Text: John E. Reilly, “Ermina's Gales: The Poems Jane Locke Devoted to Poe,” Papers on Poe, 1972, pp. 206-220

[page 206:]

John E. Reilly

COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS

Ermina's Gales: The Poems
Jane Locke Devoted to Poe

IT HAS now been a century since William F. Gill, Eugene L. Didier, and especially John H. Ingram took the first methodical steps toward the development of an authentic Poe biography. When we consider how many more steps have been taken over the past ten decades, how carefully Poe has been scrutinized, it is difficult to imagine that there remain any recesses in his life and character that have not been fully explored. But such recesses do still exist, and occasionally we uncover them even in the most obvious of places. One of these recesses is Poe's relationship with the sentimental poetess Jane Ermina Locke.

Every student of Poe is familiar with Mrs. Locke, familiar at least with the handful of “facts” that has been passed on from one Poe biographer to the next: that she was four years older than Poe, that her maiden name was Ermina Starkweather, that she assumed the name “Jane” after her marriage (in 1829), that she was related remotely through her husband to Frances Osgood, that she lived in Lowell, Massachusetts, where she had as her neighbor Mrs. Charles B. Richmond (Poe's “Annie”), that she was the mother of a large family (seven children, five of whom were still living when Poe met her), that she invited Poe to lecture in Lowell in July 1848, and that she pursued and persecuted him as he alternately encouraged and scorned her.(1) Most of what we know about Mrs. Locke's relationship with Poe is [page 207:] provided by Poe himself in two letters to her in 1847 and 1848 and in several letters to Mrs. Richmond in 1849. From Mrs. Locke's side, a brief note is all that exists of what possibly was a large number of letters written to him over a period of more than two years. Everything else from her appears to have vanished, everything except the poems she is known to have written about Poe. But these poems have been almost completely ignored. No serious effort has been made either to identify them or even to determine how many of them Mrs. Locke wrote. For example, a manuscript poem by her in the Poe-Ingram Collection is unquestionably about Poe; yet this poem has received so little attention its title has been allowed to remain for many years incorrectly transcribed as “Ermina's Gale.”(2) It is, indeed, one of Mrs. Locke's gales, one of her frequent sentimental outbursts, but the proper title to the poem is “Ermina's Tale.”

The purpose of the present paper is to bring to light “Ermina's Tale” and five other gales, five other poems Mrs. Locke wrote about Poe between December 1846 and July 1850. Though none of these poems is of any real value in its own right, all six of them are of interest in part for what they reveal of Mrs. Locke's view of her relationship with Poe and more importantly for the impression of Poe, the image if you will, which they embody. Indeed, these poems provide us with a unique opportunity to observe the impact Poe had not only upon someone who knew him personally but upon someone who was virtually a stereotype of the kind of woman for whom he had an immense personal appeal.

Mrs. Locke entered Poe's life by means of a poem, one which she wrote in response to reports of the destitution of the Poe family that were published in December 1846. A copy of her poem reached Poe at Fordham through the hands of Nathaniel Parker Willis before the close of the month, but the text seems not to have been printed at that time.(3) However, given Mrs. Locke's respect for Poe's critical opinion, especially his favorable opinion of her work, it is unlikely that she withheld these “beautiful lines,” as he described them, permanently from publication.(4) Accordingly, there is a poem entirely appropriate to the circumstances of December 1846 printed in Mrs. Locke's The Recalled, the 1854 collection of her verse. Entitled “An Invocation for Suffering Genius” and located in a section of the book called “Voices of the Past,” the poem laments the destitution and neglect of a “master” poet, and it does so in language that occasionally echoes Poe's own poem “Israfel”: [page 208:]

Mrs. Locke's “Invocation” led directly to a correspondence with Poe that got under way early in 1847. Of Poe's two surviving contributions, the second letter, written on 19 May 1848, indicates that he was deliberately and indiscretely encouraging Mrs. Locke's interest in him but that he and Mrs. Locke had still not met.(6) We have no response to this letter, at least no response in the form of a letter from her. What we have instead is a poem called “The True Poet” that she wrote on 1 June, no more than ten days after she received his letter. “The True Poet” makes no mention of Poe by name, but who else at that moment possibly could have been Mrs. Locke's “poet of the heart,” the solitary and anguished one of “angel gifts” whose only “guerdon” is his hope for “Immortality”? Though Poe remains here essentially the “master” poet of “An Invocation for Suffering Genius,” this poem, which addresses itself directly to the “true poet,” is perceptibly more personal. The first three and the last of the nine stanzas convey a sense of the whole:

Mrs. Locke wrote “The True Poet” on 1 June 1848, but before it made its initial appearance in the New York Evening Post two months later, the pace of her relationship with Poe had accelerated. Their first meeting took place on a visit she made to Fordham sometime in June,(8) and the following month he traveled to Lowell at her invitation to deliver a public lecture on “The Poets and Poetry of America” on 10 July. Mrs. Locke's sense of triumph must have been exquisite. Had she not lured to Lowell a poet of national reputation? And was not this “glorious devil,” as Mrs. Osgood described him, a guest at Wamesit Cottage, the Locke family residence near the banks of the Concord River? Though the presence of Mrs. Locke's husband and their five young children as well as the public nature of Poe's presence in Lowell must have precluded intimacies of any kind during his visit, Poe did make a very intimate impression upon Mrs. Locke's lively imagination, an impression she made an attempt to convey in “Ermina's Tale,” the manuscript poem in the Poe-Ingram Collection.(9) Dated “Wamesit Cottage[,] August/48,” the manuscript is accompanied by a note which, though no addressee is identified, unquestionably was directed to Poe:

The “Tale” itself is Ermina's (i.e., Jane Ermina Locke's) fantastic, almost frenzied account of a “trance-like”“ experience, a “reality,” in which the “void” of her “lonely” soul was filled by the “mortal form” (ie., Poe) of her “ideal.” Though space prohibits quoting here all thirty-one of the poem's four-line stanzas, the thirteen in which Ermina describes her “vision” are essential to an appreciation of the impact Poe had upon her:

This “one blossom of my heart,” this “late love's / Full dream,” has passed, Ermina laments. “Henceforth,” she continues through an appropriate allusion,

Resignedly, Ermina now looks forward only to the sound of “the last clarion”:

Unfortunately, we do not know how Poe received “Ermina's Tale,” though one wonders if he were not at least dismayed at the fervor he had kindled. What we do know is that while he was a guest at Wamesit Cottage in July, Mrs. Locke introduced him to Mrs. Charles B. Richmond and that he promptly abandoned whatever interest, pretended or otherwise, he had in his ardent, middle-aged hostess for a genuine infatuation with her attractive, young neighbor, his “dearest Annie.”(10) Just when Mrs. Locke realized that she had been forsaken is uncertain, but the sense of loss and resignation with which “Ermina's Tale” closes and the urgency of the accompanying note suggest that she may have begun to suspect as early as August. Her reaction — or at least Poe's version of it — when she finally realized is reported in his letters to Mrs. Richmond in February and March of 1849. He had, Poe complained, “incurred the unrelenting vengeance of that worst of all fiends, ‘a woman scorned,’” in this instance a woman who occupied herself “in ransacking the world for scandal against me, (& the falser the better for her purpose,) & in fabricating accusations where she could not find them ready made.”(11) [page 213:]

Though Mrs. Locke may, indeed, have been guilty of the “vile calumnies” and “misrepresentations” charged by Poe, he in turn misrepresented her when in a letter to Mrs. Richmond in February 1849 he compared Mrs. Locke to Elizabeth Frieze Ellet, the scourge ofhis indiscretions among the literary ladies of New York several years earlier.(12) It was a misrepresentation because Mrs. Locke had neither Mrs. Ellet's stamina nor her disposition for relentless malignancy, and the shreds of evidence we do have from the closing year of Poe's life suggest that Mrs. Locke's attitude toward him was not one of unrelieved hostility but one of such genuine ambivalence that her machinations, unsuccessful though they proved to be, probably were calculated as much to recover his affection as to discredit him.(13)

A sense of this ambivalence marks a mournful tribute to Poe written by Mrs. Locke less than a week after his death on 7 October 1849. Entitled simply “Requiem” and dated 12 October, the poem was printed in Willis's Home Journal on the twenty-seventh of that month as the work of one “E. S.” (i.e., Ermina Starkweather).(14) An accompanying editorial note describes “‘E. S.” as “one of the good and pure who had an unvarying sympathy and admiration for our friend Edgar Poe.” Though Mrs. Locke's sympathy and admiration may have been unvarying, “Requiem” demonstrates that they were then not unmixed with her awareness of Poe's “errors,” errors which, perhaps, had enhanced the fascination he held for one “O'er whose path his shadow fell.” Here is the entire poem:

“Requiem” was not the only poem Mrs. Locke wrote about Poe after his death. There were at least two others. One of them, “Lady and Poet, appears in Mrs. Locke's collection The Recalled, but the whole thrust of the poem suggests that she probably wrote it not long [page 215:] after “Requiem.” She may even have had it published somewhere at that time. The poem tells us of a “Poet” who, on his “dying bed — / Afar neath a southern sun,” sought forgiveness of a “Lady fair” for a “wrong” he had spoken and a “vow” he had broken. If there is any doubt that “Lady and Poet” is a fantasy about Mrs. Locke and Poe, a transparent exercise in wish fulfillment, the epigraph from Poe's drama Politian clearly suggests that Mrs. Locke composed the poem with Poe in mind. Note that the “meek spirit” of the “gentle one” yearned to forgive her repentant offender:

The Locke family moved from Lowell to Boston in the spring of 1850. In July of that year, Mrs. Locke attended an exhibition of paintings and sculpture at the Boston Athenaeum. She saw there a bas relief executed in marble by Horatio Greenough for George Ticknor and lent by Ticknor to the Athenaeum for the occasion. The catalogue to the exhibition describes the bas relief (item number 244) as “The discouraged Artist sitting before his unfinished work with a dying lamp, which a friendly hand replenishes to enable him to continue his labors.”(17) Greenough's sculpture reminded Mrs. Locke of Poe, of “one I sadly yet remember,” and it taught her “a lesson to be treasured.” She reported the experience to the Boston Daily Journal for 17 July in the form of a poem bearing the ungainly title “Athenaeum Gallery — Marble Basso Rilievo — No. 244”:

This poem marks a discernible shift in Mrs. Locke's attitude. Though Poe remains here the lamented genius, the victim of suffering and neglect, the poem is devoid of the sense of Mrs. Locke's personal involvement with him that characterized “Ermina's Tale,” “Requiem,” and “Lady and Poet.” She seems instead to have recovered the stance of detached compassion she had assumed in “An Invocation for Suffering Genius,” the poem she wrote before she had come to know him personally. In effect, the Athenaeum poem suggests that by July 1850 Mrs. Locke had come full circle to the emotional point at which she had entered Poe's life almost four years earlier.

In 1854 James Munroe and Company of Boston, a firm for which Mrs. Locke did a good deal of literary journeywork, published her book The Recalled. This collection prints five of the six poems about Poe examined in this paper, the Athenaeum poem being the only one not included. Whether Mrs. Locke wrote any other poems about Poe, especially after the publication of The Recalled, is not known; but the possibility would seem to have diminished as her recollection of Poe grew remote. An exhaustive search to make certain would be a formidable undertaking, for Mrs. Locke, who died in March 1859, published poetry widely until the very close of her life.(19) And a methodical search would necessitate examining a number of publications over a period of at least six years, publications such as the Boston Daily Journal, the Boston Atlas, the New York Evening Post, the Home Journal, the Unitarian Christian Register, several temperance journals, and a variety of other magazines and newspapers, some of which are hard to come by even when copies are said to survive. The results probably would not justify the effort.

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NOTES

1 Published sources of information on Mrs. Locke include the following: John Goodwin Locke (Mrs. Locke's husband), Book of the Lockes. A Genealogical and Historical Record of the Descendants of William Locke, of Woburn (Boston, 1853), pp. 222-223; “Jane Ermina Locke,” The Great Republic Monthly, 1 (May 1859), 541-542 (an obituary); Grace Le Baron Upham, “A Memoir of Mrs. Jane Ermina Locke; by Her Daughter,” Contributions of the Old Residents’ Historical Association, Lowell, Massachusetts, IV (Sept. 1890), 259-271; Frederick W. Coburn, an untitled article in two parts on Poe and Mrs. Locke in The Lowell (Massachusetts) Courier-Citizen, 20 Jan. 1940, p. 11, and 27 Jan., p. 11; Frederick W. Coburn, “Lowell's Association with Edgar Allan Poe, in 1848,” The Lowell Courier-Citizen, 20 Jan. 1941, p. 11, 27 Jan., p. 11, 3 Feb., p. 11, 10 Feb., p. 11. There is additional information on Mrs. Locke in letters which will be cited in this paper.

2 See, for example, John Carl Miller, John Henry Ingram's Poe Collection at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, 1960), p. 9 (item 44).

3 Poe acknowledged receipt of the poem in his letter to Willis which the latter published in the Home Journal on 9 Jan. 1847. The letter is reprinted in The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (New York, 1966), II, 338-339.

In his letter to Mrs. Locke on 10 March 1847, Poe seems to speak of the poem as though it had been published (Letters, II, 346). If the poem was published at that time, the most likely place for its appearance would have been Willis's Home Journal. Unfortunately, no complete file of the Journal for 1846-47 exists.

In his Edgar Allan Poe. His Life, Letters, and Opinions (1880; rpt. New York, 1965), p. 331, John H. Ingram claimed to have the poem in his possession, but what Ingram seems to have had in mind was the manuscript of “Ermina's Tale” now in the Poe-Ingram Collection.

4 Mrs. Locke's respect for Poe's critical opinion is expressed in the Preface to her The Recalled (Boston, 1854), pp. iii-iv. For Poe's praise of these “beautiful lines,” see Letters, II, 346.

5 The Recalled, pp. 93-95. The spaced periods between the sixth and seventh stanzas suggest that Mrs. Locke may have deleted material from an earlier version of the p poem.

6 Letters, I, 366-368.

7 New York Evening Post, 3 Aug. 1848, p. 1. The poem which here is said to be “For the Evening Post,” is signed only “J. E. L.” and is dated “Wamesit Cottage, June 1st.” I have accepted this as the date of composition. “The True Poe” was reprinted in the Lowell Daily Journal and Courier, 9 Feb. 1849, p. 1 (where it is dated “1849”), and in The Recalled, pp. 22-24. It is perhaps to the reprinting of this poem in the Daily Journal and Courier that Poe refers in his letter to Mrs. Richmond of 23 March 1849 (Letters, II, 434).

8 Although tradition has held that Poe saw Mrs. Locke for the first time when he visited Lowell in July, two unpublished letters in the Poe-Ingram Collection point to the earlier meeting at Fordham. One of these letters, from Mrs. Richmond to Ingram (13 March 1877) simply indicates that the earlier visit took place; the other letter, from Sarah Helen Whitman to Ingram (2 June 1874), specifies that the visit occurred in June.

9 “Ermina's Tale,” a MS. of four pages accompanied by a note, is item number 44 in the Poe-Ingram Collection. I am grateful to the authorities of the University of Virginia Library for permission to quote from this MS.

We may be able to trace the route this MS. took from Mrs. Locke to the Poe-Ingram collection. She wrote it in August of 1848 and sent it to Poe; he forwarded “Mrs. L's long MS. poem” to Mrs. Richmond in June 1849 (Letters, II, 447); and Mrs. Richmond sent Ingram [page 220:] the one remaining “memento” of Mrs. Locke that Poe had given her (Mrs. Richmond to Ingram, 13 March 1877, in the Poe-Ingram Collection).

Mrs. Locke seems not so indiscrete as to have published “Ermina's Tale” during Poe's lifetime. When it did appear in print, it was as a part of “The Sisters of Avon,” a long poem in The Recalled, pp. 204-218. Here Mrs. Locke deleted seven of the original thirty-one stanzas, including the very explicit last two of the thirteen vision stanzas quoted in this paper, and made the remainder of the poem a part of a speech delivered by the more matronly of the two unnamed sisters of Avon.

10 In her letter of March 1877 (Poe-Ingram Collection), Mrs. Richmond told Ingram that Mrs. Locke had introduced Poe to her.

11 Letters, II, 429-432.

12 ibid., p. 431.

13 How otherwise can we account for Mrs. Locke's never having ceased writing to Poe, for her threatening to visit him again at Fordham in June of 1849 (Letters, II, 448), and for her having told him several months earlier that she was preparing a “detailed” narrative of “all that occurred” between them, a narrative in which he was to “appear noble, generous, &c. &c.” (Letters, II, 438)? How otherwise, too, can we account for the republication of her poem “The True Poet” in the Lowell Daily Journal and Courier on 9 Feb. 1849, where it bears not the date 1 June 1848, the date of its composition, but the new date “1849,” thereby suggesting that Poe remained Mrs. Locke's “poet of the heart”?

14 Home Journal, 27 Oct. 1849, p. [2]. “Requiem” was reprinted as “Requiem for Edgar A. Poe” in The Recalled, pp. 29-31.

15 Because there are a number of typographical errors in the Home Journal printing of the poem, the text followed here is that of The Recalled.

16 The Recalled, pp. 181-183.

17 Catalogue of the Twenty-Third Exhibition of Paintings, in the Gallery of the Boston Athenaeum, Beacon Street (Boston, 1850), p. 13. For the history of the bas relief, see Nathalia Wright, Horatio Greenough: The First American Sculptor (Philadelphia, 1963), pp. 250-251.

18 Boston Daily Journal, 17 July 1850, p. 1. Mrs. Locke's name is misprinted “Jonas E. Locke.” The poem does not appear in The Recalled.

19 According to Mrs. Locke's obituary in The Great Republic Monthly, I (May 1859), 542, her last poem was published in February 1859.