In The Shadow Of The Master: Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
Page 31
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!
III
Hear the loud alarum bells-
Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now-now to sit, or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!
How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear, it fully knows,
By the twanging
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells-
Of the bells,-
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!
IV
Hear the tolling of the bells-
Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people-ah, the people-
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone-
They are neither man nor woman-
They are neither brute nor human-
They are Ghouls:-
And their king it is who tolls:-
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A paean from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the paean of the bells!
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the paean of the bells-
Of the bells:-
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells-
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells:-
To the tolling of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells .
Poe in G Minor BY JEFFERY DEAVER
The year is 1971. I’m sitting on a stool on a low stage, two spotlights shining in my face. I clutch my dreadnought-size guitar. (Think Bob Dylan’s Gibson Hummingbird on the cover of Nashville Skyline, but without the hummingbird.)
The venue is called the Chez, which I’ve recently learned means “The house of…” in French. (Not usually talented at languages, I pay attention in that particular class because I have a breathless crush on my professor, a cross between Linda Ronstadt and Claudine Longet, who, yes, shot that skier, but I don’t care.)
The Chez is a coffeehouse in Columbia, Missouri, where I’m a junior in the university’s Journalism School. I come here to perform folk songs in the evenings once or twice a week. The admission is free, the frothy pre-Starbucks concoctions are cheap, and owing to its location in a church, the place is alcohol-free. All of which means the audiences are sober, attentive, and-fortunately for me-forgiving.
Though I’m at school to become the next Walter Cronkite, singing and songwriting are my passions, and if I’d been able to make a living on the stage I’d have signed up in an instant-no insurance plan or 401(k) needed-even if the devil himself was the head of the record label’s A &R department.
This Friday night I begin fingerpicking a melody that’s not of my composition. It was written by Phil Ochs, a young singer-songwriter central to the folk music scene of the sixties and early seventies. He wrote a number of songs that embodied the psyche of that era, like “Draft Dodger Rag” and “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” but the song that I’m performing this Friday is not social or political. It’s a lyrical ballad-one that I love and with which I often open my sets.
Ochs generally wrote both the music and words for his songs, but for this tune he created the melody only; the lyrics were from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Bells.” The poem features four stanzas, each describing bells’ tolling for different occasions: a happy social outing, a marriage, a tragedy, and finally a funeral. The first stanza concludes:
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
Is “The Bells” Poe’s best poem? No. It’s a bit of a trifle, lacking the insight and brooding power he was capable of. But is it a pure pleasure to read aloud or perform? Absolutely. By the final verse my audiences were invariably singing along.
I have always loved Poe’s prose fiction, and it has been a major influence, both informing the macabre tone of my writing and inspiring my plot twists and surprise endings. But I was a poet and songwriter before I was a novelist, and his lyrical works attracted me first. I believe that, in writing, less is more and that poetry, when well crafted, is the most emotionally direct form of written communication. Richard Wilbur, the former poet laureate of America, offered this metaphor about poetry (I’m paraphrasing): the confinement of the bottle is what gives the genie his strength. His meaning is that conciseness and controlled rhythm, rhyme, and figure of speech create a more powerful expression than unleashed outpourings.
In Poe’s work the combination of this control and his preferred themes-crime, passion, death, the dark side of the mind-make pure magic.
Blend those two ingredients with music… well, culture don’t get any better than that.
Phil Ochs was moved to adapt a poem, but Poe's prose works too have found second lives as musical compositions. Indeed, there aren’t many authors-Shakespeare aside-whose body of work has provided seeds for so much melodic inspiration.
Claude Debussy, composer of Clair de Lune and Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, cited Poe as one of his major influences. He began two Poe-inspired operas, one based on “The Fall of the House of Usher” and one on “The Devil in the Belfry.” Neither was completed by the composer, though a version of “Usher” was reconstructed in the 1970s and performed. Philip Glass, the minimalist composer, also wrote a successful opera based on “Usher,” as did Peter Hammill, the British singer-songwriter.
Presently the British theater company Punchdrunk is staging its version of “The Masque of Red Death” at the Battersea Arts Center in London. The show-a “site-specific,” interactive piece (the latest trend in theater, I hear)-features otherworldly choreography, classical music, and masked audience members roaming the elaborate, candle-lit performing space,
mingling with the actors. Though not praised by all critics, the play is one of the hottest tickets in English theater, and the buzz is that it’s headed for New York.
Sergei Rachmaninoff turned a Russian translation of “The Bells” into a choral symphony. The twentieth-century British composer and conductor Joseph Holbrooke wrote several Poe adaptations, including the symphonic works The Raven and The Bells, and he composed the music for a ballet based on “Masque.” New York City choreographer David Fernandez wrote a short ballet based on “The Raven.”
Lou Reed, a longtime admirer of Poe, produced a two-CD set entitled The Raven-his first release in some years-featuring exclusively work influenced by Poe. The material was performed by Reed and, among others, David Bowie, Ornette Coleman, Steve Buscemi, and Willem Dafoe.
Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Stevie Nicks have all performed folk versions of “Annabel Lee,” and the brilliant British art-rock group the Alan Parsons Project released Tales of Mystery and Imagination, an album filled entirely with Poe-inspired material. At least one track, I believe, actually made it into the Top 40. There have been many other performers, from Dylan to Marilyn Manson to Iron Maiden, who claimed inspiration by Poe or worked references from his work into theirs.
Oh, okay, I’ll mention one other adaptation: my own musical version of Poe’s “A Dream Within a Dream,” which I composed when I was in my twenties and determined to slap the wrist of a selfdelusional society. (Inexplicably, my adaptation did not make any Top 40 lists, so don’t bother searching for downloads on iTunes-or even LimeWire.)
Looking at this recitation of adaptations, you can’t help but wonder why Poe appeals to so many musicians, and ones of such vastly differing styles and forms (I mean, Debussy and Lou Reed?).
I think the answer is that Poe’s work is inherently musical.
His storytelling is the stuff of opera, which has classic beginning, middle, and end structures, revels in crime, violence, the gothic, passion, and death, and is often over the top and borders on melodrama, sure, but, hey, we don’t go to the opera for subtlety.
As for his poems-they uniformly display a lyricism and craft that the best, most emotionally engaging songs possess. Whether or not it’s been set to music, Poe’s writing is hummable.
After all, name another popular writer who could, with such intoxicating meter and imagery, write a poem embracing nothing less than love, tragedy, and death, that would find its way into concert halls and recording studios one hundred years later… and that coins and seamlessly fits in a six-syllable jawbreaker like “tintinnabulation.”
Got you beat there, Will Shakespeare.
About Jeffrey Deaver
Once upon a morning bright, waking from too short a night,
The author wandered from his bed, nagged by some looming task, he knows.
Ah, yes, he’s done his piece on Poe but has a bit more yet to go
Because his bio, it’s now clear, just cannot be writ in prose.
It must be a poem, never prose.
Some fifty-seven years ago, he was born in Chicago.
He studied writing very young and practiced as a journalist
And then a lawyer in New York town but, truth be told, it got him down.
And so in 1989, he told his boss, “I call it quits.”
The day job’s dead. He called it quits.
Since then he’s been writing thrillers, about folks fleeing hired killers
And detectives trying to track down psychos sick as the fiend Lecter.
The novels number twenty-four, short stories more or less two score.
Two movies sprouted from his books: Dead Silence and The Bone Collector.
Yes, Angelina and Denzel-The Bone Collector.
His books, known specially for their twists, hit worldwide best-seller lists.
Translated into thirty tongues, they’re sold in many, many nations.
He’s won top prizes overseas, and here at home three Ellery Queens.
He hasn’t got an Edgar yet, but has received six nominations.
Poe, help him out-six nominations!
His latest tale, if you get the chance, is a series premiering Kathryn Dance,
Called The Sleeping Doll. And due this summer, June or July,
We’ll see the author’s popular hero, Lincoln Rhyme, in The Broken Window.
(Sorry, but it would take an Edgar Poe to make that last line fly.
He did his best; it just won’t fly.)
EXCERPT FROM
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
Preface
Upon my return to the United States a few months ago, after the extraordinary series of adventures in the South Seas and elsewhere, of which an account is given in the following pages, accident threw me into the society of several gentlemen in Richmond, Va., who felt deep interest in all matters relating to the regions I had visited, and who were constantly urging it upon me, as a duty, to give my narrative to the public. I had several reasons, however, for declining to do so, some of which were of a nature altogether private, and concern no person but myself; others not so much so. One consideration which deterred me was, that, having kept no journal during a greater portion of the time in which I was absent, I feared I should not be able to write, from mere memory, a statement so minute and connected as to have the appearance of that truth it would really possess, barring only the natural and unavoidable exaggeration to which all of us are prone when detailing events which have had a powerful influence in exciting the imaginative faculties. Another reason was, that the incidents to be narrated were of a nature so positively marvellous, that, unsupported as my assertions must necessarily be (except by the evidence of a single individual, and he a half-breed Indian), I could only hope for belief among my family, and those of my friends who have had reason, through life, to put faith in my veracity-the probability being that the public at large would regard what I should put forth as merely an impudent and ingenious fiction. A distrust in my own abilities as a writer was, nevertheless, one of the principal causes which prevented me from complying with the suggestion of my advisers.
Among those gentlemen in Virginia who expressed the greatest interest in my statement, more particularly in regard to that portion of it which related to the Antarctic Ocean, was Mr. Poe, lately editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, a monthly magazine, published by Mr. Thomas W. White, in the city of Richmond. He strongly advised me, among others, to prepare at once a full account of what I had seen and undergone, and trust to the shrewdness and common sense of the public-insisting, with great plausibility, that however roughly, as regards mere authorship, my book should be got up, its very uncouthness, if there were any, would give it all the better chance of being received as truth.
Notwithstanding this representation, I did not make up my mind to do as he suggested. He afterward proposed (finding that I would not stir in the matter) that I should allow him to draw up, in his own words, a narrative of the earlier portion of my adventures, from facts afforded by myself, publishing it in the Southern Messenger under the garb of fiction. To this, perceiving no objection, I consented, stipulating only that my real name should be retained. Two numbers of the pretended fiction appeared, consequently, in the Messenger for January and February, (1837), and, in order that it might certainly be regarded as fiction, the name of Mr. Poe was affixed to the articles in the table of contents of the magazine.
The manner in which this ruse was received has induced me at length to undertake a regular compilation and publication of the adventures in question; for I found that, in spite of the air of fable which had been so ingeniously thrown around that portion of my statement which appeared in the Messenger (without altering or distorting a single fact), the public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable, and several letters were sent to Mr. P.’s address, distinctly expressing a conviction to the contrary. I thence concluded that the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidenc
e of their own authenticity, and that I had consequently little to fear on the score of popular incredulity.
This exposé being made, it will be seen at once how much of what follows I claim to be my own writing; and it will also be understood that no fact is misrepresented in the first few pages which were written by Mr. Poe. Even to those readers who have not seen the Messenger, it will be unnecessary to point out where his portion ends and my own commences; the difference in point of style will be readily perceived.
A. G. PYM. New-York, July, 1838.
Chapter X
Shortly afterward an incident occurred which I am induced to look upon as more intensely productive of emotion, as far more replete with the extremes first of delight and then of horror, than even any of the thousand chances which afterward befell me in nine long years, crowded with events of the most startling and, in many cases, of the most unconceived and unconceivable character. We were lying on the deck near the companion-way, and debating the possibility of yet making our way into the storeroom, when, looking toward Augustus, who lay fronting myself, I perceived that he had become all at once deadly pale, and that his lips were quivering in the most singular and unaccountable manner. Greatly alarmed, I spoke to him, but he made me no reply, and I was beginning to think that he was suddenly taken ill, when I took notice of his eyes, which were glaring apparently at some object behind me. I turned my head, and shall never forget the ecstatic joy which thrilled through every particle of my frame, when I perceived a large brig bearing down upon us, and not more than a couple of miles off. I sprung to my feet as if a musket bullet had suddenly struck me to the heart; and, stretching out my arms in the direction of the vessel, stood in this manner, motionless, and unable to articulate a syllable. Peters and Parker were equally affected, although in different ways. The former danced about the deck like a madman, uttering the most extravagant rhodomontades, intermingled with howls and imprecations, while the latter burst into tears, and continued for many minutes weeping like a child.