The Slender Poe Anthology (4 page)

It's hard to imagine this first appeared in the third gathering of Poe's poems to be published; it was 1831 and he was just 22. Is there another poem written by such a young man that has secured a permanent place in the American canon?

Jane Stanard, the tall, beautiful mother of one of Poe's close teenage friends, gave the young man sanctuary from the increasing tensions at home with his foster-father, John Allan. Fanny Allan's illness kept her bed-ridden and emotionally less available than Poe needed. Stanard, too, was in progressive decline, but before she went insane, her consoling presence provided crucial inspiration for this lyric, memory-borne after her death. As Poe put it in an 1848 letter to Helen Whitman, Stanard was “the first, purely ideal love of my soul.”

Few figures in literature have the mythic visibility of a Helen of Troy; her beauty made for war. In Poe's lyric, beauty brings us divine vision.

TO HELEN

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!

This is one of the last poems Poe composed. It was published in
The Flag of Our Union
out of Boston in 1849. The Gold Rush in California had taken hold of the nation's imagination, and this was Poe's deft response to the mania. Where is the true gold? A tandem tale of ‘49, “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” also plays with this question. It is likely that an anonymous lyric, ”Tom-a-Bedlam Song,” also was a source of inspiration.

Poe would not live out the year. One particular sadness regarding Poe's early exit at the age of only 40 concerns his composition of poetry—for he was just catching his stride—and this dark jewel of poem is part of the evidence.

ELDORADO

Gaily bedight,

A gallant knight,

In sunshine and in shadow,

Had journeyed long,

Singing a song,

In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old
—

This knight so bold
—

And o'er his heart a shadow

Fell, as he found

No spot of ground

That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength

Failed him at length,

He met a pilgrim shadow
—

‘Shadow,' said he,

‘Where can it be
—

This land of Eldorado?'

‘Over the Mountains

Of the Moon,

Down the Valley of the Shadow,

Ride, boldly ride,'

The shade replied,
—

‘If you seek for Eldorado!'

Another dark gem. Portents in the sky, pestilence abroad. Funerary rites in the black draped chamber, drinking and singing: a merry wake. Oinos (Greek for either ‘one' or ‘wine') writing with his ‘stylus of iron' from the perspective of authorship whereby he's aware his reader and he won't be breathing the same air (the situation of Poe to all who hold this slender tome). Who among us will not see their face pale in the ebony mirror?

First published in the
Southern Literary Messenger
in September of 1835, it surely served in its own singular way the contemporary cult of memory, the duty never to forget the dead.

Nowadays, ‘shadow' suggests all those insalubrious aspects of an individual's personality, those things we don't like in others that we ourselves possess, but keep hidden from our consciousness. Yet, in his
A Little Book on the Human Shadow
, Robert Bly writes, “Only the shadow understands the ecstasy of sound.”

SHADOW—A PARABLE

“
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the Shadow:”
—
Psalm of David

Ye who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long
since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things
shall happen, and secret things be known, and many centuries shall pass
away, ere these memorials be seen of men. And, when seen, there will be
some to disbelieve, and some to doubt, and yet a few who will find much
to ponder upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron.

The year had been a year of terror, and of feelings more intense than
terror for which there is no name upon the earth. For many prodigies and
signs had taken place, and far and wide, over sea and land, the black
wings of the Pestilence were spread abroad. To those, nevertheless,
cunning in the stars, it was not unknown that the heavens wore an aspect
of ill; and to me, the Greek Oinos, among others, it was evident that
now had arrived the alternation of that seven hundred and ninety-fourth
year when, at the entrance of Aries, the planet Jupiter is conjoined
with the red ring of the terrible Saturnus. The peculiar spirit of the
skies, if I mistake not greatly, made itself manifest, not only in
the physical orb of the earth, but in the souls, imaginations, and
meditations of mankind.

Over some flasks of the red Chian wine, within the walls of a noble
hall, in a dim city called Ptolemais, we sat, at night, a company of
seven. And to our chamber there was no entrance save by a lofty door of
brass: and the door was fashioned by the artisan Corinnos, and, being of
rare workmanship, was fastened from within. Black draperies, likewise,
in the gloomy room, shut out from our view the moon, the lurid stars,
and the peopleless streets
—
but the boding and the memory of Evil they
would not be so excluded. There were things around us and about of
which I can render no distinct account
—
things material
and spiritual
—
heaviness in the atmosphere
—
a sense of
suffocation
—
anxiety
—
and, above all, that terrible state of existence
which the nervous experience when the senses are keenly living and
awake, and meanwhile the powers of thought lie dormant. A dead weight
hung upon us. It hung upon our limbs
—
upon the household furniture
—
upon
the goblets from which we drank; and all things were depressed, and
borne down thereby
—
all things save only the flames of the seven lamps
which illumined our revel. Uprearing themselves in tall slender lines of
light, they thus remained burning all pallid and motionless; and in the
mirror which their lustre formed upon the round table of ebony at
which we sat, each of us there assembled beheld the pallor of his
own countenance, and the unquiet glare in the downcast eyes of his
companions. Yet we laughed and were merry in our proper way
—
which was
hysterical; and sang the songs of Anacreon
—
which are madness; and drank
deeply
—
although the purple wine reminded us of blood. For there was yet
another tenant of our chamber in the person of young Zoilus. Dead,
and at full length he lay, enshrouded; the genius and the demon of the
scene. Alas! he bore no portion in our mirth, save that his countenance,
distorted with the plague, and his eyes, in which Death had but half
extinguished the fire of the pestilence, seemed to take such interest in
our merriment as the dead may haply take in the merriment of those who
are to die. But although I, Oinos, felt that the eyes of the departed
were upon me, still I forced myself not to perceive the bitterness of
their expression, and gazing down steadily into the depths of the ebony
mirror, sang with a loud and sonorous voice the songs of the son of
Teios. But gradually my songs they ceased, and their echoes, rolling
afar off among the sable draperies of the chamber, became weak, and
undistinguishable, and so faded away. And lo! from among those sable
draperies where the sounds of the song departed, there came forth a dark
and undefined shadow
—
a shadow such as the moon, when low in heaven,
might fashion from the figure of a man: but it was the shadow neither
of man nor of God, nor of any familiar thing. And quivering awhile among
the draperies of the room, it at length rested in full view upon the
surface of the door of brass. But the shadow was vague, and formless,
and indefinite, and was the shadow neither of man nor of God
—
neither
God of Greece, nor God of Chaldaea, nor any Egyptian God. And the shadow
rested upon the brazen doorway, and under the arch of the entablature of
the door, and moved not, nor spoke any word, but there became stationary
and remained. And the door whereupon the shadow rested was, if I
remember aright, over against the feet of the young Zoilus enshrouded.
But we, the seven there assembled, having seen the shadow as it came out
from among the draperies, dared not steadily behold it, but cast down
our eyes, and gazed continually into the depths of the mirror of ebony.
And at length I, Oinos, speaking some low words, demanded of the shadow
its dwelling and its appellation. And the shadow answered, “I am SHADOW,
and my dwelling is near to the Catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those
dim plains of Helusion which border upon the foul Charonian canal.”
And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror, and stand
trembling, and shuddering, and aghast, for the tones in the voice of
the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of
beings, and, varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable fell
duskly upon our ears in the well-remembered and familiar accents of many
thousand departed friends.