Text: Alice Moser Claudel, “Mystic Symbols in Poe's ‘The City in the Sea’,” Papers on Poe, 1972, pp. 54-61

[page 54, unnumbered:]

Alice Moser Claudel

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, EASTERN SHORE

 

Mystic Symbols in Poe's
“The City in the Sea”

 

“THE CITY in the Sea,” fascinating even in decay, leads scholars and poets to look for many different sources as the exact place Poe described. Some cities they name once flourished; others exist in legends or in the work of poets and artists. Dante's City Dis has been named as one possible model.(1) Eric W. Carlson, in his notes to Introduction to Poe, writes, “Although once subtitled ‘The City of Sin,” this symbolic poem has less to do with sinful Gomorrah and Babylon than with the classical Hades.”(2) Vincent Buranelli believes the poem has a “dream world theme,” which is found as well in Poe's “The Valley of Unrest” and in “Dream-Land.”(3)

In a long analysis of Poe's death wish, his “enthralling anguish” and imagining of a “world of death in which there is no living thing but a weird, sepulchral magnificence,” C. M. Bowra states firmly that “The City in the Sea” (and he names “Dream-Land,” as well) is a myth for the state of mind in which Poe composed poetry.(4) He feels that Poe enlarged melancholy “into a scheme of existence” and that the poet felt some “universal catastrophe” might precede rebirth. This seems to be a romantic way of considering the poem but not without reason.

The English scholar Alethea Hayter deals with the effect of opium on the romantic writers of the 19th century and she dwells somewhat on “The City in the Sea” because, she says, it is quite in line with some [page 55:] of the writings of opium-eaters and occasional opium-eaters. She lists ruined towers, temples, thrones, the appearance of the waters, and so on, as part of what modern youngsters might term “a bad trip.”(5) Some problems arise, I feel, because we sometimes fail to consider Poe's early training in Latin, modest though it may have been, his fair knowledge of the Bible, his love of classical literature, his impishly critical turn of mind, and his habit of changing and recreating his own poetry. The dancer is often confused with the dance. Another poet, Marianne Moore, reminds us that to have poetry one must have “real toads in imaginary gardens.” Poe's symbolic garden is no doubt based upon “real toads,” but even about them scholars differ.

In a short article in American Literature, Louise Pound suggests Babylon, among other cities, real and imaginary, as a possible source for “The City in the Sea.” (6) She states that the idea of a city covered by the sea is an old one in world folklore and mentions ancient writers who have told of such cities. In a later note in American Literature, she adds Tyre to her earlier list, citing pertinent passages from Ezekiel.(7) The distinguished Poe scholar, the late Thomas Ollive Mabbott, disagrees with Pound, saying that she has followed Killis Campbell “in a somewhat absurd position on ‘The City in the Sea.’” Citing lines and a related note from “Al Aaraaf”“ he indicates that the doomed city, “The City of Sin,” as the name appeared in an earlier version, is one of the cities of the plain, possibly Gomorrah, punished by God along with Sodom, for its wickedness.(8) In an introduction to the poem, Mabbott writes: “Unexpectedly inept was Killis Campbell's choice of Babylon as Poe's city (Poems, p. 208). The ruins of Babylon are a mound far distant from the sea — and how could ‘Babylon-like walls’ be at Babylon? Yet in American Literature (March 1934 and March 1936) we find that Louise Pound accepted Killis Campbell's strange notion.”(9)

We are more concerned with Poe's poem than with Pound's speculations; however, she was merely seeking possible sources which inspired Poe. She admits that the city is of Poe's own architecture. Despite the fact that he observed the buttons of life, he preferred to be indefinite and his imagination fuses, to borrow a word from William Hazlitt, many things and adds depth. One's own imagination is drawn here to this once glittering center, decaying now. Some decay may be owing to time and to conquests; but in folk belief and in the statements of the prophets of the Old Testament, most destruction of cities and countries comes about because of sin. No matter what Poe has written [page 56:] in “Al Aaraaf” and in early versions of “The City in the Sea,” we must give our greatest attention to the last version; and despite the fact that Poe calls the walls “Babylon-like” and they cannot, therefore, be in Babylon, we must consider Babylon at least part of the background of the poem.

Of all doomed cities or those about to be doomed, Babylon seems to have received the most curses, the greatest rage, throughout the Old Testament. One can piece bits together and form the general narrative from II Chronicles, II Kings, and Daniel, among others. Indeed, in Genesis x.11, we find that the confusion of tongues in the Tower of Babel was brought about by Jehovah for the presumptuousness of the descendants of Noah who built it. The desire to be as high as God (or the gods) and of attempting to extend knowledge beyond human limitations is sinful in the Hebrew religion, close to the sin of worshiping graven images. The abhorrence of intolerable pride exists in the thought of the ancient Greeks, as well.

Briefly, the story (taken here from II Kings xiv and xv) is that Jerusalem was taken by Nebuchadnezzar. The temple was burned; Jerusalem's walls were broken. Jehovah's altar-vessels were desecrated, for these vessels were later used for carousing and for the worship of idols. The Captain of the guard took pillars of brass from the House of the Lord, as well as bowls of gold and silver and pillars with wreathen work and pomegranates. The treasures of Solomon's temple were put into Nebuchadnezzar's temple at Babylon, and the temple of Jehovah and the palaces of the city were burned. The Hebrews were made servants to Babylon until the reign of the kingdom of Persia. Piecing together the various versions of the conflict one has a kind of skeleton structure of “The City in the Sea.” Some of the language of Isaiah was used by Poe. Mabbott in the reference cited above gives passages from Isaiah xiv.9, but for some reason he does not state that the prophet is referring to Babylon. Poe, too gifted not to make something his own, has surely been influenced by this chapter. In it, Isaiah speaks of the hard bondage of his people under Babylonian rule and predicts that they will say, “How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased!” He prophesies, “Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations.” He says, “Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee.” One reason for the prophecy, in addition to the bondage and [page 57:] the desecration of the temple of the Hebrews, is given in verse 13 of this chapter, when Isaiah, assuming the voice of the Babylonian king, says, “For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: ...” and in verse 14, he adds, “I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will be like the most high.” Isaiah has compared the king, in verse 12, with Lucifer, “son of the morning.” He says that although other kings will lie in glory, he shall be cast out of his grave. In verse 23, comes another part of the prophecy: “I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water, and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction, saith the Lord of Hosts.” These striking quotations do not rule out the possibility that Poe thought of Gomorrah as well, or even Tyre, but they do point out reasons for the destruction of Babylon and the sins named are universal rather than private. They give the prophecy, including possession of the land by pools of water.

In the September 1970 number of Le Courier (publication of UNESCO in Paris), there is a fascinating article entitled: “La Tour de Babel ou le Malentendu.” The author, Frederich Ragette, professor of architecture at Beirut, states that the former existence of the tower is attested to by the Bible and by the Greek historian Herodotus and the Greek geographer Strabo. Handsome reproductions in color of the “proud tower” by Pieter Breugel the Elder are used as illustrations. The first painting (in the museum of Rotterdam) creates a tower that resembles a gigantic wedding cake, tipsy and mad-looking, reaching above the low-lying clouds toward heaven. The Euphrates is more a sea than a river and is loaded with frigates and with small sailboats crowded near the tower, part of whose base is close to the water. In the water a lurid light is lying. The tower resembles the Coliseum at Rome (and in the Bible, in Revelations, Rome is equated with Babylon and for reasons of pride, cruelty, and false worship), but this is a kind of crazy resemblance, off-balance, tier upon tier, more to achieve heaven, to be exalted above the stars, than to achieve form and grace on earth. The antlike workers, absorbed in the structure and lost to earth and to nature, all combine to give the effect of a tower “pendulous in air,” yet in danger of toppling into the sea-like Euphrates which halfway encircles it. There is a macabre red coloring of the upper tiers and of the jagged toothlike beginnings of others. This somewhat hellish light is reflected down the left side of the painting onto the heaps of bricks below and onto the soil in the foreground. I have not been able to discover whether Poe knew this painting in reproduction. [page 58:] It is a kind of grotesque foreshadowing of what would happen to the city for its excesses.

Yvor Winters thought that “The City in the Sea” was Poe's most objective poem. Certainly, without being didactic, it is one of his most moral poems. One reaches the moral theme by hidden paths, and the Hebrews, the Babylonians, and the Greeks all lend symbols.

I believe that Poe's city is not literally in the sea but is reflected in the sea which surrounds it. William T. Albright in From the Stone Age to Christianity points out that gods and the sea were frequently associated.(10) Phoenician gods were ‘enthroned on an island in the sea.” Ezekiel (xviii.2) speaks of the prince of Tyre who declares, “I am a god; I sit on the throne of god in the midst of the seas.” Albright says that “El appears in Ugaritic literature as dwelling in the ‘midst of the fountains of the two deeps.” One might emphasize the word around in Poe's poem. Forgotten by lifting (uplifting) winds, the melancholy waters lie resignedly around the city. From many references in the Old Testament we know that the winds are instruments of God, who uses them soothingly or destructively to reward or punish. No rays from heaven come down on the city's long night (night itself a symbol for death) but light from out the lurid sea streams up the towers. In many ways this is an allegorical city to which, metaphorically, many places have paid their tribute of symbols. One might mention that water is a symbol of purity and of healing, but it is also a symbol for both beginning and ending. Water is the division between life and death, the means of arriving at Hades. The turrets and the shadows (symbols for vision and death intertwined) all seem “pendulous in air.” One might observe that air and underwater do not resemble. I am indebted to my husband, Professor Calvin Claudel, for the observation that the phrase “pendulous in air” calls to mind the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

In the chapter “New Horizons in History’ in the work cited above, Albright mentions 19th century archaeologists and interpreters of Near Eastern documents whose names Poe has mentioned in various writings. Among these are Winckelmann, Champollion, Robert K. Porter, Edward Robinson, and others. An immediate verification may be made by checking Burton Pollin's Dictionary of Names and Titles in Poe's Collected Works.(11)

Descriptions of ancient devotional rites for various gods and goddesses were accessible to Poe in encyclopedias and even in casual readings of the writers of antiquity who are given as references in The [page 59:] Golden Bough: Plutarch, Strabo, Lucian, Eusebius, and others, all of whom are listed in Pollin's Dictionary mentioned above. The shrines must certainly have merited Poe's word “melancholy” during rites for gods such as Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, and Attis. Poe's sculptured ivy and stone flowers represent the natural flowers and the ivy, the latter associated with the gods; and if one accepts the Biblical denunciations of such gods, the reason for the ruined temple and fanes is obvious. Poe may have some personal criticisms embedded in the poem, so far as false gods and false pride are concerned, of course; but in a general sense he follows the Biblical position with regard to idol worship. The Bacchanals ate ivy, and their inspired fury was thought to be owning to the effect of the intoxicating plant. The ivy and the fig tree were associated with Dionysus.

In descriptions of the ziggurats of Babylon, art historian David Robb says that the ziggurat with its symbolic relationship to mountains as religious places became in time the house of the gods, in which capacity “it is associated with the king-priest.” He also states that carved reliefs of stone were often used as ornamentation on Mesopotamian buildings.(12)

The violet seemed a troublesome symbol until research reminded of its association with Attis, whom Poe mentions in other works. The ecstatic rites for this god were such as to turn not only Near Eastern women but even Roman women into mad creatures and men into eunuchs. Trees were draped with bands of violets, for violets sprang from the blood of Attis, as roses and anemones had sprung from the blood of Adonis. It is perhaps not accidental that our Latin American neighbors do not use the North American term “pansy” as a symbol for a homosexual but use instead the symbol “violet (violeta),” and there are jokes which play in punning fashion upon this word.

The open temples are on a level with the waves, but the waters are not tempted from their bed by the “gaily-jewelled dead” nor for the idol's eye of diamond. Poe probably uses the word “diamond” because the diamond is associated with Astarte, another name for Ishtar, Babylonian goddess and symbol of sexual love and not the supernal love and beauty Poe claimed to adore. The Babylonian king was said to have been suckled at the breasts of Ishtar; and, the kings were associated with the gods, Hammurabi, the Babylonian ruler, declared that “the insignia of royalty were conferred on him by the god Sin.” (13) This quotation, said to appear in the Babylonian story of Etana, is interesting in that it may have some connection with the double meaning [page 60:] of the word “Sin” in Poe's earlier title for his poem, “The City of Sin.” Part of a Babylonian blessing contains the line, “May both the gods Sin and Shamash bless you when you appear.”(14) Albright speaks of the great Babylonian deity Marduk as being identified with a whole list of male deities and notes that Sin is Marduk as illuminer of the night.”(15) In “The City in the Sea,” if there is any double meaning regarding Sin, Marduk's function has certainly failed.

The alliterative line, “The viol, the violet, and the vine” is a musical naming of important mystic symbols which sustain the theme of the poem: doom follows the sins of worshiping false gods and of over weening and arrogant behavior. In the 1831 version of the poem, the beginning noun in the line was “mask” instead of “viol.” The word may have been changed because Poe felt that “mask” presented too obvious an image; for the mask is quite well known in connection with dramatic religious rites of the ancient world. “Viol” not only added the evocative alliteration Poe admired, but also is a link with the pas sages from Isaiah quoted above. “Viol” makes a kind of contrasting image because the viol is mentioned in the Bible in connection with Hebrew holy days; however, in Amos (v. 10, 23) the Lord asks whether “the day of the Lord shall be darkness, and not light?” and then commands, “Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.” God is angered with Judah and Israel for their sins. Again in Amos (vi. 4, 5) He castigates them for their rich and idle lives “that lie upon beds of ivory and stretch themselves upon their couches,” and “That chant to the sound of the viol, and invent to themselves instruments of musick, like David; ...” The sinful use of the viol, then, seems more terrible when one contrasts it with its normal use, so that “viol” fits in dramatically as well as poetically with the violet (worship of false god, in this case Attis), and the vine, so well-known a symbol for worshipers of Bacchus and Dionysus and for excessive wine-bibbing, and the like.

The sea of glass seems to wait the final hour of the city. The waves begin to move toward destruction beyond earthly doom. The tops of the towers as they sink seem to give a void within the filmy heaven; and once again Poe presents an image that would scarcely occur if the whole city were under deep water. The waves have now a redder glow, and the color red is commonly associated with war, animal passions, death, and, paradoxically, the life-force. The association of life with death, and the possibility of the former rising from the latter, may be what Bowra had in mind in his analysis of “The City in the Sea.” Also, [page 61:] although Poe may not have known of such stories, during excesses of grief for the slain god or gods, waters (sometimes seas, sometimes rivers) were said to have run red with the blood of the victims or followers because of dismembering to reenact the fate of the slain deity.

Beginning with “And when amid no earthly moans,” Poe uses many phrases quite similar to those of the prophet Isaiah which appear in the chapter quoted above and which Mabbott quotes. There is a kind of image within an image which links supernatural with natural forces. Hell is not only a state of mind and a place here; for, even within one (like the Kingdom of Heaven) it expresses itself outwardly in behavior to other men and hell rises from a thousand thrones; and the thrones serve as metonymic images for the thousand (thousands of) kings who not only worshiped idols and “gods many,” but also proclaimed themselves to be gods. In permitting themselves to be worshiped and feared as Jehovah was feared, they were guilty of idolatry and of satanic pride and were hell incarnate “rising from a thousand thrones.” What bitter irony, therefore, is in the word “reverence,” the final one.

[page 61, continued:]

NOTES

1 Henry M. Belden, American Literature, VII (Nov. 1935), 332-334.

2 Introduction to Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Glenview, Ill., 1967), p. 564.

3 Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1961), p. 98.

4 The Romantic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), pp. 183-184.

5 Opium and the Romantic Imagination (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970), pp. 83, 327.

6 American Literature, VI (March 1934), 22-25.

7 “On Poe's “The City in the Sea’ Again,” American Literature, VIII (March 1936), 70-71.

8 Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, I (Cambridge, Mass., 1969) 197.

9 Ibid., p. 198, n. 1.

10 (Garden City, N. Y., 1957), p. 216.

11 (New York, 1968).

12 David M. Robb and J.J. Garrison, Art in the Western World (New York, 1953), pp. 44, 48.

13 The New Golden Bough, ed. Theodor H. Gaster (Garden City, N.Y., 1961), p. 73.

14 A. C. Bouquet, Sacred Books of the World (London, 1959), p. 41.

15 Albright, p. 217.