I asked what was the name of the usurping tyrant.
As well as the Count could recollect, it was Mob.
Not knowing what to say to this, I raised my voice, and deplored the Egyptian ignorance of steam.
The Count looked at me with much astonishment, but made no answer. The silent gentleman, however, gave me a violent nudge in the ribs with his elbows—told me I had sufficiently exposed myself for once—and demanded if I was really such a fool as not to know that the modern steam-engine is derived from the invention of Hero, through Solomon de Caus.
We were now in imminent danger of being discomfited; but, as good luck would have it, Doctor Ponnonner, having rallied, returned to our rescue, and inquired if the people of Egypt would seriously pretend to rival the moderns in the all-important particular of dress.
The Count, at this, glanced downward to the straps of his pantaloons, and then taking hold of the end of one of his coat-tails, held it up close to his eyes for some minutes. Letting it fall, at last, his mouth extended itself very gradually from ear to ear; but I do not remember that he said any thing in the way of reply.
Hereupon we recovered our spirits, and the Doctor, approaching the Mummy with great dignity, desired it to say candidly, upon its honor as a gentleman, if the Egyptians had comprehended, at any period, the manufacture of either Ponnonner’s lozenges, or Brandreth’s pills.
We looked, with profound anxiety, for an answer;—but in vain. It was not forthcoming. The Egyptian blushed and hung down his head. Never was triumph more consummate; never was defeat borne with so ill a grace. Indeed, I could not endure the spectacle of the poor Mummy’s mortification. I reached my hat, bowed to him stiffly, and took leave.
Upon getting home I found it past four o’clock, and went immediately to bed. It is now ten, A.M. I have been up since seven, penning these memoranda for the benefit of my family and of mankind. The former I shall behold no more. My wife is a shrew. The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life and of the nineteenth century in general. I am convinced that every thing is going wrong. Besides, I am anxious to know who will be President in 2045.10 As soon, therefore, as I shave and swallow a cup of coffee, I shall just step over to Ponnonner’s and get embalmed for a couple of hundred years.
POEMS
Poe conjured strange scenes and haunting images in a dozen truly memorable poems that established his reputation in verse. Yet he achieved originality through a study of the poetic tradition; his juvenilia included imitations of the classical satirists. As a schoolboy he read Shakespeare and Milton with appreciation and studied Alexander Pope with delight. He left home at eighteen with a sheaf of verses, desperate to become a famous poet and identifying closely with the exiled Byron. In “Tamerlane,” the title poem of his first volume, he envisioned a scorned Byronic hero, and in the longer “Al Aaraaf,” which occasioned his second book, he emulated the orientalism of Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh. His fondness for dream imagery also derived from his reading of Coleridge. Savoring of derision and self-pity, the early poems recur to themes of loneliness, rejection, and loss, and “The Lake” offers a suggestive hint of the delight in terror symptomatic of his curious fascination with death.
Although Poe published three volumes of poetry by the age of twenty-two, none met with commercial success. In his “Letter to Mr.————,” which introduced the Poems of 1831, he acknowledged “the great barrier in the path of an American writer”: the popularity of established European writers, whose works sold cheaply in the absence of an international copyright law. Abandoning the idea of a career as a poet, he turned to periodical fiction and became “essentially a magazinist” but continued to write occasional poems, incorporating a few in tales such as “The Fall of the House of Usher.” He returned to poetry more concertedly when “The Raven” brought literary celebrity in 1845; his last four years produced several poems that rank among his best.
Poe regarded beauty as the sole province of the poem and valued indefinite sensation. Through meter, rhyme, and sonority he created musical effects and believed the beauty of woman inspired the “elevating excitement of the soul” essential to poetry. By a logical extension, “the death of a beautiful woman” represented “the most poetical topic in the world” and many of his most memorable poems grapple with the loss of an idealized female presence. Poems about dying women abounded in the sentimental literature of the day; what sets Poe’s work apart (beyond verbal brilliance) is the obsessive intensity and occult strangeness of the poet’s attachment to the dead beloved.
Among the early poems included here, “Fairy-Land” epitomizes indefiniteness in its evocation of a nocturnal landscape where “huge moons wax and wane,” burying the “strange woods” in “a labyrinth of light.” “Alone” offers revealing self-reflection: the speaker acknowledges a strangeness or difference that from childhood has alienated him from the rest of humanity. “Introduction” extends this confessional mode, tracing the beginnings of the “dreaming-book” his poems comprise. Poe tellingly admits that he “fell in love with melancholy” and “could not love except where Death / Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath”—that he felt doomed to love only dying women. A similar note of fatality informs “The Sleeper,” where the poet broods on the strange “pallor” and “silentness” of his “sleeping” love. It suffuses “To Helen,” where his homage to Helen of Troy privately eulogizes the late Mrs. Stanard, the nurturing, cherished confidant of Poe’s early adolescence.
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 shou
ld 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.
THE LAKE—TO—1
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.
SONNET—TO SCIENCE
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 Diana1 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?
FAIRY-LAND
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—
Videlicet1 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.
INTRODUCTIONI
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 lightni
ng’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.
The Portable Edgar Allan Poe Page 49