Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (8 page)

8
Interestingly—in regard to playing off supernatural and natural—Poe revised what in “The Assignation” had first read as “the Demon of Romance that stalked up and down the narrow canal” to “the Genius of Romance that stalked up and down the narrow canal.” This change eliminates any hint of supernaturalism and substitutes, fittingly, a word that has as its root meanings “creator” and “begetter,” thus deftly preparing for the lack of creativity, artistic or sexual, in old Mentoni as contrasted with both in the Marchesa’s lover, who probably fathered her child.

9
Since racial issues have been connected with
Pym
so often in recent years, one might profitably consult Randall Kennedy’s
Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption,
New York: Pantheon Books, 2003. See especially Kennedy’s “Introduction” and chapters 3, 6, and 7. Noteworthy, too, is Kennedy’s observation: “Distinctly underdeveloped is the literary tradition that portrays interracial relationships that are at least potentially rewarding” (pp. 137-138). Naturally, as a person of his time, Poe would have had conflicts concerning racial issues, and in expressing any thoughts regarding these matters he no doubt would be ambiguous. That Dirk Peters survives when Pym and their Tsalalian hostage do not may register such uncertainties. See also Camille Paglia’s
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.
London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 579-580, 590-591. Joseph V. Ridgely’s assessment of Poe and racism (in which he reminds us that the author of an extremely pro-slavery article in the April 1836
Southern Literary Messenger
was not Poe) should confute more speculative ideas concerning Poe and race. See Ridgely’s “The Authorship of the ‘Paulding-Drayton Review’,” in
Poe Studies Association Newsletter
20:2 (Fall 1992), pp. 1-3, 6. See also Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson’s
The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849,
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987, pp. 200, 205; and Terence Whalen’s
Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, chapters 5 and 6. For earlier worthwhile opinions about Poe’s novel, see G. R. Thompson’s “Romantic Arabesque, Contemporary Theory, and Postmodernism: The Example of Poe’s
Narrative,”
in ESQ:
A Journal of the American Renaissance
35:3, 4 (1989), pp. 163-272; and
Poe’s Pym: Critical Explorations,
edited by Richard Kopley, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1992. Poe’s debts in
Pym
to another influential tradition in his day are illuminated by Kent Ljungquist’s
The Grand and the Fair: Poe’s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques,
Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1984, chapter 2.

10
A gloss on these masculine-feminine mergings may be found in Camille Paglia’s
Sexual Personae,
pp. 579-580; 590-591. Also too significant to ignore in light of such a reading is Pym as imp. According to
Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary,
the word “imp” may derive from the Latin for “to prune,” which led to definitions like “graft,” “repair,” or, in noun form, “bud,” “shoot,” “offspring,” “scion,” and “graft”—all suggestive of growth and development, and thus of Pym’s maturing.

11
For Poe’s sophistications and modifications of literary Gothicism, see my “Poe and the Gothic Tradition,” pp. 72-91. For later impacts, see three publications of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, Maryland: Richard Fusco’s Fin de
Millénaire: Poe’s Legacy for the Detective Story
(1993); Craig Werner’s “Gold Bugs and the Powers of Blackness: Re-Reading Poe” (1995); and my volume of edited essays
Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities
(1986). On Poe’s international high standing, see
Poe Abroad: Influences, Reputation, Affinities,
edited by Lois Vines, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999.

In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less—
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.

 

But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody—
Then—ah then I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.

 

Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight—
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define—
Nor Love—although the Love were thine.

 

Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining—
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
¹

Dim vales—and shadowy floods—
And cloudy-looking woods,
Whose forms we can’t discover
For the tears that drip all over.
Huge moons there wax and wane—
Again—again—again—
Every moment of the night—
Forever changing places—
And they put out the star-light
With the breath from their pale faces.
About twelve by the moon-dial
One more filmy than the rest
(A kind which, upon trial,
They have found to be the best)
Comes down—still down—and down
With its centre on the crown
Of a mountain’s eminence,
While its wide circumference
In easy drapery falls
Over hamlets, over halls,
Wherever they may be—
O‘er the strange woods—o’er the sea—
Over spirits on the wing—
Over every drowsy thing—
And buries them up quite
In a labyrinth of light—
And then, how deep!—O, deep!
Is soaring in the skies,
With the tempests as they toss,
Like—almost any thing—
Or a yellow Albatross.
^a
They use that moon no more
For the same end as before—
Videlicet
^t
a tent—
Which I think extravagant:
Its atomies, however,
Into a shower dissever,
Of which those butterflies,
Of Earth, who seek the skies,
And so come down again
(Never-contented things!)
Have brought a specimen
Upon their quivering wings.

In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
“Whose heart-strings are a lute;”
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
²
And the giddy stars (so legends tell)
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.

 

Tottering above
In her highest noon,
The enamoured moon
Blushes with love,
While, to listen, the red levin
(With the rapid Pleiads, even,
Which were seven,)
Pauses in Heaven.

 

And they say (the starry choir
And the other listening things)
That Israfeli’s fire
Is owing to that lyre
By which he sits and sings—
The trembling living wire
Of those unusual strings.

 

But the skies that angel trod,
Where deep thoughts are a duty—
Where Love’s a grown up God—
Where the Houri glances are
Imbued with all the beauty
Which we worship in a star.

Therefore, thou art not wrong,
Israfeli, who despisest
An unimpassioned song;
To thee the laurels belong,
Best bard, because the wisest!
Merrily live, and long!

 

The ecstasies above
With thy burning measures suit—
Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,
With the fervour of thy lute—
Well may the stars be mute!

 

Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours;
Our flowers are merely—flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.

 

If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky.

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!
³

At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And, softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.
The rosemary nods upon the grave;
The lily lolls upon the wave;
Wrapping the fog about its breast,
The ruin moulders into rest;
Looking like Lethe,
^c
see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not, for the world, awake.
All Beauty sleeps!—and lo! where lies
(Her casement open to the skies)
Irene, with her Destinies!

 

Oh, lady bright! can it be right—
This window open to the night?
The wanton airs, from the tree-top,
Laughingly through the lattice drop—
The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,
Flit through thy chamber in and out,
And wave the curtain canopy
So fitfully—so fearfully—
Above the closed and fringed lid

‘Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid,
That, o‘er the floor and down the wall,
Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall!
Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?
Why and what art thou dreaming here?
Sure thou art come o’er far-off seas,
A wonder to these garden trees!
Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress!
Strange, above all, thy length of tress,
And this all solemn silentness!

 

The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
Which is enduring, so be deep!
Heaven have her in its sacred keep!
This chamber changed for one more holy,
This bed for one more melancholy,
I pray to God that she may lie
Forever with unopened eye,
While the dim sheeted ghosts go by!

 

My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
As it is lasting, so be deep!
Soft may the worms about her creep!
Far in the forest, dim and old,
For her may some tall vault unfold—
Some vault that oft hath flung its black
And winged panels fluttering back,
Triumphant, o‘er the crested palls,
Of her grand family funerals—
Some sepulchre, remote, alone,
Against whose portal she hath thrown,
In childhood, many an idle stone—
Some tomb from out whose sounding door
She ne’er shall force an echo more,
Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!
It was the dead who groaned within.

Once
it smiled a silent dell
Where the people did not dwell;
They had gone unto the wars,
Trusting to the mild-eyed stars,
Nightly, from their azure towers,
To keep watch above the flowers,
In the midst of which all day
The red sun-light lazily lay.
Now
each visiter shall confess
The sad valley’s restlessness.
Nothing there is motionless—
Nothing save the airs that brood
Over the magic solitude.
Ah, by no wind are stirred those trees
That palpitate like the chill seas
Around the misty Hebrides!
^d
Ah, by no wind those clouds are driven
That rustle through the unquiet Heaven
Uneasily, from morn till even,
Over the violets there that lie
In myriad types of the human eye—
Over the lilies there that wave
And weep above a nameless grave!
They wave:—from out their fragrant tops
Eternal dews come down in drops.
They weep:—from off their delicate stems
Perennial tears descend in gems.

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a 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.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

 

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
^e
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathèd friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.

Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

 

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye—
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.