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    Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

    Page 6
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      Benjamin F. Fisher, Professor of English at the University of Missis sippi, has published extensively on Poe and many other subjects in American, Victorian, and Gothic studies. He is currently at work on two books and a monograph about Poe. Fisher is on the editorial boards of Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, Edgar Allan Poe Review, Victorian Poetry, Frank Norris Studies, Gothic Studies, Simms Review, and English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, and he is past president of the Poe Studies Association and chairman of the Speakers Series of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. He was awarded a Governor’s Citation in the state of Maryland for outstanding contributions to Poe studies and has won several awards for outstanding teaching.

      Notes

      1 Palmer C. Holt, “Poe and H. N. Coleridge’s Greek Classic Poets: ‘Pinakidia,’ ‘Politian,’ and ‘Morella’ Sources,” American Literature 34 (1962), pp. 8-30. I add here my grateful acknowledgment of the scholarship in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969-1978. Although I have not used the text, I have also often found helpful the annotations by Burton R. Pollin, ed., in Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Boston: Twayne, 1981; vol. 1: Imaginary Voyages.

      2 A fine overview of Gothicism is Devendra Prasad Varma’s The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences, London: Arthur Barker, 1957. I assess Dunlap’s imitating of American literary Gothicism in my “William Dunlap, American Gothic Dramatist,” in Transactions of the Samuel Johnson Society of the Northwest 17 (1988), pp. 167-190. See also Clark Griffith’s “Poe and the Gothic,” in Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Eric W. Carlson, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987, pp. 127-133; and my “Poe and the Gothic Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 72-91. Especially good on many points concerning Poe is editor Richard P. Benton’s The Gothic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: A Symposium in Two Parts, a special double number of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 18:1 & 2 (1972). Benton’s introductory overview, “The Problems of Literary Gothicism,” sets forth excellent perceptions on American Gothicism from its early manifestations to the later twentieth century.

      3 Dennis W. Eddings, “Theme and Parody in ‘The Raven’,” in Poe and His Times: The Artist and His Milieu, edited by Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV, Baltimore, MD: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990, pp. 209-217.

      4 The best overview of this project is Alexander Hammond’s “A Reconstruction of Poe’s 1833 Tales of the Folio Club,” in Poe Studies 5 (December 1972), pp. 25-32; and his “Further Notes on Poe’s Folio Club Tales,” Poe Studies 8 (December 1975), pp. 38-42. See also my The Very Spirit of Cordiality: The Literary Uses of Alcohol and Alcoholism in the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Baltimore, MD: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1978.

      5 Strangely, Mabbott—in Collected Works, vol. 2, p. 238—is reluctant to credit this tale with any value, citing in support Robert Louis Stevenson’s denigration dating from 1875. A more convincing critique is Louis A. Renza’s “Poe’s King: Playing it Close to the Pest,” in Edgar Allan Poe Review 2:2 (2001), pp. 3-18.

      6 Such is the argument of Clark Griffith in “Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics,” in University of Toronto Quarterly 24 (1954), pp. 8-25.

      7 I assess this technique in “Blackwood Articles à la Poe: How to Make a False Start Pay,” in Perspectives on Poe, edited by D. Ramakrishna, New Delhi: APC Publications, 1996, pp. 63-82.

      8 Interestingly—in regard to playing off supernatural and natural—Poe revised what in “The Assignation” had first read as “the Demon of Romance that stalked up and down the narrow canal” to “the Genius of Romance that stalked up and down the narrow canal.” This change eliminates any hint of supernaturalism and substitutes, fittingly, a word that has as its root meanings “creator” and “begetter,” thus deftly preparing for the lack of creativity, artistic or sexual, in old Mentoni as contrasted with both in the Marchesa’s lover, who probably fathered her child.

      9 Since racial issues have been connected with Pym so often in recent years, one might profitably consult Randall Kennedy’s Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption, New York: Pantheon Books, 2003. See especially Kennedy’s “Introduction” and chapters 3, 6, and 7. Noteworthy, too, is Kennedy’s observation: “Distinctly underdeveloped is the literary tradition that portrays interracial relationships that are at least potentially rewarding” (pp. 137-138). Naturally, as a person of his time, Poe would have had conflicts concerning racial issues, and in expressing any thoughts regarding these matters he no doubt would be ambiguous. That Dirk Peters survives when Pym and their Tsalalian hostage do not may register such uncertainties. See also Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 579-580, 590-591. Joseph V. Ridgely’s assessment of Poe and racism (in which he reminds us that the author of an extremely pro-slavery article in the April 1836 Southern Literary Messenger was not Poe) should confute more speculative ideas concerning Poe and race. See Ridgely’s “The Authorship of the ‘Paulding-Drayton Review’,” in Poe Studies Association Newsletter 20:2 (Fall 1992), pp. 1-3, 6. See also Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson’s The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987, pp. 200, 205; and Terence Whalen’s Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, chapters 5 and 6. For earlier worthwhile opinions about Poe’s novel, see G. R. Thompson’s “Romantic Arabesque, Contemporary Theory, and Postmodernism: The Example of Poe’s Narrative,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 35:3, 4 (1989), pp. 163-272; and Poe’s Pym: Critical Explorations, edited by Richard Kopley, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1992. Poe’s debts in Pym to another influential tradition in his day are illuminated by Kent Ljungquist’s The Grand and the Fair: Poe’s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques, Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1984, chapter 2.

      10 A gloss on these masculine-feminine mergings may be found in Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, pp. 579-580; 590-591. Also too significant to ignore in light of such a reading is Pym as imp. According to Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, the word “imp” may derive from the Latin for “to prune,” which led to definitions like “graft,” “repair,” or, in noun form, “bud,” “shoot,” “offspring,” “scion,” and “graft”—all suggestive of growth and development, and thus of Pym’s maturing.

      11 For Poe’s sophistications and modifications of literary Gothicism, see my “Poe and the Gothic Tradition,” pp. 72-91. For later impacts, see three publications of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, Maryland: Richard Fusco’s Fin de Millénaire: Poe’s Legacy for the Detective Story (1993); Craig Werner’s “Gold Bugs and the Powers of Blackness: Re-Reading Poe” (1995); and my volume of edited essays Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities (1986). On Poe’s international high standing, see Poe Abroad: Influences, Reputation, Affinities, edited by Lois Vines, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999.

      POEMS

      The Lake—To

      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 Diana 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?1

      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 soaring in the skies,

      With the tempests as they toss,

      Like—almost any thing—

      Or a yellow Albatross.a

      They use that moon no more

      For the same end as before—

      Videlicett a tent—

      Which I think extravagant:

      Its atomies, 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.

      Israfel b

      In Heaven a spirit doth dwell

      “Whose heart-strings are a lute;”

      None sing so wildly well

      As the angel Israfel,2

      And the giddy stars (so legends tell)

      Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell

      Of his voice, all mute.

      Tottering above

      In her highest noon,

      The enamoured moon

      Blushes with love,

      While, to listen, the red levin

      (With the rapid Pleiads, even,

      Which were seven,)

      Pauses in Heaven.

      And they say (the starry choir

      And the other listening things)

      That Israfeli’s fire

      Is owing to that lyre

      By which he sits and sings—

      The trembling living wire

      Of those unusual strings.

      But the skies that angel trod,

      Where deep thoughts are a duty—

      Where Love’s a grown up God—

      Where the Houri glances are

      Imbued with all the beauty

      Which we worship in a star.

      Therefore, thou art not wrong,

      Israfeli, who despisest

      An unimpassioned song;

      To thee the laurels belong,

      Best bard, because the wisest!

      Merrily live, and long!

      The ecstasies above

      With thy burning measures suit—

      Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,

      With the fervour of thy lute—

      Well may the stars be mute!

      Yes, Heaven is thine; but this

      Is a world of sweets and sours;

      Our flowers are merely—flowers,

      And the shadow of thy perfect bliss

      Is the sunshine of ours.

      If I could dwell

      Where Israfel

      Hath dwelt, and he where I,

      He might not sing so wildly well

      A mortal melody,

      While a bolder note than this might swell

      From my lyre within the sky.

      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!3

      The Sleeper

      At midnight, in the month of June,

      I stand beneath the mystic moon.

      An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,

      Exhales from out her golden rim,

      And, softly dripping, drop by drop,

      Upon the quiet mountain top,

      Steals drowsily and musically

      Into the universal valley.

      The rosemary nods upon the grave;

      The lily lolls upon the wave;

      Wrapping the fog about its breast,

      The ruin moulders into rest;

      Looking like Lethe,c see! the lake

      A conscious slumber seems to take,

      And would not, for the world, awake.

      All Beauty sleeps!—and lo! where lies

      (Her casement open to the skies)

      Irene, with her Destinies!

      Oh, lady bright! can it be right—

      This window open to the night?

      The wanton airs, from the tree-top,

      Laughingly through the lattice drop—

      The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,

      Flit through thy chamber in and out,

      And wave the curtain canopy

      So fitfully—so fearfully—

      Above the closed and fringed lid

      ‘Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid,

      That, o‘er the floor and down the wall,

      Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall!

      Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?

      Why and what art thou dreaming here?

      Sure thou art come o’er far-off seas,

      A wonder to these garden trees!

      Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress!

      Strange, above all, thy length of tress,

      And this all solemn silentness!

      The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,

      Which is enduring, so be deep!

      Heaven have her in its sacred keep!

      This chamber changed for one more holy,

      This bed for one more melancholy,

      I pray to God that she may lie

      Forever with unopened eye,

      While the dim sheeted ghosts go
    by!

      My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,

      As it is lasting, so be deep!

      Soft may the worms about her creep!

      Far in the forest, dim and old,

      For her may some tall vault unfold—

      Some vault that oft hath flung its black

      And winged panels fluttering back,

      Triumphant, o‘er the crested palls,

      Of her grand family funerals—

      Some sepulchre, remote, alone,

      Against whose portal she hath thrown,

      In childhood, many an idle stone—

      Some tomb from out whose sounding door

      She ne’er shall force an echo more,

      Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!

      It was the dead who groaned within.

      The Valley of Unrest

      Once it smiled a silent dell

      Where the people did not dwell;

      They had gone unto the wars,

      Trusting to the mild-eyed stars,

      Nightly, from their azure towers,

      To keep watch above the flowers,

      In the midst of which all day

      The red sun-light lazily lay.

      Now each visiter shall confess

      The sad valley’s restlessness.

      Nothing there is motionless—

      Nothing save the airs that brood

      Over the magic solitude.

      Ah, by no wind are stirred those trees

      That palpitate like the chill seas

      Around the misty Hebrides!d

      Ah, by no wind those clouds are driven

      That rustle through the unquiet Heaven

     


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