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IV
DEATH
It would be vain to search the writings of Poe for an orderly setting forth of his beliefs concerning death. Likewise it would be profitless to make any labored effort to reduce to a system what he says in various ways upon the subject. His theology is like biblical theology in being no theology at all — not a systematized and scientific treatise, but widely scattered thoughts upon many subjects. Nevertheless a consideration of his religious views and implications would be very incomplete without some examination of his eschatology, and particularly of the place of death in his writings.
That the man dwelt very constantly in the valley of the shadow of death is manifest from the large place it fills in his poems and tales. Of his forty-eight poems about half a dozen are of neutral tint. One, Eulalie, is almost happy and gay, though with a note of past sadness haunting its music:
I dwelt alone
In a world of moan,
And my soul was a stagnant tide.
All the other poems, in one way or another, are en-gloomed by life's disappointments, and made somber by the great shadow. [page 56:]
Nor is it otherwise with the tales. There are a few hoaxes and satires, and a few stories of adventure — all of a very ephemeral interest. But practically all the most noted and characteristic stories are terrific with the shadow that walketh at noonday; death and destruction, the grave and the judgment stalk hand in hand across his pages.
That it is so was due to temperament more than to experience. Death had robbed Poe of his parents, but that was before he could realize his loss, if, indeed, it may be counted a loss under the circumstances. From him it also took the mother of a young friend, Mrs. Stanard, celebrated as the subject of his exquisite little poem, To Helen. Then followed the death of his kind foster mother, Mrs. Allan. That was probably the one great loss of his life when measured by the effect it had upon his fortunes, yet it seems to have touched him far less than the passing of the mother of a fleeting boyhood acquaintance.(1) Both these bereavements were in early youth and normally they would not long have distressed a boy. Once more the grave opened and took his young wife. Thus three times within his memory death crossed his path. The toll exacted was heavy — when we meet the King of Terrors, is it ever light? Nevertheless, multitudes of men with affections more tenaciously profound than Poe's have as heavy, or far heavier bereavements [page 57:] without taking up their abodes by the tombstone. It was simply his mood, his way of looking at his world, that made it so sorrowful a place.
To Poe death seemed not so much fraught with horror as with sadness. There are passages reflecting terror at the thought of premature burial.(2) The terrific in others is due not to the mere fact of death, but to the wholesale mortality of plague and pestilence.(3) With the exception of a paragraph in Ligeia,(4) and another in the Premature Burial.(5) it is difficult to recall any expression of passionate horror or great fear on the subject. It seemed rather to fascinate him and fill him with pensive and plaintive regret. Death is an intruder a discord, a destroyer of beauty — as such his artist soul hated it. Where it came in life — and thus it did come to Poe's loved ones and to him — it seemed especially bitter: —
Come! let the burial rite be read — the funeral song be sung!
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young —
A dirge for her, the doubly dead in that she died so young.
. ... ..... .
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes —
The life still there upon her hair — the death upon her eyes.
It was thus that he pictured nearly all the maidens and matrons of his tales and poems, in the beauty of youth slipping away to see the far-off countries. The [page 58:] death of the old, whose beauty was already dead, did not so affect him, nor did he ever dwell upon the death of men. But for the flowers of humanity to be destroyed was tragic.
The place that all this held in the poet's mind is not left to conjecture. In a notable passage in one of his essays he set forth what it was in death upon which he brooded, not with affright but with pensive melancholy:
Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy? Death — was the obvious reply. And when, I said, is this most melancholy of topics most poetical? From what I have already explained at some length, the answer here also, is obvious — When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world — and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.(6)
Here Poe is essentially biblical, as he is in practically all his views of death. Throughout the Old Testament death is looked upon not from the religious but from the natural viewpoint, as something to which all life is subject in harmony with the great laws of change.(7) In the recognition of that fact there is a tinge of bitterness: [page 59:]
For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again; neither doth God respect any person.(8)
Especially when death overtook the young did the Hebrew thinkers revolt from it. To have the days of youth shortened;(9) to be cut off in the midst of one's days;(10) to depart before one was full of years — all that was so contrary to what ought to be as to compel the conclusion that it fell as a judgment of God.(11) When the prophet Joel wanted to picture the utter desolation of his land in poetic language heavily fraught with pathos, he, like Poe, could think of no more melancholy thing than the death of the young. He, however, found it not in a beautiful girl dead, but in such a one clothed in all the trappings of woe, bemoaning the husband whom death had snatched away before the fellowship of love had fairly begun:
Lament like a virgin
Girded with sack cloth for the husband of her youth.(12)
The poets of Israel also resemble Poe in having written pensively and not wildly of death's violation of life's beauty. That is the minor chord running through their songs. The transitoriness of life is like the fading of flowers, and both are sad. So it was to the poetic fancy of the Great Prophet of the Exile: [page 60:]
All flesh is grass
And all the beauty thereof is as the flower of the field.
The grass withereth
The flower fadeth
Because the breath of the Lord bloweth upon it.(13)
So it was to Job:
Man, born of woman,
Is of few days and full of trouble,
He cometh forth like a flower and withereth,
He fleeth like a shadow and continueth not.(14)
So it was to the Psalmists:
As for man, his days are as grass,
As a flower of the meadow so he flourisheth,
For the wind passeth over it and it is not,
And the place thereof knoweth it no more.(15)
Our poet in speaking of the dead could not always see beyond the grave. The departed went into darkness where the worm fed upon them. Poe hoped it might glide gently without disturbing their deep sleep.(16) He knew that his Annabel Lee had been shut up in a sepulcher; it was there that he found her:
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling — my darling — my life and my bride
In the sepulchre there by the sea —
In her tomb by the sounding sea.(17) [page 61:]
When “the fever called ‘Living’ is conquered at last” there is rest in a bed where alone rest can be found — a bed whose narrowness and gloom are forgotten in the restfulness “just a few feet down under the ground.”(18) Literally interpreted this means that not only the body but also the soul, the person, goes into the grave, there, in some sense, to retain its personality.
Is that also biblical? Yes. All “shall lie down alike in the dust and the worms shall cover them.”(19) Man “is like the beasts that perish. ... Like sheep they are herded in the grave, by the shepherd death.”(20) Or as Job expressed it:
My days are past,
My purposes are broken off,
. ... . ... . ... .
If I have any hope, the grave is my house:
I have made my bed in the darkness
To corruption I have said — “My father thou;”
To the worm — “My mother and my sister.”(21)
That abode beneath the ground was also regarded by Job as a place of rest:
Then had I lain down and been quiet
I had slept — then had I been at rest.
. ... ..... . .
There the wicked cease from troubling themselves,
And there the weary are at rest.(22) [page 62:]
In the shadowy quiet of the Hebrew grave, as in Poe's, bodies and souls were somehow alive, and so should continue. That seems the most primitive, and hence the most uniform of all ancient beliefs concerning the dead. In early graves, those of the Hebrews among the rest, food and weapons and all things needed by the spirits were placed. All desired to be buried among their own people lest proper companionship should be wanting.(23) It is to such antique beliefs that popular superstition harks back in associating ghosts with burial places. Poe wanted his Sleeper's sleep to be so profound that in her grave she might
In a remarkable passage in Ezekiel which pictures Egypt going down to death, she is greeted by others gone before — Assyria, Elam, Edom, and others. Deep down in Sheol princes and people of each nation lie, their graves arranged about the grave of their king:
Son of man, wail for the multitude of Egypt and cast them down; even her and her daughters of the famous nations. ... The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst of Sheol. ... They are gone down, they lie still. ... Ashur is there and all her company. His graves are round about her. All of them slain; fallen by the sword, whose graves are set in the uttermost part of the pit.(25) [page 63:] This shows how the old belief that left the dead in their graves afterwards blended with the new conception of one vast abode of the departed. In transition, the graves are represented as being in Sheol.
Job, who is as little consistent as Poe in his thoughts of the dead, leaves his picture of the grave as a place of perfect rest, and complains of the pains the soul will endure through the suffering of the dead body:
Thou overcomest him forever and he passeth,
Thou changest his countenance, and sendest him away.
His sons come to honor and he knoweth it not;
They are brought to shame and he perceiveth it not.
Only his flesh upon him suffereth pain,
And his soul within him mourneth.(26)
Rachel, dead a thousand years before, was yet in her grave when her children were led away to captivity and death. The poetic fancy of the prophet could hear her weeping there:
A voice is heard in Ramah,
Lamentation and bitter weeping,
Rachel weeping for her children;
She refuseth to be comforted for her children
Because they are not.(27)
Even in the New Testament the dead are represented as coming out of their graves where they long had lain:
The earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose and came out of the graves.(28) [page 64:] Thus also it shall be in the resurrection, so persistently do old beliefs color language for those no longer holding them.(29)
From such views of a shadowy existence in the grave the Old Testament writers developed the idea of Sheol, the universal abode of the dead. It was but an enlargement of old thoughts concerning the grave, and curiously blended with them, as already noted. Dark, beneath the ground, it was a land of shadow where only shades dwelt, forgotten of God and beyond the reach of hope. What wonder, then, that the Psalm of the Sons of Korah is as full of moan and despair as anything Poe ever sang:
My soul is full of troubles
For my life draweth nigh unto Sheol.
I am numbered with those who go down into the pit;
I am as a man who hath no help,
Cast off among the dead
Like the slain who lie in the grave
Whom thou rememberest no more.
. ... . ... . ...
Wilt thou show the dead thy wonders?
Shall the shades rise and praise thee?
Shall thy loving kindness be told in the grave,
Or thy faithfulness shown forth in destruction?
Shall thy wonders be known in the darkness,
And thy righteousness in the land of oblivion?(30) [page 65:]
Another psalmist remonstrated with God:
Oh remember how short my time is.
For what vanity hast thou created all the children of men?
What man is he that shall live and not see death,
That shall deliver his soul from the power of Sheol?(31)
So protested the dying Ligeia:
Oh God! O Divine Father! shall these things be undeviatingly so?
Shall the Conqueror be not once conquered?(32)
Hezekiah's passionate prayer out of the bitterness of his soul throbs and sobs with the longing for escape from the grave and Sheol:
Sheol cannot praise thee,
Death cannot celebrate thee.
They that go down into the pit
Cannot hope for thy truth.
The living, the living —
He shall praise thee.(33)
It was the same with the Lady Ligeia, with the added vehemence of the modern Occidental will to live:
Words are impotent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled with the Shadow. I groaned in anguish at the pitiable spectacle. I would have soothed — I would have reasoned; but, in the intensity of her wild desire for life, — for life — but for life — solace and reason were alike the uttermost folly.(34) [page 66:]
This comparative study might be extended to the literature of many peoples besides the early Hebrews — especially the Babylonians and Greeks — without calling for modification. Poe was akin to them all in his views of death. Homer spoke for his day: “I had far rather work as a slave on a poor man's farm in the land of the living than rule over all the hosts of the departed dead.”(35) Much alike are the Greek Hades, the Hebrew Sheol, and Poe's
strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim west
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.(36)
Of the same sort is the mysterious shadowy heaven below the waters where the dead reluctantly go when forced by the forgetfulness of their friends to quit their quiet sleep in the grave:
The dead all sleep,
At least as long as love doth weep:
Entranced, the spirit loves to lie
As long as tears on Memory's eye:
But when a week or two go by
And the light laughter chokes the sigh,
Indignant from the tomb doth take
Its way to some remembered lake,
Where oft — in life — with friends it went
To bathe in the pure element,
And there, from the untrodden grass,
Wreathing for its transparent brow
Those flowers that say (ah hear them now!) [page 67:]
To the night winds as they pass,
“Ai! Ai! Alas! — Alas!”
Pores for a moment ere it go,
On the clear waters there that flow,
Then sinks within (weighed down by woe)
Th’ uncertain shadowy heaven below.(37)
Under the spell of such ideas of death and the underworld of the dead, whether held as serious beliefs or poetic fancies, no writer could ever sing the strange Christian beatitude, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.”(38)
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 56:]
1 Probably one reason why Mrs. Allan's death did not affect Poe in a way to be reflected in his writings was because she was not a young and beautiful woman. Also her excellent qualities seem to have been of a kind not appealing to the romantic and sensitive nature of the boy as did the quick sympathy of the beautiful young mother of his acquaintance. Stanard.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 57:]
2 Fall of House of Usher; Berenice.
3 The Red Death; Shadow; King Pest.
4 Ligeia, II. 255. 256.
5 Premature Burial, V. 268.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 58:]
6 Philosophy of Composition, XIV. 201: explaining what determined his choice of theme for The Raven.
7 The most striking exception to this statement is found in Gen. 3: 19 sqq. Strangely enough. this story of death resulting from the fall of man, though found in the most ancient stratum of the first book of the Bible, is never made use of elsewhere in the Old Testament.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 59:]
8 Sam. 14:14; cf. I Sam. 15:32.
9 Psa. 89:45.
10 Psa. 102:24.
11 Prov. 10:27; Psa. 37:1, 2; introducing the religious element.
12 Joel 1:8.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 60:]
13 Isa. 40:6. 7; cf. Poe: Let life. then, as the day-flower, fall
With the noon-day beauty — which is all.
Tamerlane, VII. 8:8.
14 Job 14:1, 2.
15 Psa. 103:15, 16.
16 The Sleeper.
17 Annabel Lee.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 61:]
18 For Annie.
19 Job 21:26.
20 Psa. 49:12. 14.
21 Job 17:11, 13. 14.
22 Job 3:13, 17. Such is the meaning of the passage, though to bring it out the noble, familiar rhythm has been sacrificed.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 62:]
23 Gen. 49:29-31; 50:25: 1 Kgs. 14:31; 2 Chron. 21:18-20.
24 The Sleeper.
25 See the whole weird dirge (Ezek. 32:17-32) .
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 63:]
26 Job 14:20-22.
27 Jer. 31:15; cf. Gen. 35:19, 20.
28 Matt. 27:51-53.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 64:]
29. Dan. 12:2: Jno. 5:25. How little permanent value attaches to the scaffolding used in building up the elements of a great faith! Under any circumstances the hope of everlasting life must have been a part of Christianity. but bad it sprung from a people practicing cremation and not burial that hope would never have been expressed in terms of the resurrection.
30 Psa. 88:3-5. 10-12.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 65:]
31 Psa. 89:47. 48.
32 Ligeia, IL 257.
33 38:18. 19: see the whole Psalm.
34 Ligeia, II. 255.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 66:]
35 Odyssey, XI. 488.
36 The City in the Sea.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 67:]
37 The Sleeper, as printed in 1831 under the title Irene. See VII. 179. 180.
38 Rev. 14:13.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - WMF28, 1928] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Biblical Allusions in Poe (Forrest)