When I was discovering poetry as a teenager, the first serious poem I ever memorized was “To Helen” by Edgar Allan Poe. Some of the classical references were not known to me, but the beauty of the language was overwhelming. It still is a poem I return to with great joy.
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy-Land!
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Edgar Allan Poe, or Eddie as he was known within his family, was born in Boston in 1809. His mother, Eliza Poe, was a popular and accomplished actress who may have named her son after a character in “King Lear.” His father was also a performer but received mainly disparaging reviews.
Both parents died when Edgar was still a child, and he was foster-raised by the John Allan family. Thus his middle name. The family was well-to-do, and his early education included a grammar school in Scotland and a boarding school in England. Later Edgar attended the University of Virginia and the Military Academy at West Point. At one time Poe also enlisted in the regular Army, and (to my delight) took the name Edgar A. Perry to avoid debt collectors.
Poe began writing poems as a young teenager, and he published his first collection, anonymously, in 1827 when he was eighteen. He was later to publish one of his finest poems, “Ulalume,” anonymously, though the author was soon identified because, as one reviewer noted: “No other American poet has the same command of language and power of versification.” This quite modern-sounding poem ranks with “The Raven” (See video) as being among Poe’s most popular pieces. Here’s how it starts.
The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crispéd and sere —
The leaves they were withering and sere:
It was night, in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir: —
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
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 scoriac 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.
Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere —
Our memories were treacherous and sere;
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year —
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)
We noted not the dim lake of Auber,
(Though once we had journeyed down here)
We remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
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While our attention is directed to Poe’s poetry, we mustn’t forget that his prominence as a writer in part derives from his prose works. Among them,“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (the first modern detective story) and that glorious tale of revenge, “The Cask of Amontillado.” If you’d prefer something more Gothic and colorful, consider “The Masque of the Red Death.”
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In a softer vein, Poe is viewed today as one of the exceptional practitioners of dream poetry. As he wrote:
Dreams! in their vivid colouring of life
As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
Of semblance with reality which brings
To the delirious eye, more lovely things
Of Paradise and Love—and all our own!
Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.
His writing in this genre culminated in the ecstatic “Dream Within a Dream,” an exploration of the reality of life.
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
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Little Known Fact. In his lifetime, Edgar Allan Poe had only one best-selling book. It was not a collection of his poems or his one novel. It was The Conchologist’s First Book: Or, a System of Testaceous Malacology, Arranged Expressly for the Use of Schools, It’s all about molluscs with shells, and went through three printings. Evidently, seashells sell.
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Geographically, Poe is most closely associated with Richmond and Baltimore. But for the final three years of his life, he lived in a cottage in Fordham, New York. Here he wrote a tour-de-force poem inspired by the bells ringing from St. John’s College (now Fordham University) next door. Here are the first two stanzas.
Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
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
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!
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Poe’s life was a mix of literary fame and personal tragedy, losing his wife to tuberculosis while fighting the demon of alcohol. And as befits a writer of mystery and suspense, his own finish reflected his fiction. On a trip to Baltimore, he suddenly and mysteriously disappeared for several days and when discovered was delirious and in disarray, wearing someone else’s clothes. He died shortly thereafter, and to this day no one is quite sure what happened and how and why.
What is certain is that his final poem (1849) is one of his most admired. Here is the story of “Annabel Lee.”
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged 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;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me—
Yes! —that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
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 see 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 side of the sea.
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VIDEO. You may have thought we would neglect “The Raven.” But not so. We’d like you to experience the entire poem, one of the great performance poems in American literature. The video is a little fuzzy, and the bird is sometimes hard to make out. But the rendering is definitive. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Vincent Price.
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: EDGAR ALLAN POE
