Complete Tales & Poems
Page 143
III
Ah! ever I behold
Thy dreamy, passionate eyes,
Blue as the languid skies
Hung with the sunset’s fringe of gold;
Now strangely clear thine image grows,
And olden memories
Are startled from their long repose
Like shadows on the silent snows
When suddenly the night-wind blows
Where quiet moonlight lies.
IV
Like music heard in dreams,
Like strains of harps unknown,
Of birds forever flown—
Audible as the voice of streams
That murmur in some leafy dell,
I hear thy gentlest tone,
And Silence cometh with her spell
Like that which on my tongue doth dwell,
When tremulous in dreams I tell
My love to thee alone!
V
In every valley heard,
Floating from tree to tree,
Less beautiful to me,
The music of the radiant bird,
Than artless accents such as thine
Whose echoes never flee!
Ah! how for thy sweet voice I pine:—
For uttered in thy tones benign
(Enchantress!) this rude name of mine
Doth seem a melody!
ALONE
FROM childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I lov’d, I lov’d alone.
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
* * *
1 Private reasons—some of which have reference to the sin of plagiarism, and others to the date of Tennyson’s first poems—have induced me, after some hesitation, to republish these, the crude compositions of my earliest boyhood. They are printed verbatim, without alteration from the original edition, the date of which is too remote to be judiciously acknowledged.
E. A. P.
2 A star was discovered by Tycho Brahe, which appeared suddenly in the heavens, attained in a few days a brilliancy surpassing that of Jupiter, then as suddenly disappeared, and has never been seen since.
3 On Santa Maura—olim Deucadia.
4 Sappho.
5 This flower is much noticed by Lewenhoeck and Tournefort. The bee feeding upon its blossom becomes intoxicated.
6 Clytia—The Chrysanthemum Peruvianum, or, to employ a better-known term, the turnsol—which turns continually toward the sun, covers itself, like Peru, the country from which it comes, with dewy clouds which cool and refresh its flowers during the most violent heat of the day.—B. de St. Pierre.
7 There is cultivated in the king’s garden at Paris, a species of serpentine aloes without prickles, whose large and beautiful flower exhales a strong odor of the vanilla, during the time of its expansion, which is very short. It does not blow till toward the month of July—you then perceive it gradually open its petals—expand them—fade and die.—St. Pierre.
8 There is found, in the Rhone, a beautiful lily of the Valisnerian kind. Its stem will stretch to the length of three or four feet, thus preserving its head above water in the swellings of the river.
9 The Hyacinth.
10 It is a fiction of the Indians that Cupid was first seen floating in one of these down the river Ganges, and that he loves the cradle of his childhood.
11 And golden vials full of odors, which are the prayers of the saints.—Rev. St. John.
12 The Humanitarians held that God was to be understood as having really a human form.—Vide Clarke’s Sermon, vol. i., page 26, fol. edit.
The drift of Milton’s argument leads him to employ language which would appear, at first sight, to verge upon their doctrine; but it will be seen immediately that he guards himself against the charge of having adopted one of the most ignorant errors of the dark ages of the church.—Dr. Sumner’s Notes on Milton’s Christian Doctrine.
This opinion, in spite of many testimonies to the contrary, could never have been very general. Andeus, a Syrian of Mesopotamia, was condemned for the opinion as heretical. He lived in the beginning of the fourth century. His disciples were called Anthropmorphites.—Vide Du Pin.
Among Milton’s minor poems are these lines:
Dicite sacrorum præsides nemorum Deæ, &c.
Quis ille primus cujus ex imagine
Natura solers finxit humanum genus?
Eternus, incorruptus, æquævus polo,
Unusque et universus exemplar Dei.
And afterward:
Non cui profundum Cæcitas lumen dedit
Dircæus augur vidit hunc alto sinu, &c.
13 Seltsumen Tochter Jovis
Seinem Schosskinde
Der Phantasie.—Goethe.
14 Sightless—too small to be seen.—Legge.
15 I have often noticed a peculiar movement of the fire-flies;—they will collect in a body and fly off, from a common centre, into innumerable radii.
16 Therasæa, or Therasea, the island mentioned by Seneca, which, in a moment, arose from the sea to the eyes of astonished mariners.
17 Some star which, from the ruin’d roof
Of shak’d Olympus, by mischance, did fall.—Milton.
18 Voltaire, in speaking of Persepolis, says: “Je connois bien l’admiration qu’inspirent ces ruines—mais un palais érigé au pied d’une chaine des rochers sterils—peut il être un chef-d’œuvre des arts?”
19 “Oh! the wave!”—Ula Deguisi is the Turkish appellation; but, on its own shores, it is called Bahar Loth, or Almotanah. There were undoubtedly more than two cities engulfed in the “dead sea.” In the valley of Siddim were five—Adrah, Zeboin, Zoar, Sodom, and Gomorrah. Stephen of Byzantium mentions eight, and Strabo thirteen (engulfed),—but the last is out of all reason.
It is said [Tacitus, Strabo, Josephus, Daniel of St. Saba, Nau, Mundrell, Troilo, D’Arvieux], that after an excessive drought, the vestiges of columns, walls, etc., are seen above the surface. At any season, such remains may be discovered by looking down into the transparent lake, and at such distances as would argue the existence of many settlements in the space now usurped by the “Asphaltites.”
20 Eyraco—Chaldea.
21 I have often thought I could distinctly hear the sound of the darkness as it stole over the horizon.
22 Fairies use flowers for their charactery.—Merry Wives of Windsor.
23 In Scripture is this passage—“The sun shall not harm thee by day, nor the moon by night.” It is perhaps not generally known that the moon, in Egypt, has the effect of producing blindness to those who sleep with the face exposed to its rays, to which circumstance the passage evidently alludes.
24 The albatross is said to sleep on the wing.
25 I met with this idea in an old English tale, which I am now unable to obtain, and quote from memory.—“The verie essence and, as it were, springe-heade and origine of all musiche is the verie pleasaunte sounde which the trees of the forest do make when they growe.”
26 The wild bee will not sleep in the shade if there be moonlight.
The rhyme in this verse, as in one about sixty lines before,
has an appearance of affectation. It is, however, imitated from Sir W. Scott, or rather from Claud Halcro—in whose mouth I admired its effect:
Oh! were there an island,
Tho’ ever so wild
Where woman might smile, and
No man be beguil’d, etc.
27 With the Arabians there is a medium between Heaven and Hell, where men suffer no punishment, but yet do not attain that tranquil and even happiness which they suppose to be characteristic of heavenly enjoyment.
Un no rompido sueno—
Un dia puro—allegre—libre
Quiera—
Libre de amor—de zelo—
De odio—de esperanza—de rezelo.—Luis Ponce de Leon.
Sorrow is not excluded from “Al Aaraaf,” but it is that sorrow which the living love to cherish for the dead, and which, in some minds, resembles the delirium of opium. The passionate excitement of Love and the buoyancy of spirit attendant upon intoxication are its less holy pleasures—the price of which, to those souls who make choice of “Al Aaraaf” as their residence after life, is final death and annihilation.
28 There be tears of perfect moan
Wept for thee in Helicon.—Milton.
29 It was entire in 1687—the most elevated spot in Athens.
30 Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the Queen of Love.—Marlowe.
31 Pennon—for opinion.—Milton.
32 Mrs Marie Louise Shew.
33 This poem is said to have been suggested by Mrs. Helen Stannard.—Ed.
34 In climes of mine imagining apart?—ED.
35 Query “fervor”?—ED.
EDGAR ALLAN POE was born in Boston in 1809 and raised in Virginia. He attended schools in England, Scotland and Virginia, and at the age of twenty-one was expelled from West Point. Poe’s early work as a writer went unrecognized and he was forced to earn his living on newspapers, working as an editor in Richmond, Philadelphia and New York. Although he was respected as a literary critic, his poetry and short stories were neglected until the publication of The Raven and Other Poems in 1845. Poe’s life and personality have attracted almost as much attention as his writings. The circumstances of his life were further complicated by the ill health of his young bride, his cousin Virginia Clemm. He died a few years after her in 1849.