Dicebant mihi…: ‘My companions told me I might find some little alleviation of my misery, in visiting the grave of my beloved’; Poe’s English translation, from the Latin, of an elegy of second-century Baghdad poet Ben Zaïat. In the nineteenth century the name ‘Berenice’ had four syllables, rhyming with ‘icy’.
the treatise … impossibile est: Curio’s On the size of the Blessed Kingdom of God, Augustine’s City of God, and Tertullian’s On the Flesh of Christ all deal with the mysterious relation between the material and the spiritual worlds. According to Tertullian’s famous paradox, ‘The Son of God has died, it is to be believed because it is incredible; and, buried, He is risen, it is sure because it is impossible.’
Mademoiselle Sallé… des idées: in the eighteenth century Marie Sallé was said to dance so expressively that all her steps were feelings; the narrator adapts this praise to claim that all Berenicë’s teeth were ideas.
Morella
First published in the Southern Literary Messenger for April 1835, this early exploration of metempsychosis was collected in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).
Sympos.: at the climax of Plato’s Symposium (211 b), Socrates recalled his teacher Diotima’s vision of unity as the ‘soul of beauty’. The translation is Poe’s own.
Presburg: because of its ancient university, Pressburg in Hungary (now Bratislava in Slovakia) was rumoured to be a centre of black magic.
Hinnom became Ge-Henna: Hinnom was, according to Jeremiah 19: 5, a place near Jerusalem where children were sacrificed to the pagan god Moloch. In its generalized form as ‘Gehenna’, the name means simply ‘hell’.
The mild Pantheism … mentioned them: the paragraph alludes to various theories of the self. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) treated as substantial the consciousness that Kant had insisted was only a logical presupposition of thought. While not truly pantheistic, the resulting Fichtean ‘Ego’ was like God ubiquitous and omniscient. Fichte’s disciple Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) extended these theories, especially with respect to Nature. According to his theory of identity, subjectivity and objectivity together constituted the Universe, making the Real and the Ideal one in the Absolute. The Pythagoreans, followers of the Greek mathematician from the sixth century BC, believed among other things in palingenesia or reincarnation. The sentences on John Locke summarize arguments from Bk. 2, ch. 27 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).
the Teian … Mecca: the references imply the triumph of mortality. Unlike Morella, the Greek poet Anacreon of Teos sang optimistically of love’s victory over time. Pilgrims to Mecca were traditionally buried in clothes worn on their pilgrimage.
Ligeia
The greatest of the ‘women’ tales and Poe’s personal favourite among his short fiction, ‘Ligeia’ was first published in the Baltimore American Museum for September 1838. It was collected in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).
Glanvill: although the seventeenth-century Neoplatonist Joseph Glanvill believed strongly in the power of the will, the motto has not been found in his writings and may be Poe’s invention. The name ‘Ligeia’ is used variously by Virgil and Milton.
Ashtophet: a goddess of the Sidonians related to Ashtoreth, Astarte, Aphrodite, and Venus.
There is one dear topic … astrologers: in describing Ligeia, the narrator ranges widely through literature and myth. The most important allusions are to: Francis Bacon’s ‘Of Beauty’; the statue Venus de Medici, falsely attributed to Cleomenes; Democritus’ purported claim that truth is as deep as a well; and Castor and Pollux, the twin stars of the constellation Leda.
Lo!… Worm: published on its own in 1843, the poem ‘The Conqueror Worm’ was two years later added to a revised version of ‘Ligeia’.
the fair-haired … Tremaine: Rowena is the fairer of the two heroines in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.
The Man that was Used Up
First published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine for August 1839, this satire was collected in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).
Pleurez, pleurez…: Poe translated the motto, ‘Weep, weep, my eyes! It is no time to laugh | For half myself has buried the other half; from Le Cid, III. iii. 7–8. The ‘used up’ of the title can mean ‘badly treated’, as well as ‘exhausted’. The Kickapoo tribe was among those fighting in the Florida Indian Wars of 1839.
reasons: pronounced ‘raisins’ in Poe’s joke.
quorum pars magna fuit: ‘of which he was a great part’; from Virgil, Aeneid, ii. 6.
horresco referens: ‘I shudder recalling it’; ibid. ii. 204.
mandragora … yesterday: Shakespeare, Othello, III. iii. 330–3.
Man-Fred … Bas-Bleus: the excess of Byron’s romantic Manfred was both admired and parodied. A Man Friday is a devoted aide, after the native in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Bas-Bleu is French for ‘bluestocking’, a derogatory term for women interested in the arts.
man in the mask: the Man in the Iron Mask was a political prisoner in the Bastille. With his identity hidden, his aristocratic origins were the subject of popular speculation, especially in the novel of Alexandre Dumas.
scratch: a kind of wig. Although De L‘Orme is a fiction, many of those named in this section were real Philadelphia tradespeople.
The Fall of the House of Usher
First published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, for September 1830, this famous tale was collected in both Tules of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) and Tales (1845).
Usher: the source of the protagonist’s family name is uncertain. Poe’s mother acted with a couple named Usher, whose children were neurotic. Elsewhere, Poe alludes to Archbishop James Ussher, the respected though pedantic seventeenth-century biblical scholar, best remembered for dating Creation precisely in 4004 BC.
Son cæur…: ‘His heart is a suspended lute; it sounds as soon as it is touched’; adapted from the nineteenth-century lyricist Pierre-Jean de Béranger.
Von Weber: the early nineteenth-century German composer Carl Maria von Weber was best known for his representations of the supernatural, as in the Wolf Glen scene of his gothic opera Der Freischütz. His so-called ‘last waltz’ was actually by his friend Karl Gottlieb Reissiger.
Fuseli: the Swiss-born English painter John Henry Fuseli was best known for his depictions of the unconscious, as in The Nightmare (1785–90).
‘The Haunted Palace’: published separate!) in April 1839, the poem was included in all editions of the tale. According to Poe the central image is of ‘a mind haunted by phantoms—a disordered brain’.
n. 1 Watson… vol. v: Poe’s ‘authenticating’ note draws on the collected works of Richard Watson, Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge in the eighteenth century. Watson cites the works of Dr Thomas Percival and Abbé Lazzaro Spallanzani, and is himself the Bishop of Llandaff.
We pored … Maguntinae: all the books in Usher’s library, except the ‘Mad Trist’, are real, although many are so rare that Poe could have known them only second- or third-hand. Gresset, Machiavelli, Holberg, Tieck, and Campanella offer allegorical tales with optimistic and pessimistic views about contemporary society; Swedenborg’s vision of heaven and hell and Pomponius Mela’s geography are similarly Utopian, though both claim to be true. The palmistries of Robert Fludd, Joannes ab Indagine, and Marin Cureau de la Chambre involve Renaissance traditions of fortune-telling. The Directorium of Eymeric of Gironne instructs priests during the Spanish Inquisition, especially concerning forbidden books. The Vigiliae describes the vigils for the dead used in Mainz in 1500.
William Wilson
This tale first appeared in The Gift: a Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1840, which was actually issued earlier, in 1830. It was collected in Tules of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).
Pharonnida: the motto is not from the named work of William Chamberlayne, though the seventeenth-century play wright does speak of conscience in another of his plays.
Elah-Gabulus: the homosexual Roman emperor
Elagabalus or Heliogabalus was renowned for his cruelty.
Dr Bransby: at Stoke Newington near London, Poe himself studied at Manor House School under the Reverend John Bransby. Here and elsewhere in the tale, the details of Wilson’s life parallel those ot Poe’s own.
peine forte et dure: literally ‘strong and hard penally’, the legal term sentencing a person to be crushed to death.
Carthaginian medals: the exergue is the lower part of the emblem on the reverse of a coin. Poe seems to believe, from his misreading of a French encyclopaedia, that this part of the design lasts longer.
Oh, le bon temps…: ‘Oh, what a good time it was, that age of iron’; from Voltaire, ‘Le Mondain’.
the nineteenth… own nativity: Poe’s birthday was 19 January; and although born in 1809, to make himself seem younger he sometimes gave 1813 (or 1811) as the year of his birth.
key: here, tone or pitch of voice.
Eton: as Poe had no first-hand experience of this famous English public school, Wilson’s years there are less fully described than his earlier schooling.
Hemdes Alliais: Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes was a second-century rhetorician who, like his friend the emperor Hadrian, spent his wealth liberally on public buildings.
The Man of the Crowd
The tale appeared in both The Casket and [Burton’s] Gentleman’s Magazine tor December 183g. It was collected in Tales (1845).
Ce grand malheur…: ‘That great misfortune, not to be able to be alone’; from Les Caractères, by the seventeenth-century moralist Jean de la Bruyère.
αχλος …: ‘the mist that previously was upon them’; adapted from Homer, Iliad, v. 127.
Leibnitz… Gorgias: Poe’s opinion elsewhere varied on Leibniz, the seventeenth-century rationalist and co-inventor of calculus. The sophist Gorgias represents faulty rhetoric in the Socratic dialogue bearing his name.
Eupatrids: well-born, after hereditary nobles of Athens.
Retzsch: Friedrich Retzsch, nineteenth-century German artist, famous for his illustrations of Goethe’s Faust.
n. 1 Hortulus Animæ…: the rare sixteenth-century Ortulus anime cum oratiunculis of Johanna Grüningcr, whose illustrations Isaac D‘Israeli judged indecent.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Arguably the first detective story, this tale was published in Graham’s Magazine for April 1841. It was collected in Tales (1845).
Browne: from chapter V of Urn Burial by the seventeenth-century doctor and polymath. The first version of this extensively revised tale omitted the motto, but opened with a learned paragraph on the phrenological organ of ‘analysis’, similar to the discussion of phrenology at the beginning of ‘The Imp of the Perverse’.
Hoyle: in the eighteenth century, Edmund Hoyle published widely on the rules of card-playing. In revised forms, his books remain in print.
Bi-Purt Soul: since as early as Plato’s Symposium, philosophers have argued for the duality of the soul. One variation accounts for the Doppelgänger motive, common in Poe.
et id genus omne: ‘and all of that kind’. The whole discussion of the fictitious effeminate Chantilly suggests the narrator’s fears about the sexual ambiguity of his relation to Dupin; see David Van Leer, ‘Detecting Truth: The World of the Dupin Tales’, in Silverman (ed.), New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales, 69–79.
Epicurus … nebular cosmogony: in Eureka, his late essay on the universe, Poe associated the atomic theory of the ancient Greek philosopher with William Herschel’s eighteenth-century explanation of the universe in terms of the Orion nebula.
Perdidit…: ‘the first letter has lost its original sound’; from Ovid, Fasti, v.
métal d‘Alger: an inexpensive alloy used in place of silver. Napoleons are 20-franc gold pieces.
the head felt off: earlier versions continue ‘and rolled to some distance’. Most other of Poe’s many revisions to the description of the crime are less gruesome and concern only minor details.
Monsieur Jourdain: in Act 1, scene ii of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, the middle-class hero affects gentlemanly airs by calling for his dressing-gown (robe de chambre), ‘better to hear the |chamber| music’.
Vidoeq: in the nineteenth century, the reformed criminal François-Eugène Vidoeq headed the intelligence service under Napoleon, and later founded the first private detective agency. His 1828 Memoires whetted readers’ appetite for crime novels, and Vidoeq’s own moral ambiguity made him the model for the tortured avenger of subsequent detective fiction.
Je les ménageais: ‘I dealt with them tactfully ‘.
Cuvier: Georges Cuviei, nineteenth-century French natural historian.
Neufehatelish: countrified, after a remote French province.
Jardin des Piaules: the great Parisian Botanical Garden whose zoological displays anticipated evolutionary theory.
n. 1 “de nier…”: ‘to deny what is, and to explain what is not’; from Part VI, letter xi of Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Héloïse, an eighteenth-century novel exploring the témale inner conscience. The phallic implications of the paragraph’s ‘stamens’ and ‘codfish’ emasculate the Prefect.
Eleonora
The last of Poe’s ‘women’ tales, ‘Eleonora’ appeared in The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1842, available in autumn 1841.
Lully: “Under the protection of a specific form, the soul is safe.’ The reference, quoted in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, is to the trials of the biblical Job, as explicated by the thirteenth-century Spanish mystic Ramon Llull.
‘agressi… exploraturi’: ‘they were come into the sea of shades [Atlantic Ocean], to find out what is in it’. From Geographia Nubiensis, the Latin translation of the twelfth-century travel narrative of Arab scientist Al-Idrisi.
Oedipus: on arriving at Thebes, the Greek hero Oedipus solved the riddle of the sphinx, which refers to the stages of human maturation.
bard of Schiraz: the fourteenth-century Persian poet Shams ud-din Muhammad, known as Hafiz.
Helusion: variant for Elysium.
Hesper: Hesperia, the western region dominated by Hesperus, the evening star.
The Masque of the Red Death
This brief masterpiece first appeared in Graham’s Magazine for May 1842.
Red Death: although its name recalls the Black Plague of the Middle Ages, the Red Death is imaginary. Cholera, however, was a pressing reality in the nineteenth century, and the United States suffered two serious outbreaks during Poe’s lifetime.
‘Hernani’: Victor Hugo’s 1830 play of political and romantic intrigue in the reign of Charles V of Spain.
a thief in the night: Christ in His second coming will reappear like a thief in the night: 1 Thessalonians 5: 2.
The Pit and the Pendulum
This tale first appeared in The Gift. A Christinas and New Year’s Present, MDCCCXLIII, available earlier in 1842.
Impia … at Paris: the motto reads: ‘Here the wicked mob, unappeased, long cherished a hatred of blood. Now that the fatherland is saved, and the cave of death demolished, where grim death has been, life and health appear.’ In the French Revolution, the Jacobins were extreme radicals responsible for the excesses of the Reign of Terror. Their liberal politics were the opposite of those of the reactionary Spanish Inquisition.
inquisitorial voices: Poe draws on American anti-Catholic paranoia in the nineteenth century, especially about the long-standing ‘inquisitions’ by which the Church searched out heresy. Although not historically precise, the tale correctly suggests that the Inquisition was particularly harsh in Spain, where it was centred in Toledo, and was halted temporarily in 1808 by Napoleonic troops under General Colbert, Comte de Lasalle.
The Mystery of Marie Rogêt
This second of the Dupin tales appeared in William Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion in three instalments—November and December 1842, and February 1843. It was collected in his 1845 Tales. Poe’s use of a fictional character to solve a real-life murder affords the tale
its special interest, and led Dorothy Savers to declare it his finest work. The facts were essentially as Poe indicated. In July 1841 the shop-girl Mary Rogers was found floating dead in the Hudson River. Sensationalizing journalists converted this commonplace incident into a media event by emphasizing its mysterious elements, implying that Rogers was the victim of gang violence. When Poe began his account, the death remained unexplained. His early instalments reprinted various newspaper articles in an edited but fairly accurate form to expose their faulty logic and implicit xenophobia. While he was preparing his final instalment—in which Dupin exposed the complicity of Rogers’s secret lover—the innkeeper Mrs Loss (called Madame Deluc by Poc) confessed on her death-bed to having assisted in the abortion during which Rogers died. Faced with this new evidence, Poe quickly altered his final instalment and revised the whole tale more extensively for its republication in book form. As a result, the tale offers fundamentally two explanations: the favoured is Poe’s original solution involving the secret lover; the second, barely sketched in, transforms the lover into the abortionist of Mrs Loss’s account, without ever actually mentioning her confession or what it implied about Rogers’s death. For a detailed account of Poe’s use of his sources, see John Walsh, Poe the Detective: The Curium Circumstances behind ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1008).
Selected Tales (Oxford World's Classics) Page 45
