; when he began courting her in 1849, he read the poem in her presence. Its poignant evocation of a fated love that outlasts death itself, compelling the speaker to “lie down” nightly beside the tomb of Annabel Lee, stands as Poe’s greatest lyric poem.

In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less—
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.

 

But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody—
Then—ah then I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.

 

Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight—
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define—
Nor Love—although the Love were thine.

 

Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining—
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana
¹
from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

Dim vales—and shadowy floods—
And cloudy-looking woods,
Whose forms we can’t discover
For the tears that drip all over.
Huge moons there wax and wane—
Again—again—again—
Every moment of the night—
Forever changing places—
And they put out the star-light
With the breath from their pale faces.
About twelve by the moon-dial
One more filmy than the rest
(A kind which, upon trial,
They have found to be the best)
Comes down—still down—and down
With its centre on the crown
Of a mountain’s eminence,
While its wide circumference
In easy drapery falls
Over hamlets, over halls,
Wherever they may be—
O’er the strange woods—o’er the sea—
Over spirits on the wing—
Over every drowsy thing—
And buries them up quite
In a labyrinth of light—
And then, how deep!—O, deep!
Is the passion of their sleep.
In the morning they arise,
And their moony covering
Is soaring in the skies,
With the tempests as they toss,
Like—almost any thing—
Or a yellow Albatross.
They use that moon no more
For the same end as before—
Videlicet
¹
a tent—
Which I think extravagant:
Its atomies,
²
however,
Into a shower dissever,
Of which those butterflies,
Of Earth, who seek the skies,
And so come down again
(Never-contented things!)
Have brought a specimen
Upon their quivering wings.

Romance, who loves to nod and sing,
With drowsy head and folded wing,
Among the green leaves as they shake
Far down within some shadowy lake,
To me a painted paroquet
Hath been—a most familiar bird—
Taught me my alphabet to say—
To lisp my very earliest word
While in the wild-wood I did lie
A child—with a most knowing eye.

 

Succeeding years, too wild for song,
Then roll’d like tropic storms along,
Where, tho’ the garish lights that fly
Dying along the troubled sky.
Lay bare, thro’ vistas thunder-riven,
The blackness of the general Heaven,
That very blackness yet doth fling
Light on the lightning’s silver wing.

 

For, being an idle boy lang syne,
Who read Anacreon,
²
and drank wine,
I early found Anacreon rhymes
Were almost passionate sometimes—
And by strange alchemy of brain
His pleasures always turn’d to pain—
His naivete to wild desire—
His wit to love—his wine to fire—

And so, being young and dipt in folly
I fell in love with melancholy,
And used to throw my earthly rest
And quiet all away in jest—
I could not love except where Death
Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath—
Or Hymen,
³
Time, and Destiny
Were stalking between her and me.

 

O, then the eternal Condor years
So shook the very Heavens on high,
With tumult as they thunder’d by;
I had no time for idle cares,
Thro’ gazing on the unquiet sky!
Or if an hour with calmer wing
Its down did on my spirit fling,
That little hour with lyre and rhyme
To while away—forbidden thing!
My heart half fear’d to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the string.

 

But
now
my soul hath too much room—
Gone are the glory and the gloom—
The black hath mellow’d into grey,
And all the fires are fading away.

 

My draught of passion hath been deep—
I revell’d, and I now would sleep—
And after-drunkenness of soul
Succeeds the glories of the bowl—
An idle longing night and day
To dream my very life away.

 

But dreams—of those who dream as I,
Aspiringly, are damned, and die:
Yet should I swear I mean alone,
By notes so very shrilly blown,
To break upon Time’s monotone,

While yet my vapid joy and grief
Are tintless of the yellow leaf—
Why not an imp the greybeard hath,
Will shake his shadow in my path—
And even the greybeard will o’erlook
Connivingly my dreaming-book.

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As 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 lov’d—
I
lov’d alone—
Then
—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry 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 roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d 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—

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

 

On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.

 

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy-Land!

At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapour, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And, softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.
The rosemary nods upon the grave;
The lily lolls upon the wave;
Wrapping the fog about its breast,
The ruin moulders into rest;
Looking like Lethë,
¹
see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not, for the world, awake.
All Beauty sleeps!—and lo! where lies
Irenë, with her Destinies!

 

Oh, lady bright! can it be right—
This window open to the night?
The wanton airs, from the tree-top,
Laughingly through the lattice drop—
The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,
Flit through thy chamber in and out,
And wave the curtain canopy
So fitfully—so fearfully—
Above the closed and fringéd lid
’Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid,
That, o’er the floor and down the wall,

Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall!
Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?
Why and what art thou dreaming here?
Sure thou art come o’er far-off seas,
A wonder to these garden trees!
Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress!
Strange, above all, thy length of tress,
And this all solemn silentness!