A wingèd odor went away.
Wanderers in that happy valley,
Through two luminous windows, saw
Spirits moving musically,
To a lute’s well-tunèd law,
Round about a throne where, sitting
(Porphyrogene!)
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.
And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace-door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch’s high estate.
(Ah, let us mourn!—for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him desolate!)
And round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.
And travellers now, within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms, that move fantastically
To a discordant melody,
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh—but smile no more.
THE CONQUEROR WORM
Lo! ’tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly—
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!
That motley drama—oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And the angels sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
Out—out are the lights—out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy “Man,”
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
EDGAR ALLAN POE—A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The life of Edgar Allan Poe was, like so many of his tales, short, poignant and strangely haunted. Afflicted by a nervous disorder which manifested itself in alcoholism, Poe died at the early age of forty. Yet he left behind him a literary legacy, particularly in the field of the short story, unrivaled to this day.
Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, the son of itinerant actors Betty and David Poe, and after an early childhood spent in a succession of shabby dressing rooms was orphaned at the age of three. Taken in by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, the child grew up under the care of Mrs. Allan and her elderly servant Nancy. In 1815 John Allan took his family to England and Scotland, and in 1816 Edgar was enrolled in a London boarding school. But Mrs. Allan was contracting tuberculosis and John Allan’s business ventures were going badly, so the family returned to Richmond in 1820, moving into a cottage facing Clay Street. Edgar’s education continued, first at Joseph W. Clarke’s school and then at an academy run by William Burke.
A fine athlete—he set a broad-jump record of 21 feet 6 inches—and possessed of a brilliant mind, the young man seemed to have an assured future. Yet he was already something of a brooder. He enjoyed long walks with his poetically inclined older brother, William Henry, and scrawled numerous love poems delivered by his sister Rosalie to the girls of Miss Mackenzie’s Seminary.
His relations with his foster father were never good, and were not improved by the boy’s unsuccessful stint as a clerk in John Allan’s store. In 1826 he won grudging consent to enter the University of Virginia, but received minimum financial help. The difficulties of his financial situation at college led him to drink, and eventually to gamble. He left the university at the end of one year, $2,000 in debt, though among the top students in scholastic standing.
Returning to Richmond, he suffered a harsh disappointment. He had fallen in love with a Richmond girl named Elmira Royster, and had written her letters from college. But Elmira’s parents had intercepted the letters and Elmira, assuming he had forgotten her, had become engaged to another man. Out of his heartbreak he wrote a long poem, Tamerlane, destined to become his first published work.
Friction with his foster father came to a head soon after, and following an angry argument Poe was forced to leave home. He headed for Boston, the city of his birth, and New England’s budding literary center. For six weeks he tried unsuccessfully to obtain work and on May 26, 1827, enlisted in the U. S. Army under the name of Edgar A. Perry. Poe described himself as 22 years of age, a native of Boston, 5’ 8” in height, with gray eyes, brown hair and a fair complexion, and listed his occupation as a clerk. Assigned first to Fort Independence in Boston Harbor for training, he was presently transferred to the Quartermaster’s Office. Meantime, in midsummer of 1827, through the offices of a Boston acquaintance, he got his first book printed. Little more than a pamphlet, wrapped in a buff cover and containing some 40 pages, it bore the title Tamerlane and Other Poems. The author’s name appeared nowhere; the title page simply indicated that the work was “By a Bostonian.”
On November 8, 1827, Poe’s company boarded the Waltham in Boston Harbor and ten days later docked at Fort Moultrie, off Charleston, South Carolina. While stationed there, he started work on his first symbolic poem, longer than Tamerlane and bolder in concept, calling it Al Aaraaf.
Despite a promotion to Regimental Sergeant Major, Poe decided the army was not for him, and confessing his true name and identity, asked for a discharge. It was granted on condition that he achieve a reconciliation with his foster father. When John Allan refused, Poe suffered a nervous collapse and was taken to the post hospital with a fever. Then on February 28, 1829, Frances Allan died, and John Allan, acceding to his wife’s last request, agreed to see his foster son again. The discharge from the army was arranged, and the two men made a truce. It did not last long, however, and in May Poe left his father’s home to stay with his widowed aunt Mrs. Maria Clemm and her young daughter Virginia. Meantime, Al Aaraaf was published by a Baltimore firm and received considerable critical notice.
In the summer of 1830, the young poet turned back once more to the idea of a military career. Taking entrance examinations for West Point, he gained admission, and immediately regretted it. He fell into the same drinking and gambling habits that he had surrendered to at the University of Virginia. Once more John Allan, now remarried, refused to pay his foster son’s bills. Early in 1831, Poe was court-martialed and discharged.
He left the Point for nearby New York, where he succeeded in arranging for publication of a book of his poems, after which he again took trunk and carpetbag to his aunt Mrs. Clemm in Baltimore. The death of
his brother William Henry had the effect of strengthening his dependence on Mrs. Clemm. A love affair with a Baltimore belle named Mary Starr ended in a scandal caused by Poe’s drinking. Shortly afterward John Allan cut his foster son out of his will, and Mrs. Clemm, her daughter Virginia and their wayward poet cousin found themselves in serious straits.
But in 1833 a sudden new gleam of hope shone. On October 12 of that year the Baltimore weekly, Saturday Visiter, published a short story that had won the periodical’s $50 prize—MS. Found in a Bottle, by Edgar A. Poe. More important than the money was the critical acclaim for the 24-year-old author. Very soon Poe was earning money by writing. The Southern Literary Messenger published Berenice, Shadow, and other stories. But at the very time that his career was beginning to flourish, Poe started experimenting with opium, under the influence of English poets Elizabeth Barrett and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Nevertheless, Thomas Willis White, publisher of the Southern Literary Messenger, invited Poe to join his staff, and the young poet, now a short-story writer, left Baltimore for Richmond.
By this time he was deeply in love with Virginia Clemm, fourteen years old, beautiful, and a worshiper of her brilliant cousin. His first few weeks in Richmond were spent in alternate states of excitement and depression, and in September he came to a decision, returned to Baltimore and took out a marriage license.
Poe and Virginia Clemm were married on May 16, 1836, and spent a two-week honeymoon in Petersburg. Once more, it seemed as if a secure and happy future lay ahead. But once more, stability was short-lived. Poe took to staying out all night, scandalizing Richmond with his neglect of his young wife and flagrant attention to other women. At the same time his habits affected his work, and by the end of 1836, Mr. White was disillusioned with his new editor. On January 3, 1837, Poe took leave of his readership, and moved with Mrs. Clemm and Virginia to New York, where he felt sure his contacts would be able to provide him with a means of earning a living. However, New York was in the depth of a depression, and once again Mrs. Clemm became the sole support of the family, eking a scant living for the three from a boarding house.
In June 1837, Harper’s accepted Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which it published the following year, while The American Monthly accepted Poe’s Von Jung, the Mystific. However, the Poes still had little money, and in August 1838, Poe decided to try his luck in Philadelphia. The family settled into a small house on Coates Street, near Fairmount Park, and existence became as normal as it ever was to be. After trying for months to find regular employment with one of the periodicals, Poe began to turn to whatever kind of writing was offered. In April 1839 he took out a copyright on a textbook about shells, The Conchologist’s First Book, which, like his other hack work, netted him very little financial gain. To add to his problems, Virginia’s health was now beginning to fail.
In July 1839, Poe wrote to William E. Burton, asking for employment on The Gentleman’s Magazine, issuing from Philadelphia, and received a job offering $10 a week for two hours editorial work per day. He accepted. Besides numerous book reviews, he contributed stories, including The Fall of the House of Usher. Late in December of that year, Poe realized one of his dearest ambitions, the publication of 25 of his stories, in two handsome volumes entitled Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, published by the firm of Lea and Blanchard. Poe then began to think of a magazine of his own, an idea which rapidly hardened into a resolve. In January 1841, he launched The Penn Magazine. It was a financial failure, and Poe was forced to accept an editorial position with George Rexe Graham, who had recently bought The Gentleman’s Magazine. In the issue of April 1841, he published the world’s first detective story, and one of the greatest—Murders in the Rue Morgue.
Under Poe’s editorship, The Gentleman’s Magazine experienced a promising rise in circulation, and for the moment Poe was free of financial strain, with an annual salary of $800 a year—in that era a respectable income—plus fees for his stories and poems. But one evening, toward the middle of January, 1842, Virginia was stricken with a tubercular attack. Poe again was filled with despair and began to drink heavily. His relations with co-workers became strained and finally impossible, and Poe was dismissed from the staff in May of 1842, although he still continued to publish in Gentleman’s.
Recovering from this breakdown, Poe exerted himself once again to gain subscriptions for his own Penn Magazine, now to be called The Stylus. But he was sick and delirious much of the time and the doctor was called as often to attend him as Virginia. For seven weeks he remained bedridden.
In early 1843, The Tell-Tale Heart, Lenore, and an important critical work, The Rationale of Verse, appeared in a new and short-lived magazine, The Pioneer, for which Poe was paid $10 a story. At the same time The Gold-Bug ran in another periodical and was widely reprinted. Momentarily his enthusiasm for The Stylus returned, but once again he fell into his drinking habit, and even though he continued to write in fitfully brilliant fashion—The Raven was finished in early 1844—the onset of disintegration was apparent.
On April 6, 1844, Poe decided to try his luck again in New York. Leaving Mrs. Clemm to dispose of what little they had left behind, he boarded a train with Virginia. They rented an apartment at 130 Greenwich Street, and following a visit to The New York Sun, Poe’s remarkable Balloon-Hoax was perpetrated. The publicity and profit got Poe some free-lance work, enabling him to bring Mrs. Clemm to New York.
Once again things appeared to be well. Momentarily Virginia’s health bloomed. Poe stopped drinking and wrote steadily. On January 29, 1845, The Raven appeared in The New York Mirror, where Poe had been working for three months. Overnight, Poe’s reputation as a poet, as well as a story writer and a critic, was made. On February 22, he left the Mirror and joined the staff of the newly formed Broadway Journal. He received $1 a column for his writing and was able to move his family to a small apartment at 195 Broadway, nearer the newspaper office.
In the summer Poe had a volume called Tales published by Wiley and Putnam. The following November, the same firm brought out a companion volume, The Raven and Other Poems, a book containing 31 poems and selling at 31 cents a copy. Poe was now receiving royalties for the first time in his life, and by October 1845 had acquired ownership of the Journal.
But just as he seemed on the brink of success, Virginia’s health began to fail again, and Poe turned again to drink. Also, just at this time he made the acquaintance of Mrs. Frances S. Osgood, a new poet, and by the end of the summer rumors spread of an affair between the two.
The Journal folded with the issue of January 3, 1846, but Poe was soon busy with a series of articles on New York personalities, The Literati, for Godey’s Lady’s Book. In an effort to help Virginia recover her health, the family left Turtle Bay in midsummer of 1846, for a cottage in Fordham, a village about 13 miles north of the city (now East 192nd Street).
Just at this time Poe was being discovered in France. Charles Baudelaire, himself a young poet, read a translation of Poe’s The Black Cat published in a Paris newspaper. Fascinated with the writing, Baudelaire undertook translations of his own, and placed Poe permanently among the best-known foreign writers in France.
On the night of January 30, 1847, the long-drawn-out tragedy of Virginia Poe came to an end. Virginia was 24 when she died. Poe broke down completely. Mrs. Shew, a widow who had nursed Virginia through the last months of her illness, stayed on to care for Poe. Gradually he recovered enough to resume his free-lance writing.
Finally, on May 23, 1848, George P. Putnam, late of Wiley and Putnam, decided to risk publication of 500 copies of Poe’s disquisition on the theory of the universe, Eureka, for which the author received an advance of $14. Although this volume was not widely popular, it ultimately found purchasers, and an additional printing of 250 copies was required. Ulalume, which has been called his most characteristic poem, also belongs to this period.
At this time Poe, then 39 years old, met and began courting Mrs. Helen Whitman, 45-year-old widow of a young lawyer from Mas
sachusetts. The two wrote love poetry to one another and on September 21, 1848, Poe presented himself at her door in Providence to ask for her hand. On December 23 the marriage banns were published, but the marriage never took place. Mrs. Whitman was informed that Poe had also been courting Mrs. Annie Richmond, whom he had met in Richmond in the fall of that year, while in the city obtaining subscriptions for The Stylus. Also, it seemed there had been another drinking spree during which Mrs. Richmond had shown Poe the sympathy he thrived on. Mrs. Whitman broke off the engagement.
Although plagued with severe headaches after his return from Providence, Poe set to work again. And again, things went well for a time. On February 7, 1849, he finished Hop-Frog, which was printed by the Boston weekly, The Flag of Our Union. It paid him $5 a page, and Poe was soon contributing regularly. In April Von Kempelen and His Discovery appeared, and two weeks later, the poem, For Annie. On July 7, Poe’s tribute to Mrs. Clemm, To My Mother, was published. But the pressures of work and the rumors still circulating about him and Annie sent Poe into another breakdown, through which Mrs. Clemm again nursed him.
In late April 1849, Poe received a letter from Mr. Edward H. N. Patterson of Oquawka, Illinois, a complete stranger, offering to finance a magazine on which Poe would enjoy full editorial control. To get the magazine started, Mr. Patterson proposed a three-month lecture tour by Poe. Poe undertook the tour, but it turned out disastrously, ending in another breakdown, accompanied by attempts at suicide. Recovering once more, he returned to Richmond where he gave a brilliant lecture at the Exchange Hotel, on August 17, on The Poetic Principle.
In Richmond he took the opportunity to visit Elmira Royster, now a rich widow. Poe’s charm was as magnetic as ever. Soon afterward their engagement was announced. But Elmira began to suspect that Poe was interested primarily in her money and called off the engagement. Poe broke down again. Elmira, who sincerely loved him in spite of everything, finally consented to the marriage. The wedding was set for the following October. But for the last time, his fatal inclination intervened. Poe’s exact movements are unclear, but on the morning of September 28, he got off a train in Baltimore drunk and in a high fever. He made his way to the house of a friend, Dr. Nathan C. Brooks. Not finding the doctor at home, Poe wandered off and was neither seen nor heard of for five days.
Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe Page 124
