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What is Talked About.
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—— The newspapers announce the death, on last Sunday, at Baltimore, of EDGAR A. POE the distinguished author. His career and intellectual development, when the full story comes to be written, will be pronounced the most singular in the annals of American literature. His character was a strange combination of good and evil, of strength and weakness. He had originality, the fastidious ness, the delicacy, the invention for achievements in the higher walks of literature; but he lacked the common heart of humanity, on which success must always be based. There is an air of artificiality in all his writings. Many of the most striking and seemingly poetical are built up mathematically, curious pieces of joinery, mathematical contrivances of talent. They exhibit a rare ingenuity and withal something more, for the gloomy, melancholy burden which rises on the ear from his quaint verses and periods was an echo from his own broken life, and will live in the recollections of those who knew him with a mournful pathos. The “Raven” has a trick of inspiration in it, a certain truthfulness in its very inconsequentiality; so also his “most musical, most melancholy,” “Fall of Usher,” his “Ulalume” &c. Many readers uttered upon them the comprehensive criticism “hum-bug,” but they caught the mood nevertheless, and the stories and poems lived in their memories and on their lips. A writer in the Tribune, who pays an unprejudiced tribute to his career, publishes the following poem, probably the last he wrote
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea.
But we loved with a love that was more than love —
I and my ANNABEL LEE —
With a love that the wingëd seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful ANNABEL LEE;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me —
Yes! — that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my ANNABEL LEE.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we —
Of many far wiser than we —
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE:
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE,
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling — my darling — my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea —
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - LW, 1849] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - What is Talked About [Death of Poe] (Anonymous, 1849)