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V
BEYOND DEATH
In both Poe and the Hebrew Bible there is present a hope that death might be escaped. To neither was it annihilation, to neither was there much thought of a resurrection. That doctrine was used figuratively in the Old Testament to express the hope of Hosea and Ezekiel that their destroyed nation would live again in this world.(1) Only in a very late book was it applied to individuals,(2) and not until the centuries immediately preceding the opening of the Christian era did it become anything like the resurrection doctrine of the New Testament. Without such a doctrine, and with nothing better to hope for in the realms of the dead than a poor shadowy existence, the ancient Israelites and our modern poet both dreaded death and dreamed of a way to escape it.
Of possible ways to remain in the land of the living two seem to have presented themselves to Poe. Each of them probably stood related to one and the same means. One was for the soul to take possession of some other body. That meant transmigration whose popular presentation in his Tales differs radically from its philosophical conception by his Indian and German masters. The second way was by holding the present body against the assaults of death. Of neither [page 69:] does he give us perfect examples. Of the latter, the victory over death is very brief; of the former the reincarnations are for a short time and there is no intimation that they were to be repeated.
There are two cases in the Tales of temporarily keeping the soul in the body and the body from decay — Mesmeric Revelation,(3) and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.(4) To these may possibly be added the case of the Egyptian mummy who got up and proved himself very much alive.(5) This last, however, was so manifestly a piece of mere drolling that it signifies nothing except perhaps the fascination which death and the possibility of cheating it had over Poe. Even the other two cases, where persons at the point of death are thrown into a mesmerized state and held there by the will of another, are almost of the nature of hoaxes. But again, they reveal the extent to which their author speculated on the possibility of holding death at bay.
There are several cases of reincarnation — one in a picture,(6) one in a horse,(7) one in a new-born infant,(8) one in a dead woman,(9) one in a man.(10) Leaving out of account the transfer of a woman, bit by bit, into her slowly painted portrait by a process suggestive of sympathetic magic, one means is involved in all the [page 70:] other cases of transmigration. It is the triumph of the will over death. That is what links them with the cases of withstanding death just considered. There the will of the hypnotizer triumphed, and there is no indication that Valdemar might not have been kept from dissolution indefinitely as easily as for the seven months of the experiment. In the cases of metempsychosis it was the will of the transmigrating soul that brought about the reincarnation, and there is nothing to indicate that the process might not have repeated itself forever.
The case of Ligeia best brings out the victory of the will over death, even where death had temporarily prevailed. The writer shows how he dwelt upon the subject by the quotation from Joseph Glanvill used as a motto for the tale, and repeated in the narration itself:
And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intenseness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.(11)
Ligeia's half shrieked appeal and protest to God as she leapt from her deathbed, and her last sighs as she sank into death, repeated those same words.(12) And the will of the beautiful woman triumphed. Not only did she return to life; she alone of all Poe's characters who came out of the tomb is left in life when [page 71:] the tale closes.(13) Once then, at least, we have in his pages the story of one who could not be holden of death.
Twice in the old Hebrew stories it is recorded that men escaped the darkness of the grave and the great prisonhouse of spirits beyond it. Enoch and Elijah eluded the universal conqueror, though neither remained among men.(14) Believing such a thing possible, it was inevitable that Hebrew thinkers should longingly dwell upon the possibility of like escape for others. That longing came to repeated utterance in Israel's poets. The boldest and most classic voicing of the great hope runs thus:
So my heart is glad, and my soul rejoiceth,
My flesh also dwelleth securely;
For thou wilt not abandon my soul unto Sheol
Nor let thy beloved go down to the pit.
Thou wilt show me the pathway of life.(15)
The poet believed he could overleap death and Sheol. Like the similar dreams of Poe, it never came true. It remained for a later voice to declare the realization of that disappointed dream by Another in a different way.(16)
With the Hebrews as with Poe there seemed to be a double way to escape death through a single means or power. There might be a continuation of life in this world; or there might be a journeying on to God [page 72:] without passing through death. Not will, but faith, was the single means or power relied upon by the Hebrew. By that power the soul linked with God might overleap death:
Preserve me, O God,
For in thee do I take refuge.
..... . .
I have set the Lord always before me,
Because he is at my right hand
I shall not be moved.(17)
Or if the individual failed of such power on his own account the faith of others might snatch the prey temporarily from death, as did Elijah and Elisha.(18) Faith, then, and not will, was the means used by the Hebrew in either case. So Enoch stands high in a Christian catalog of ancient men of faith: “By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death.”(19)
Meanwhile, in Poe's world and in the Old Testament world, despite both will and faith, all continued to pass on into the far-off country. So both wrought out for themselves a surer hope than escape from physical dissolution, and a better hope than the darkness of the grave. Spirits haunting graves or abysmal underground regions,(20) spirits coming at times to the world again,(21) spirits taking possession of living men(22) [page 73:] — such things could satisfy neither ancient nor modern writers. Both therefore came to look up to bright worlds, and not down to the darkness for the spirits of the dead. In Eiros and Charmion, and Monos and Una, Poe represents men as passing through the “Night of the Grave” to be “born again” into the realm of spirits. That, however, is only after they have lain dead so long that the body has crumbled back to dust, though meantime retaining in the grave full power to feel and know and will.(23) Some such process is probably in the mind of Poe when in the Assignation he has the lovers choose to go through death's portal to meet “in that hollow vale,”(24) and when Lenore's
ghost is riven
From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven —
From grief and moan, to a golden throne, beside the King of Heaven.(25)
Again, in the Power of Words the “spirit new-fledged with immortality,”(26) and in the Domain of Arnheim the angelic beings who once were mortals,(27) and in Eleonora the ministering spirit from Paradise attending the beloved,(28) all possibly passed to their refinement of spirituality through a long journey and sojourn in the dark valley. But whatever and wherever [page 74:] the experiences between their dying and their glorification, they were
White robed forms of friends long given
In agony, to Earth — and Heaven.(29)
The faith seems to have dwelt in him which found trembling expression in his Politian:
What matters it —
What matters it, my fairest and my best,
That we go down unhonored and forgotten
Into the dust — so we descend together.
Descend together — and then — and then perchance —
And then perchance
Arise together, Lalage, and roam
The starry and quiet dwellings of the blest,
And still — and still together — together.(30)
Reflecting so much of his highest poetry Poe's impassioned letters to Mrs. Whitman reflect also this:
Helen — if you died — then at least, I would clasp your dear hands in death, and willingly — oh, joyfully — joyfully go down with you into the night of the Grave. ... Helen — my Helen — the Helen of a thousand dreams. — She whom the great Giver of all good has preordained to be mine — mine only — if not now, alas! then hereafter and forever in the Heavens.(31)
This may well be his last word on his all-engrossing theme, for his last poem was of the good knight seeking his Eldorado beyond the shadow.(32) And he [page 75:] praised Longfellow's Excelsior for making the youth cry from the pinnacle of the world where he fell dead, “still ‘Excelsior!’ There is yet an immortal height to be surmounted — an ascent in Eternity.”(33) Also he tells us that his ideal in elegiac poetry was to utter such notes of triumph as are found in his Lenore.(34)
The last word of the Bible upon the subject, with its doctrine of the resurrection, and its beatitude of the dead,(35) is too well known to need repeating. Even in the time of gloomy beliefs and disappointed hopes there was light upon the cloud:
To the wise the way of life goeth upward
That he may depart from Sheol beneath.(36)
Thou wilt guide me with thy counsel
And afterwards receive me to glory.(37)
I shall behold thy face in righteousness,
I shall be satisfied when I awake, gazing on thy form.(38)
The dust shall return to the earth as it was,
And the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.(39) [page 76:]
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 68:]
1 Hosea 13:14: Ezek. 37:1-14.
2 Dan. 12:12.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 69:]
3 V. 241-254.
4 VI. 154-166.
5 Words With a Mummy.
6 The Oval Portrait.
7 Metzengerstein.
8 Morella.
9 Ligeia.
10 Tale of the Ragged Mountains.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 70:]
11 Tales, II. 248, 253.
12 Ibid., 257, 258.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 71:]
13 Ibid., 268.
14 Gen. 5:24: 2 Kgs. 2:11.
15 Psa. 16:9-11.
16 Acts 2:25-28.
[the following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 72:]
17 Psa. 16:1, 8.
18 1 Kgs. 17:17-23: 2 Kgs. 4:18-37.
19 Heb. 11:5.
20 Isa. 14:9-11; 38:18.
21 1 Sam. 28:7-15.
22 Mk. 5:1-9.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 73:]
23 IV. 1-8; 200-212.
24 II. 109-124.
25 VII. 54.
26 VI. 139-144.
27 VI. 185.
28 IV. 240, 241.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 74:]
29 VII. 90.
30 VII. 72, 73.
31 Letters to Sarah Helen Whitman, 13.
32 VII. 123.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 75:]
33 Criticisms, XI. 85.
34 Marginalia, XVI. 56.
In the Literati, XV. 6, Poe gives equivocal assent to a doctrine of the resurrection of the spirit, but not of the body. Perhaps this was in harmony with the notion of an etherealized body rising with the spirit as in Eiros and Charmion. It approaches St. Paul's doctrine of the “spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15:44) .
35 Rev. 14:13.
36 Prov. 15:24.
37 Psa. 73:24.
38 Psa. 17:15.
39 Eccl. 12:7.
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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)