Upstream

by Mary Oliver

  Emerson was the leading member of the group we know as the New England transcendentalists. It is hardly a proper philosophy; certainly it is not a school of thought in which all members were in agreement. Impossible such a finding would have been with the various sensibilities of Concord! For each member, therefore, it must be reported somewhat differently. For Emerson, it devolved from Coleridge and German philosophy, from Swedenborg, no doubt from half a hundred other voices, as from his religious beliefs and his own appreciation of the world’s more-than-utilitarian beauty. For Emerson, the value and distinction of transcendentalism was very much akin to this swerving and rolling away from acute definition. All the world is taken in through the eye, to reach the soul, where it becomes more, representative of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, the deep stillness that is, whose whole proclamation is the silence and the lack of material instance in which, patiently and radiantly, the universe exists. Emerson would not turn from the world, which was domestic, and social, and collective, and required action. Neither would he swerve from that unperturbable inner radiance, mystical, forming no rational word but drenched with passionate and untranslatable song. A man should want to be domestic, steady, moral, politic, reasonable. He should want also to be subsumed, whirled, to know himself as dust in the fingers of the wind. This was his supple, unbreakable faith.

  _______

  His certainty that a man must live also in this world, enjoined with the similar faith of the other transcendentalists, was no small force in the New England of the 1830s and 1840s, especially in speech and action on behalf of abolition. Slow as he often was to express outrage, Emerson burst forth in his journal thus: “This filthy enactment [of the Fugitive Slave Law] was made in the 19th century, by people who could read and write. I will not obey it, by God.” And he did not.

  _______

  Writing that loses its elegance loses its significance. Moreover, it is no simple matter to be both inspirational and moderate. Emerson’s trick—I use the word in no belittling sense—was to fill his essays with “things” at the same time that his subject was conceptual, invisible, no more than a glimmer, but a glimmer of immeasurable sharpness inside the eye. So he attached the common word to the startling idea. “Hitch your wagon to a star,” he advised. “The drop is a small ocean.” “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” “We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.” “Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree.” “The soul makes the body.” “Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view,” he says, and suddenly that elite mystical practice seems clearer than ever before, and possible to each of us.

  Of course his writing is made up of the nineteenth-century sentence, so nimble with commas. The sparks of his expression move forward softly and reasonably, in their shapely phrases—then they leap. He rests upon the gnomic as a poet will rest upon meter, and comes not to a conclusion but to a pause in which the reader’s own impetus, given such a bright shove, takes over. And yet it is not ornamental eloquence, but natural, fecund, ripe, full of seed, and possibility. Even, or especially (it is his specialty, after all), when talking about the utterly unprovable, he sends out good news, as good reports come all day from the mockingbird, or the soft tongues of the Merrimack. The writing is a pleasure to the ear, and thus a tonic to the heart, at the same time that it strikes the mind.

  Thus he wrote and lectured, often in Boston and New York but also as far west as Missouri and beyond. He did not especially like travel, or being away from home, but needed the money and trusted the lecturing process as a way for him to develop and polish his essays for eventual publication.

  _______

  In 1847, Emerson, by then an established writer widely honored on both sides of the Atlantic, returned to England. The audiences for his lectures were large and curious. Crabb Robinson, in his diary of those years, relates first his own response and then the reaction of the writer Harriet Martineau:

  Tuesday, I heard Emerson’s first lecture, “On the Laws of Thought;” one of those rhapsodical exercises of mind, like Coleridge’s in his “Table Talk,” and Carlyle’s in his Lectures, which leave a dreamy sense of pleasure, not easy to analyze, or render an account of. . . . I can do no better than tell you what Harriet Martineau says about him, which, I think, admirably describes the character of his mind. “He is a man so sui generis, that I do not wonder at his not being apprehended till he is seen. His influence is of a curious sort. There is a vague nobleness and thorough sweetness about him, which move people to their very depths, without their being able to explain why. The logicians have an incessant triumph over him, but their triumph is of no avail. He conquers minds, as well as hearts, wherever he goes; and without convincing anybody’s reason of any one thing, exalts their reason, and makes their minds worth more than they ever were before.”

  9TH JUNE, 1848.

  That we are spirits that have descended into our bodies, of this Emerson was sure. That each man was utterly important and limitless, an “infinitude,” of this he was also sure. And it was a faith that leads, as he shows us again and again, not to stasis but to activity, to the creation of the moral person from the indecisive person. Attachment to the Ideal, without participation in the world of men and women, was the business of foxes and flowers, not of men, not of women. This was, for Emerson himself, difficult. Outwardly he was calm, reasonable, patient. All his wildness was in his head—such a good place for it! Yet his certainty that thought, though it might grow most robust in the mind’s repose, was sent and meant for participation in the world, never altered, never ebbed. There are, for myself, a hundred reasons why I would find my life—not only my literary, thoughtful life but my emotional, responsive life—impoverished by Emerson’s absence, but none is greater than this uncloseting of thought into the world’s brilliant, perilous present. I think of him whenever I set to work on something worthy. And there he is also, avuncular and sweet, but firm and corrective, when I am below the mark. What we bring forth, he has taught me as deeply as any writer could, is predictable.

  But let him have the last word. In his journal he wrote:

  I have confidence in the laws of morals as of botany. I have planted maize in my field every June for seventeen years and I never knew it come up strychnine. My parsley, beet, turnip, carrot, buck-thorn, chestnut, acorn, are as sure. I believe that justice produces justice, and injustice injustice.

  The Bright Eyes of Eleonora: Poe’s Dream of Recapturing the Impossible

  1.

  In Poe’s stories and poems we hear continually about compulsion, terrors loosed by the powerful upon the weak (or the powerful components of the mind upon the weak components of the mind); we hear about plague, and tortures, and revenge. But none of these elements does more than forward the real subject of Poe’s work, which is the anguish of knowing nothing for sure about the construct of the universe, or about the existence of a moral order within it—anything that would clarify its seemingly total and imperial indifference toward individual destiny.

  Poe is no different from any of us—we all choke in such vapors, somewhat, sometimes. A normal life includes the occasional black mood. But most of us have had some real enough experience with certainty, which helps us to sustain ourselves through passages of metaphysical gloom. While Poe had none. Not little, but none.

  This lack disordered him. It is not a spiritual lack, but rather a lack of emotional organization, of confidence. And not self-confidence, which is already a complicated asset, but a lack of confidence in the world entire, and its benevolent as well as malevolent possibilities. In the deepest sense, Poe was without confidence in a future that might be different from the past. He was, forever, reliving an inescapable, original woe.

  At the same time he was both a powerful constructor of narrative and a perfect acrobat of language. He was also a man
of enormous courage. With almost superhuman will he wrote his poems and his stories—I almost want to say he wrote and rewrote his story and his poem—trying to solve the unsolvable and move on. But he never moved on. He never solved anything.

  2.

  His mother, Eliza Poe, an actress, died when Edgar was two years old. She was twenty-four. It was a pitiful finish to a miserable story: Eliza Poe was penniless, consumptive, and abandoned by Edgar’s father, whose occasional and itinerant occupation was also acting.

  In Richmond, Virginia, where Eliza died, Poe was taken to live with the John Allan family, perhaps by the whim of Frances Allan, who had no children and had witnessed the death of Eliza. The relationship between Poe and John Allan, a successful merchant, was perpetually and mutually difficult. Though he took the family’s name, Poe was never legally adopted.

  Poe became friends with a woman named Jane Stanard, the mother of a schoolboy friend. She was a strange, closeted, not too steady figure. Even as their friendship deepened, Jane Stanard sickened, was declared insane, and died. Frances Allan also had never been robust. When Poe was twenty years old, and away from home, Frances Allan died. It was a separation without closure, since John Allan chose not to summon Poe home in time for a last meeting before the final and implacable silence of death.

  In 1834, when he was twenty-five, Poe married his cousin Virginia Clemm; she was thirteen years old. Does the future seem ensured? Eight years later, while Virginia was singing, blood began to run from her mouth. It was, it is fair to say, consumption. In 1847 Virginia died. She was twenty-five.

  Poe had two years to live. With terrifying gusto, he drank his way through them.

  _______

  In the Free Library of Philadelphia there is a portrait of the actress Eliza Poe. She is at once curiously stiff and visibly animated; her long black hair curls at the ends and frames the wide brow and the enormous dark eyes. The same dark curls, the same large eyes—in fact, a very similar white, low-bodiced dress—appear in another painting, this one in Richmond, of Frances Allan. And Virginia Clemm? She is described as having had a chalky white complexion, and long black hair, and a high, clear brow, and large eyes that grew even larger and ever more luminous during her illness.

  To readers of Poe’s poems and tales, it is an altogether familiar face:

  The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once jetty hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets, now of a vivid yellow, and jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning melancholy of the countenance. (“Berenice”)*

  I examined the contour of the lofty and pale forehead—it was faultless—how cold indeed that word when applied to a majesty so divine!—the skin rivalling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant, and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, “hyacinthine”! (“Ligeia”)

  If the faces of Poe’s women are often strikingly similar, other characteristics are no less consistent:

  Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche

  How statue-like I see thee stand. . . .

  (“To Helen”)*

  So Poe writes of that pale beauty—that Helen, who is also Lenore in “The Raven” and Eleonora in the story named for her. And the Lady Madeline in “The Fall of the House of Usher” comes from the grave “a lofty and enshrouded figure.” And Ligeia “came and departed as a shadow.” And her eyes were large—“far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race.” There is not the briefest glimpse of Annabel Lee in the rhapsodic, death-soaked poem of that name, yet we know, don’t we, what she must have looked like. Pale, dark-haired, with wide and luminous eyes—vivacious in the trembling, fragile way of mayflies. The narrator says of Berenice: “Oh, gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh, sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! Oh, Naiad among its fountains!” Of Eleonora: “like the ephemeron, she had been made perfect in loveliness only to die.” Of Ligeia again: she has “the face of the water-nymph, that lives but an hour” and “the beauty of the fabulous Houri of the Turk.”

  In Poe’s stories overall, no focus is so constant as that of the face and, within the face, the look of the eyes. “The expression of the eyes of Ligeia!” the narrator cries aloud and, sacrificing the “blue-eyed Lady Rowena,” wills the dead, dark-eyed Ligeia to return to him within the vehicle of Rowena’s body. When the corpse stirs slowly and opens its eyes, he shrieks—of course it is the end of the story—“these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes of my lost love.”

  Nothing, nothing in all the secret and beautiful and peaceful Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, where the narrator is but a boy and loves for the first time—nothing shines so brightly as the eyes of the first-beloved, Eleonora.

  3.

  Said the poet Robert Frost, “We begin in infancy by establishing correspondence of eyes with eyes.”* It is deeply true. It is where the confidence comes from; the child whose gaze is met learns that the world is real, and desirable—that the child himself is real, and cherished. The look in the eyes of Poe’s heroines—it is the same intensity, over and over, upon the long string of his many tales. It is the look that, briefly, begins to give such confidence—then fades.

  Not in “Ligeia” and “Berenice” and “Eleonora” only, but in other stories too, the eye is a critical feature. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator murders an old man of whom he is truly fond because of the blue veil that is cast over one eye. “The vulture eye,” he calls it.

  Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.

  It is a simple case. The eye that does not look back does not acknowledge. To Poe’s narrator, it is unbearable.

  The eyes of Augustus Bedloe, in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” are

  abnormally large, and round like those of a cat. . . . In moments of excitement the orbs grew bright to a degree almost inconceivable; seeming to emit luminous rays, not of a reflected but of an intrinsic lustre, as does a candle or the sun.

  Bedloe, otherwise a corpse-like figure, gains vigor through his daily use of morphine. He is, we understand, a man who is being medically supervised; he has even been hypnotized. He tells his story: one afternoon, in the mountains of Virginia, he breaks through the wall of time and place. “You will say now, of course, that I dreamed; but not so,” he says. But his inexorable original fate, in the trivia of this new time and place, the Virginia wilderness, waits for him. He cannot escape it.

  In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the gloomy mansion itself takes on the look of a face, with its “vacant and eye-like windows.” The same face makes its grim appearance in the poem “The Haunted Palace.” In the tale “William Wilson,” on the other hand, such play of eye correspondence is significantly lacking; the two William Wilsons of the story are, of course, one person.

  Neither does the flash of the eye, luminous or overcast, play a role in “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

  At length, with a wild desperation at heart, I quickly unclosed my eyes. My worst thoughts, then, were confirmed. The blackness of eternal night encompassed me.

  Underneath its ropes and rats, its tensions and extraordinary machineries, “The Pit and the Pendulum” is the story of the soul struggling with the tortures of an indifferent universe. It is a tale of unmatchable horror—as it is equally a tale of all but unmatchable endurance. In the context of Poe’s work as a whole, both the “eternal night” and the narrator’s solitude are elements that make of the pit’s chamber an even more terrible tableau. In the blackness of the pit there is nothing—and no one. Not even the eye with the blue veil.

  4.

  It is not hard to recognize Poe’s many narrators as a single sensibility, as one character, an
d to see this character as other than rational. He is a man of nervous temperament; he is capable of great love, loyalty, grief, of “wild excitement” (a recurring phrase); he owns a strange and unfettered imagination. His enterprise is to challenge and dissolve a particular fact or circumstance that represents the natural order of things—specifically, death’s irreversibility. He therefore seeks to understand the world in a way that will disprove such circumstance. Discovering a “different” world assumes experiencing manifestations of that different world. To begin, then, it is necessary to disassociate from the world as it is ordinarily experienced. And not casually. He must unstring the universe to its farthest planet and star, and restring it in another way.

  His posture is transcendentalism, of the nineteenth-century Germanic variety. The possibilities of alchemy, mesmerism, occultism appeal to him. He is no Orpheus, begging an exception and a second chance, but rather—I mean from his own view—a visionary. To change his own fate, he would change our comprehension of the entire world.

  _______

  The question of madness is always present. The actions of the narrator are often recognizably insane. But the definitions of madness and rationality have been thrown here into the wind; in Poe’s stories, such states are uncertainly bordered areas in which, suddenly, ghosts walk. “Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence,” the narrator says in “Eleonora.”