Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

We might take as a paradigm for considering Poe’s verse (and, for that matter, much of his fiction) the title of a poem by twentieth-century poet Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Poe’s creative works—and not only that about his own blackbird, “The Raven”—yield multiple, equally valid interpretations. “The Lake—To—” constitutes sophisticated literary art, particularly from one as young as Poe. Some other selections in the
Tamerlane
volume are not so artistic, and it may be worth noting that Poe, likely deeming it inferior poetry, never again included in volume form the
Tamerlane
poem “The Happiest Day, the Happiest Hour.”

Many misunderstandings concerning Poe’s poems need correcting. Among them is the notion that “The Sleeper” (titled “Irene” when it originally appeared in the 1831
Poems)
is grotesque, and that it may betray a necrophiliac strain in Poe himself. The poem has continued as a popular standard selection in anthologies, and it is neither insignificant nor revolting. Rather than betraying any personal emotions or proclivities of its author, “The Sleeper” treats a situation more commonplace in Poe’s era than in our own and is accompanied by the subtle unfolding of a bereaved lover’s psychology. The opening centers on a mourner’s extreme confusion. His being outdoors on a June midnight, his thoughts wandering from the moon down to a grave and water lilies, succeeded by his hallucinatory state becoming less troubled about the “sleeping” lady—this is psychological realism subtly rendered. As mourners typically with solemn dignity, and often by an indirect route, approach a corpse prepared for burial, so this survivor leads us to realize gradually that the lady’s sleep is one of death, and that from the bed, where she has been laid out for burial (ordinary practice in Poe’s time), she will be borne to her grave.

Funeral services in the deceased’s own home are today no longer customary, but well into the twentieth century home funerals were still common: Witness Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884), Robert Frost’s poem “Home Burial” (1914), and William Faulkner’s novel As
I Lay Dying
(1930). Poe’s poem suggests the solemnity and stately ceremonies customary in funeral proceedings. The couplets (two-line rhyming units) that constitute the major verse form in the poem convey restraint and order; they are checks on impulses that might otherwise grow frenzied. The occasional triplets (three-line rhyming units) signal rises in the speaker’s emotions, albeit he never lets his imagination riot as it did when the poem began. Overall, the tone and rhythm are of restraint and slow motion, in a movement little by little toward the lady herself; only then do we discover that she is dead. Perhaps the bereaved lover requires such gradual approach to accommodate the finality of his beloved’s death, and so the indirection or obliqueness in his thinking is actually psychologically accurate.

If he had been “moon-mad,” or lunatic, when the poem began (and he could have been subject to nonrational forces that typically hold sway on Midsummer Eve, to which the June time frame may point), just so the lines about the lady’s lying near an open window incorporate folklore fears about the night air’s bad effects upon sleepers. Kept even more distanced, as if when it is faced directly it conveys starkness and bleakness that are too appalling, is the tomb itself, introduced appropriately in the final stanza as if to signify that it is the ultimate resting place for the “sleeper.” Although some are revolted by the line “Soft may the worms about her creep!” we should keep in mind that, consistent with the mourner’s previous ideas, once he contemplates the future, he adjures the worms to move about outside, not into, the lady’s body, so her rest will remain undisturbed. The exclamation punctuation in this line attests that although the bereaved lover may have strong feelings, the worms themselves should remain quiet, thereby imputing to “soft” its sound, not its tactile context.

Given that “The Sleeper” mirrors the shorter life expectancies of nearly two centuries ago, the poem not surprisingly won early acclaim, not for any melodramatic or novel substance but for poetic form and tone that may be likened to a dignified eulogy delivered at a funeral or even published in a newspaper account of visitation and funeral practices. Poe achieved far sturdier realism in this poem than has generally been admitted, and contrary to what some readers infer, he did not plan to cause revulsion in his public. “The Sleeper” may anticipate the aura of mourning in later poems like “The Raven” and “Ulalume,” or in the fiction we find in “Shadow—A Parable.” Many readers only reluctantly accept that Poe may not have imagined these pieces as cheap thrills and lurid horrifics.

In light of his aesthetic writings on poetry, it is reasonable that Poe should write some poems that in part address poetics, as he does in “Sonnet—To Science,” Israfel,” and ”To Helen” (1831). Many anthologists view ”Sonnet—To Science” as if it were Poe’s personal outcry against scientific rationalism. More likely is that Poe felt that a firmly realistic foundation is essential in genuine poetry. To bolster this premise, Poe depicts a speaker, a mere poetaster, who marshals as his inspirations tropes that were hackneyed well before Poe’s time, and that patently add decided irony to the speaker’s presumable inveigh ing against triteness. Poe’s ”poet” not only uses clichés but confines them within a sonnet. Though the sonnet has occasioned interesting. modifications in structure and allows for liberties in content, it may also rank among the more restrictive forms in English verse. In form and theme, therefore, Poe’s would-be-poet argues a sad case. More to the point is Poe’s emphasis on a realistic, plausible foundation for poetry, one that counters the speaker’s frail defense of outmoded substance.

The poem “Israfel” also argues for a poetry grounded in realism. The speaker-singer indicates that whereas the angel-poet Israfel’s dwelling in heavenly realms may help produce idealism in lyrical form, the earthly poet, living in the real world as he does, must cope with less pleasant realities. “Israfel” is, however, inescapably a “singing” poem and thus melds the beautiful with the useful, implicitly hinting at the magic or “enchantment” that often eludes earthbound poets. Like Tennyson, Poe produced poems that were artistic but that did not ignore the utilitarian.

“To Helen” (1831) likewise focuses on an ideal inspiration (her beauty is more ideal than physical in context; Helen of Troy was reputedly the most beautiful woman in the world) that calms a speaker shaken by war and sea travel. The name “Helen” derives from Greek roots meaning lightning, and the very invoking of her name dazzles the speaker with radiant beauty, so that Helen’s actual physique is obscured, but the ideal of her beauty is a restorative that brings about a settled state for the speaker. When in the final stanza the speaker has reached his home and Helen becomes Psyche (a legendary female with a lamp), the leitmotif is maintained. Nurturing Psyche’s “light” symbolically inspires the speaker, who then assumes the role of poet (a word that derives from the Greek for “creator”) within the poem as he “creates” images and rhythm. More to the point, this poet offers us an exquisite joining of theme (beauty as harmonizer) with form (exquisite lyric tone and movement). “To Helen” numbers among Poe’s few nonhorrific poems, although the speaker’s awe resembles that in many other, less pleasantly situated Poe characters.

Other poems—for example, “The Valley of Unrest,” “The City in the Sea,” and “The Coliseum”—depict weird dreamscapes that elicit wonder, as they evoke vanished glories and leave tantalizing mysteries for those who respond to their effects. The first poem pictorializes a takeover of a once populated and appealing locale by desolation as foreboding restlessness arises in all natural phenomena there. “The City in the Sea” partly derives from the biblical account of the destruction of the sinful cities Sodom and Gomorrah and partly from the legend of Atlantis, the fabled sunken city that periodically resurfaces and sinks again into the ocean. “The Coliseum” closes on a more positive note than the others because the stones that once teemed with the activities of sports and spectators retain an ability to captivate a contemporary beholder. Mood is everything in these poems, and Poe’s melodic sound effects suggest the meandering visionary experiences of the onlookers, who call up visions via song (enchantment) for readers. A similar principle informs “Dream-Land,” with its speaker who has gone imaginatively free-floating and who returns recalling lasting effects of the surreal world, “Out of SPACE—out of TIME.” where his emotions have transported him. While “Dream-Land” leaves the protagonist shaken by what he saw and heard, “Sonnet—Silence” is a tour de force of contrasting sound effects with a theme of the terrifying soundlessness of the “shadow” silence, evil double of the “corporate Silence” (a silence that results from geographic desolation). The fateful silence is that which desiccates the will.

Kindred silence descends upon the speaker and his antagonist at the end of “The Raven,” Poe’s most famous poem. Silence becomes even more terrifying here because the inexorably repeated “still” in the closing lines means absolute cessation of speaking, hearing, motion—physical representations of the will’s powerlessness. The setting resembles those in other works in its gradual constriction of the protagonist. The raven may not actually be terrifying, but he certainly paralyzes the narrator emotionally and physically. Folklore often has ravens in league with the devil; Poe’s raven may, however, be no more than a very ordinary creature seeking shelter and warmth on a cold winter night. That this bird has been taught to articulate the single word “nevermore” may be unusual but not necessarily supernatural. The bird’s speech is turned ghastly by the overwrought narrator, whose “Lenore” may in fact be as imaginary as the raven’s diabolic power.

Ambiguities abound in “The Raven.”
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That a bird admitted to the indoors on a cold December night would immediately seek the highest spot for his safety may be wholly plausible; that that perch is the head of a white marble bust of Pallas (Athena), goddess of wisdom and intellectuality, is also plausible. The protagonist may have been poring over books of magic spells as he nodded (and the incantatory sounds in the poem strengthen this possibility); somehow, his interaction with these books may have conjured the bird, consequently unleashing forces that bode ill for the conjurer. After all, the hour is midnight during the season of the death of the year, and the narrator does mention a “ghost” as emanating from his hearth, all of which might hint at supernaturalism. Learning that “ghost” was nineteenth-century slang for the shadow formed by dying embers, however, we may suspect that Poe’s narrator is not really beset by otherworldly torments, but that his mind is gradually disintegrating. Is Lenore an actual dead woman or a significant emotional part in the protagonist’s self that he has managed to “kill” or repress? She never appears as a physical being. She is “nameless,” and yet the narrator keeps invoking her; her name derives from the same root as “Helen,” and we have already seen that that name conveys brilliant light and great beauty. Could this “rare and radiant” Lenore be an ideal, without which the narrator goes mad? His “chamber” may symbolize the interior of a mind, and a closing mind at that. The protagonist doesn’t venture outside his opened door, and seeing “darkness” beyond may momentarily placate him, but creating such an entryway, along with opening the window, could in magical lore suffice to admit the bird and the nonrationality it represents. Once this power is implicitly invited inside, there’s no telling how it may operate. Using the means of Gothic themes (anxiety, fear, loss) and setting (a haunted chamber), “The Raven” gives us the interior of a human head/mind as its “world.”

A companion piece in suspense and terror, “Ulalume” moves us through foreboding outdoor scenery as the nameless speaker and his companion, Psyche, journey during what may be Halloween night. Psyche, the nurturer and illuminator (of the soul more so than the body), attempts to dissuade the speaker from proceeding, though he feels compelled to do so. Although they are outdoors, where they can easily observe planetary signs in the skies, there is an unmistakable sense of constriction and limitation connected with initially oblique hints about love (toward which planetary manifestations are unfavorable). The pair appropriately come to a decided stop when they arrive at Ulalume’s tomb, a destination the speaker hadn’t seemed to notice they were approaching. Confronted by the actual abode of death, as well as being melancholy over the loss of Ulalume, the speaker represents death-in-life as the poem ends. He rapidly becomes as emotionally “withering and sere” as the leaves. His stasis occurs because Psyche’s counsel went unheeded. Therefore we may detect in the speaker an inability to yield to any female presence in his makeup. The consequences of such egotism are disastrous. The name “Ulalume” has variously been construed as implying both light and wailing, and this speaker’s inability to reconcile with the female creative and intuitive element in the self has caused his “light” to dim and die. Consequently he is left to “wail,” and the nature of the spoken word, in a poem that constitutes a lament, serves in its monotony as an apt means of rendering the speaker’s muttered sorrow.

Poe’s dictum, that the “most poetic of all themes is the death of a beautiful woman,” is surely represented in many of his poems, but one may well ponder the exact meaning of the phrase. It does not mean that Poe himself was hostile toward women or that symbolic murders and burials in his writings reflected personal hostility. His thinking on this topic might have had strong origins in everyday life around him, when the average life span was short, and that for women often less than that for men. The phrase might also spring from a more jocular impulse (that is, he divined his own abilities in creating such situations). “Poetic” and “poet” might be read or heard as “Poe-tic” and “Poe-t,” and Poe indeed punned on his name on several occasions. Then, too, the phrase may indicate that his female characters, who symbolize a vital constituent in the self, are not dead and gone forever, but temporarily repressed. Rightly, therefore, most of them return to haunt those who were responsible, directly or indirectly, for their “deaths.” A reader may come away from the late poem “Annabel Lee” even more mystified because the survivor-speaker’s lilting tone and attitude verge toward happiness, although this lightness may be a foil for his hysterical reaction to Annabel’s death. The closing lines, too, may seem gruesome because of possible necrophilia (the speaker‘s, not Poe’s) latent in them. We are equally undecided when reading “Eldorado,” perhaps one of Poe’s happier poems, but one in which delight takes what may be a sobering turn in the final stanza (although the Shade’s words to the inquiring knight might also have a rallying intent). “The Bells,” too, leads us adroitly from pleasantness as life begins on to the funereal conclusion of life.