Text: Edgar Allan Poe (ed. James H. Whitty), “Sonnet — To My Mother,” The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911, p. 78


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[page 78, unnumbered:]

SONNET — TO MY MOTHER

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BECAUSE the angels in the Heavens above,

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Devoutly singing unto one another,

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Can find, amid their burning terms of love,

None so devotional as that of “mother,”

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Therefore by that sweet name I long have called you;

You who are more than mother unto me,

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Filling my heart of hearts, where God installed you,

In setting my Virginia's spirit free.

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My mother — my own mother, who died early,

Was but the mother of myself; but you

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Are mother to the dead I loved so dearly,

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Are thus more precious than the one I knew,

By that infinity with which my wife

Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.

 


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Notes:

None.

 

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[S:0 - JHW11, 1911] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Sonnet -- To My Mother (ed. J. H. Whitty, 1911)