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CHAPTER VI
HIS METHOD
POE had done his best in The Raven. After 1845 “Disaster followed fast and followed faster,” yet his career in verse till the end is interesting.
The spring of 1846 found him at Fordham Cottage, broken in health, with Virginia doomed to an early death. A distressing tale is that which is told of their destitution (1: 73; W. 271). Mrs. Maria Louise Shew was their good angel. After Virginia's death, January 30, 1847, until June of the same year, she charged herself with Poe's mental and bodily welfare (1: 78). It was out of gratitude and devotion to her that he wrote the lines entitled To M. L. S. (10: 88).
He blesses her —
“For the resurrection of deep-buried faith
In truth, in virtue, in humanity;”
and says, —
“Of all who owe thee most, whose gratitude
Nearest resembles worship, oh, remember
The truest, the most fervently devoted,
And think that these weak lines are written by him.”
About a year later, when his gratitude to Mrs. Shew had grown into sentimentality, the widower poet wrote the lines, To —— —— (10:89 and 194).
They run thus, — [page 72:]
“Not long ago the writer of these lines,
In the mad pride of intellectuality,
Maintained ‘the power of words’ — denied that ever
A thought arose within the human brain
Beyond the utterance of the human tongue:
And now, as if in mockery of that boast,
Two words, two foreign soft dissyllables,
Italian tones, made only to be murmured
By angels dreaming in the moonlit ‘dew
That hangs like chains of pearl on Hermon hill,’
Have stirred from out the abysses of his heart
Unthought-like thoughts, that are the souls of thought, —
Richer, far wilder, far diviner visions
Than even the seraph harper, Israfel
(Who has ‘the sweetest voice of all God's creatures’),
Could hope to utter.”
Then he speaks of her dear name which he cannot write, cannot think, cannot feel, —
— “For 't is not feeling, —
This standing motionless upon the golden
Threshold of the wide-open gate of dreams,
Gazing entranced adown the gorgeous vista,
And thrilling as I see, upon the right,
Upon the left, and all the way along,
Amid empurpled vapors, far away
To where the prospect terminates — thee only.”
“Mrs. Shew, finding her protégé was too irresponsible and too romantic to be allowed such freedom with her as he had been accustomed to, broke off the acquaintance” (W. 305).
The next woman to come in for his admiration was Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman (1: 79; W. 308). To Helen (10: 84) are lines written to her — to her eyes! — as,
“Save only the divine light in thine eyes,
Save but the soul in thine uplifted eyes:
I saw but them — they were the world to me: [page 73:]
I saw but them, saw only them for hours,
Saw only them, until the moon went down.
What wild heart-histories seemed to lie enwritten
Upon those crystalline, celestial spheres;
How dark a woe, yet how sublime a hope;
How silently serene a sea of pride;
How daring an ambition; yet how deep,
How fathomless a capacity for love!”
His next love was the woman known in his poems as “Annie” (1: 79; W. 314). The verses entitled For Annie (10: 90) exhibit a singular conception.
The fever called “Living” is at last conquered, and he is at rest, stretched at full length, composedly, on his bed. You would start at beholding him, thinking him dead.
“And oh! of all tortures,
That torture the worst
Has abated — the terrible
Torture of thirst
For the napthaline river
Of Passion accurst:
I have drank of a water
That quenches all thirst:
“Of a water that flows
With a lullaby sound,
From a spring but a very few
Feet under ground,
From a cavern not far
Down under ground.”
He says further, —
“And, to sleep, you must slumber
In just such a bed.”
And then about his tantalized spirit he sings, —
“And so it lies happily,
Bathing in many
A dream of the truth [page 74:]
And the beauty of Annie,
Drowned in a bath
Of the tresses of Annie.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
“When the light was extinguished,
She covered me warm,
And she prayed to the angels
To keep me from harm,
To the queen of the angels
To shield me from harm.
“And I lie so composedly
Now, in my ‘bed,
(Knowing her love)
That you fancy me dead;
And I rest so contentedly
Now, in my bed,
(With her love at my breast)
That you fancy me dead,
That you shudder to look at me,
Thinking me dead.
“But my heart it is brighter
Than all of the many
Stars in the sky,
For it sparkles with Annie:
It glows with the light
Of the love of my Annie,
With the thought of the light
Of the eyes of my Annie.”
One can easily imagine that this poem is the sequel, in sentiment, of Eldorado (10: 35), —
“Gayly bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.” [page 75:]
He grew old in the quest; his strength failed him; he met a pilgrim shadow of whom he asked —
“ ‘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!’”
The sonnet, An Enigma (10: 83), to Mrs. Lewis, another poetess of New York (1: 83), and A Valentine (10: 82) to Mrs. Osgood, conclude the sum of his vaporing senti mentality towards women of poetical sensibilities.
After all this it is pleasant to be assured in the lines, To My Mother (10: 94), of the sanity of the poet's affection for his wife and her mother.
“Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,
The angels, whispering to one another,
Can find among their burning terms of love
None so devotional as that of ‘Mother.’
Therefore by that dear name I long have called you —
You who are more than mother unto me,
And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you
In setting my Virginia's spirit free.
My mother, my own mother, who died early,
Was but the mother of myself; but you
Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,
And thus are dearer than the mother I knew
By that infinity with which my wife
Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.”
Of the poems after 1845 there remain three, Ulalume, Annabel Lee, The Bells, to be considered, in which his genius was not wrought awry by the sentimentality at which we have been glancing. [page 76:]
Ulalume (10: 43) is allegorical. In a walk and a talk with his soul he conies upon the tonib of his lost Ulalume. He recalls that —
“Here once, through an alley Titanic
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul —
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriae rivers that roll,
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole,
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.”
But at the time, their thoughts were so serious and palsied and sere that they knew not that it was the month of October, and marked not the night of the year, nor noted the dim lake, nor remembered the ghoul-haunted woodland.
As the night waned and the star-dials pointed to morn, they saw at the end of their path a nebulous lustre which took the form of Astarte's bediamonded crescent. He felt that she was warmer than Dian, and had come to point them to the Lethean peace of the skies, —
“But Psyche, uplifting her finger,
Said — ‘Sadly this star I mistrust,
Her pallor I strangely mistrust:
Oh, hasten! — oh, let us not linger!
Oh, fly! — let us fly! — for we must.’
In terror she spoke, letting sink her
Wings until they trailed in the dust;
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust,
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.”
He then tried to comfort Psyche with the thought that her fears were but dreaming, and that they might trust to this sibyllic splendor to guide them aright. [page 77:]
“Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom,
And conquered her scruples and gloom,
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb,
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said — ‘What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?’
She replied — ‘Ulalume — Ulalume —
'T is the vault of thy lost Ulalume!’ ”
Then it was that his heart grew ashen and sober as the withered and crisped leaves, and he cried,
“It was surely October
On this very night of last year
That I journeyed — I journeyed down here,
That I brought a dread burden down here:
On this night of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon has tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber,
This misty mid region of Weir:
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.”
This is but another variation of his one theme. It is cast in the form of a recollection. It is easy to imagine that the second stanza depicts his mental state in the troublous experiences of 1847 (W. 260-277; 1: 73).
“These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriae rivers that roll,
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek.”
Under Mrs. Show's kindly care he at length recovered (W. 278), and therewith felt more than a friendly interest in Mrs. Shew. This interest we may think is represented in the poem by the “nebulous lustre” out of which arose “Astarte's bediamonded crescent,” and which lured him, [page 78:] for a while, to forget his sorrow so far as to become enam oured of Mrs. Shew. It came to that pass in June, 1847, that she had to break with him.
Then he was recalled to himself, or was stopped by the door of a tomb, the vault of his lost Ulalume.
Ulalume was published in December, 1847
In 1848 The Rationale of Verse (6: 47) was published, in which he sets forth his theory of the technique of verse. He begins with the origin of verse, thus: “Verse originates in the human enjoyment of equality, fitness. To this enjoyment, also, all the moods of verse — rhythm, meter, stanza, rhyme, alliteration, the refrain, and other analogous effects — are to be referred.”
This seems as much to be an after-consideration, as his analysis of The Raven; for we had the repetend in Eulalie and Lenore, and the repetend and refrain in The Raven, all of 1845, and the extreme of this technical side in Ulalume. In fact, The Philosophy of Composition of Verse [[The Philosophy of Composition]] and The Rationale of Verse are Poe's ratiocinations as to his poetry in both its inner and outer form.
In Tamerlane he speaks of a love “such as angel minds above might envy.” In Annabel Lee (10:41) he celebrates a love that is “more than love.” He and Annabel Lee loved
“With a love that the wingèd 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.”
“The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me.”
“But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we,
Of many far wiser than we; [page 79:]
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.”
This comes nigh to excess of sentiment in the treatment of his most poetical of all topics, namely, the death of a beautiful woman on the lips of a bereaved lover.
In The Bells (10: 37) Poe puts aside his usual theme as if on purpose to give us proof of his skill in onomatopeia. In the prefatory letter of 1831 he had distinguished poetry from romance by saying that it presented perceptible images with indefinite sensations, to which end music was essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. This is, perhaps, his conclusion after a discursive consideration of the charming lyrics of Al Aaraaf (1829), as, evidently, The Philosophy of Composition was the out-come of a like consideration of The Raven. The term “music” with Poe means melody, and onomatopeia will cover, broadly, the artifice of his verse.
Hear the mellow wedding-bells
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight! —
From the molten-golden notes,
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats [page 80:]
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! — how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells —
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells —
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!
After this pattern are the “silver bells,” the “brazen bells,” the “iron bells,” rung to evoke the sentiments, respectively, of merriment, of terror, and of solemnity.
There may be some question as to the occasion of the composition of The Bells (W. 302), but to him who has had his ear, in youth, attuned to the plantation melodies of the South, there can be no doubt as to the source of this onomatopoetic element of Poe's poetry. This it is, despite his narrow range, that makes him distinctively an American poet. Another poet, however, with “passion for exact truth,” complained that “The trouble with Poe was, he did not know enough;” yet this poet sang, —
“ ‘The time needs heart — ‘t is tired of head:
We’re all for love,’ the violins said.”
He it was who took from this same negro minstrelsy his cue for that capital book, The Science of English Verse.
It may at first thought appear a little strange that Poe should insist upon Eureka's (9: 5) being called a poem, urging as a reason the beauty of the truth in which it abounds, but it should be remembered that it has the title, Eureka: A Prose Poem. In the same sense, The Philosophy of Composition is a prose poem, — the prose of [page 81:] The Raven. The truth of his ratiocination in the essay has a beautiful exemplification in the poem.
Nature — the Universe — was to Poe a poem as Al Aaraaf, in particular, attests, and as in The Philosophy of Composition he begins, with a beginning, from which he shows the self-consistency in The Raven that entitles it to rank as a piece of Art; so, in like manner, he discusses the Universe, except that his ratiocination is wholly speculative. He feels though that he has found the truth, from these words of his Preface: “What I here propound is true: — therefore it cannot die; or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will ‘rise again to the Life Everlasting.’” But in the very last line of the Preface he says, “Nevertheless, it is as a Poem only that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead,” which means that it is as a self-consistent system of thought that he would have it passed upon. The first lines of his Preface make this clear: “To the few who love me and whom I love — to those who feel rather than to those who think — to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realties — I offer this book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth, constituting it true.” While he thinks he has taken, of all the roads to Truth, “the broadest, the straightest, and most available . . . — the majestic highway of the Consistent,” yet he means to ask us not to question the truth of his premises. His desire is that we enjoy this as the prose of that cosmogonic poem written by the God and Father of us all in the facts of our Universe.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - JFP99, 1899] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - The Mind and Art of Poe's Poetry (J. P. Fruit) (His Method)