Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

by Edgar Allan Poe; Benjamin F. Fisher

  18 (p. 255) play unto its riddle the Œdipus: In Greek mythology, the Sphinx, a horrifying monster, ate all passersby who could not solve its riddle, “What animal goes on four feet in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?” Oedipus correctly answered that a human crawls on hands and knees as a child, walks upright in adulthood, and uses a cane in old age.

  19 (p. 261) The Masque of the Red Death: A masque is a brief but elaborate play originally intended for performance at a royal court (especially popular in Great Britain from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries). Masques incorporated music, dance, poetic drama, and ornate costumes, and often had origins in myth or allegory. Poe’s tale includes all of these elements. Double-masqueing is used for the overall tale and for the stylized action of Prospero and the masquer in the conclusion.

  20 (p. 261) The “Red Death”: The twice-repeated “Red Death” may indicate that the term has special significance for Prospero and his followers: They alone give a negative name to what may be one of life’s most firm realities—that is, blood. Blood’s association with life and death, and those in turn with change and time, is what this group wish to evade.

  21 (p. 262) But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held ... bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all: Varied interpretations of the “meaning” of the seven chambers are possible, the most likely being that they represent the seven stages of human life from birth to death. The primary blackness in the seventh chamber most probably symbolizes death; the accompanying red illumination, with its obvious tie to blood, may likewise represent sexuality as the originator of life, but also, in colloquial parlance, hint of “dying” or sexual climax.

  22 (p. 265) It was in the blue room where stood the prince, with a group of pale courtiers by his side: Significantly, Prospero is in the blue room (suggesting that his notion is naive youth’s feeling of invincibility) when he initiates the action that will bring about the climax of the tale. Blue here suggests a pleasant dawn—in this context, of life. A common interpretation of the color scheme in the tale is that it symbolizes a progression from birth or youth on to death. The scarlet chamber’s color symbolizes blood and perhaps sex, which leads to new blood (life). The black chamber symbolizes death.

  23 (p. 266) And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all: Fittingly, the end—of the fantasy cherished by Prospero and his followers, and of all life—occurs in the black and red chamber, where the color scheme and the clock (decor) represent the inevitability of life’s processes.

  24 (p. 267) Impia tortorum longas hic turba furores /... [Quatrain composed for the gates of a market to be erected upon the site of the Jacobin Club House at Paris]: No gates or inscription were used for this market. The Latin translates as, “Here the wicked troop of torturers / Insatiable, maintained their long-enduring lusts for innocent blood. / Now, the fatherland saved and the dungeon of death destroyed, / Life and safety abound where death once ruled.”

  25 (p. 280) It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies: This is a reference to the Peninsular War (1808-1814), fought when Spain, with the help of the English, rebelled against French domination under Napoleon I; during the war, General Antoine Chevalier Louis Colbert, comte de Lasalle, and his troops penetrated Toledo.

  26 (p. 301) executing a series of curvets and caracols: Curvet and caracole are terms from horsemanship for complicated steps and turns. Perhaps Legrand’s type of erratic dance here alludes to tarantism (see the epigraph to this tale and the footnote on p. 286).

  27 (p.309) “Well, a kid then”... “Captain Kidd”: The “kid-Kidd” pun is typical of Poe’s wordplay. Captain William Kidd (1645?-1701 ) was a Scottish sea captain who migrated to New York, eventually turned pirate, and was captured and hanged. Legends of his immense buried treasure continue to resurface.

  28 (p. 310) “53‡‡†305)) ... 188; ‡?;” [coded message]: The message in the cipher, or cryptograph, which is somewhat inaccurate, is provided subsequently in the text.

  29 (p. 320) superstition, ... which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise.... I mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be remembered: The narrator may be recalling the superstition about black cats and the supernatural because he has recognized credibility in the belief. Thus Poe creates another irony among the many in his creative writings.

  30 (pp. 320-321) The fury of a demon instantly possessed me.... a more than fiendish malevolence.... I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity: The “demon-fiendish-damnable” context maintains the aura of supernaturalism hovering about this tale, as do the narrator’s ensuing thoughts about perversity.

  31 (p. 325) Goaded by the interference into a rage more than demoniacal: The narrator’s rage, like that mentioned earlier, once more aligns him with supernaturalism and damnation.

  32 (p. 325) I determined to wall it up in the cellar, as the monks of the Middle Ages are recorded to have walled up their victims: This allusion to monks in the Middle Ages recalls the immensely popular theme of live burial in Gothic fiction. Poe’s repeated use of live burial, however, may also relate to the very real paranoia of being buried alive at a time when embalming was not so widespread as it is now. Newspaper features concerning fear of premature burial appeared in the United States as late as the 1920s. Poe often uses live burials to symbolize mental disintegration in his characters, although he could also take a playful attitude toward this aspect of popular culture—for example, in “The Premature Burial.”

  33 (p. 327) But may God shield and deliver me from ... the demons that exult in the damnation: The word choices in this paragraph—“inhuman,” “hell,” “damned,” “demons,” “damnation”—echo those mentioned previously (see note 30, above). Thus they reinforce the fact that the narrator’s repetitions are verbal registers of his warped psyche, just as do his rapping on the wall and its outcome.

  34 (p. 330) The box in question ... could possibly contain nothing in the world but a copy of Leonardo’s “Last Supper”; and a copy of this very “Last Supper,” done by Rubini the younger, at Florence: The box is, of course, coffin-shaped, although one so shaped might be used to transport valuable paintings. The Last Supper is the renowned, frequently copied painting by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). The original was painted on a wall in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan. Rubini cannot be precisely identified; several Italian painters bore that name.

  35 (p. 330) I resolved to quiz him well, now and hereafter: Quiz means “to question closely,” but also, especially in Poe’s era, “to tease.” The narrator, like many of Poe’s others, “sees” incorrectly the events transpiring before him. Comparable are the narrators in “The Assignation,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” and “The Sphinx”; likewise the speakers in “The Raven” and “Ulalume: A Ballad.”

  36 (p. 341) the habitual use of morphine: Morphine may help to account for the mysterious circumstances that follow.

  37 (p. 349) There are certain themes ... which are too entirely horrible ... we should regard them with simple abhorrence: In this passage, the quoted phrase “pleasurable pain” has no definite source, but an approximate wording, “pleasing pain,” may come from English poet Edmund Spenser’s long poem The Faerie Queen (1590). Poe goes on to describe several “horrible themes”: Napoleon lost more than 20,000 men while crossing the half-frozen Berezina River during his retreat from Russia in November 1812; the Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755, killed more than 30,000; the London plague of 1655 killed 80,000; the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, beginning August 24, 1572, resulted in the deaths of 100,000 French Huguenots (Protestants); the Black Hole of Calcutta was an Indian site where 100 English prisoners were suffocated in a tiny prison.

  38 (p. 352) The Chirurgical Journal of Leipsic: No Chirurgical Journal from Leipsi
c (a city in Germany) has been found. This citation may be one of Poe’s hoaxes, especially since it is part of a comic tale.

  39 (p. 353) well-known and very extraordinary case ... a very profound sensation wherever it was made the subject of converse: Poe’s source was “The Buried Alive,” a terror tale in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (October 1821), a piece also cited in “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” Poe perhaps jokes at the expense of Blackwood’s tales of sensation, and at his own expense, too, because in his earlier tale Mr. Blackwood had counseled his listener to write tales about the sensations, listing several in which the central interest would indeed have been “a very profound sensation.”

  40 (p. 353) the numerous corps of body-snatchers with which London abounds: The reference is to the old practice of robbing graves for corpses to sell for medical dissections. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick Usher was reluctant to bury his sister in their isolated graveyard, fearing that she would be exhumed. English novelist Charles Dickens features a professional “resurrection man,” Jerry Cruncher, in A Tale of Two Cities (1859); Jerry sickens of his work, however, and turns to other occupations. Possibilities of premature burial were far more likely in Poe’s day than our own, and this lengthy paragraph bears out the intensity of such concerns.

  41 (p. 355) Conqueror Worm: This phrase also occurs in “Ligeia” and in a poem used in that tale, which was published separately as “The Conqueror Worm” in Graham’s Magazine (January 1843). Worms are mentioned in a more pleasant context in “The Sleeper.”

  42 (p. 361 ) “Buchan” I burned. I read no “Night Thoughts”—no fustian about church-yards —no bugaboo tales—such as this: Scottish physician William Buchan published Domestic Medicine; or The Family Physician (1769), which continued long acclaimed. “Night Thoughts” refers to British poet Edward Young’s The Complaint; or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742), which stands as an important “Graveyard School” poem—that is, a poem about death and pertinent customs. Bugaboo tales are stories about imaginary fears—for example, those regarding premature burial.

  43 (p. 361) There are moments when ... they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish: Poe adapted this paragraph from Horace Binney Wallace’s novel Stanley (1838), although he also knew firsthand William Beckford’s Oriental-Gothic novel Vathek (1786), in which Carathis, Vathek’s mother, is a witch who ultimately explores and is retained in the caverns of Eblis, ruler of the underworld. Afrasiab is the legendary evil king of Turan (western Turkistan), who betrayed Rustum, the Persian hero, to a horrible death rife with swords and spears; Rustum managed, however, to kill his enemy with an arrow. Oxus is the ancient name of the Amu Dar‘ya, a long river in central Asia.

  44 (p. 371) “Rochefoucault, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli, and to Campanella”: François de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) is a French author remembered for his Reflections (1665, 1678), a collection of moral epigrams. La Bougive is not identified, though some have argued that Poe really meant Jean de la Bruyère (1645-1696), whose detachment resembles Dupin’s. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) is renowned for outlining methods by which a prince may acquire power (The Prince, 1513). Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) is an Italian intellectual whose work Poe probably knew by way of citations and quotations in works of other writers; Campanella had the same ability as Dupin to perceive the thoughts and consequent actions of others.

  45 (p. 373) “he is merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are fools”: The Latin translates as “the undistributed middle.” The meaning here is that all poets are not fools. Here, more explicitly than elsewhere, perhaps, Poe emphasizes balance between rational intellectuality, represented by the mathematician, and imagination, represented by the poet. Dupin’s abilities in unraveling crime mysteries reveal that he embodies such balance. If he and the Minister D__ are brothers, maybe even twins, he can understandably comprehend his opponent’s thoughts and actions. Among those who cannot fathom in this way are the Prefect, Dupin’s companion-narrator, Roderick Usher, William Wilson the narrator, and the protagonists in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Assignation,” “Berenice,” “Morella,” “Ligeia,” and “The Sphinx.”

  46 (p. 374) “x2 + px was absolutely and unconditionally equal to q ... he will endeavor to knock you down”: This is a nonsensical mathematical formula, and the response of an informed mathematician may also serve as humor, insinuated here by Dupin—and behind his remark lurks the joker in Poe.

  47 (p.377) “In this rack, which had three or four compartments, were five or six visiting cards and a solitary letter”: The letter consists of a four-page sheet containing the text on page 1 and the address on page 4. These could be turned inside out and redirected, a fact that Dupin soon discovers to be the case. When Dupin sees the Minister’s personal seal and the apparent indifference of the Minister’s handling of the letter, he realizes how his customarily neat, orderly opponent had disguised the document, which the police never thought to examine.

  48 (p.379) “’Un dessein si funeste, l ... They are to be found in Crébillon’s ‘Atrée’”: “ ‘A plot so deadly, / if unworthy of Atreus, is worthy of Thyestes”’ (French); the quotation is from Atrée et Thyeste (1707), a tragic play by French dramatist Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon. Thyestes has seduced Atreus’ wife and plans to murder him. Knowing of this scheme, Atreus murders Thyestes’ sons and serves them to him at a banquet, after which Thyestes invokes a curse on the house of Atreus. Dupin’s implication is that the Minister D__ had not planned as carefully as he should have.

  49 (p. 381) When he had gone ... and excited in my bosom a feeling of mingled respect, interest, and admiration: In this and the preceding paragraph are additional resemblances to “The Fall of the House of Usher”: In that story the narrator, like this one, sees a person depart the mansion, not to be seen again. The “ushered me” phrase is identical with one in the earlier tale (where it seems to be a pun), and the presence of an “excessively ... pale woman” dressed in mourning attire may recall Madeline Usher and the funereal aspect of Roderick’s chamber. The lady’s departure shortly afterward is also reminiscent of Madeline’s passage through Roderick’s chamber.

  50 (p. 384) “You are young yet, my friend.... Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see”: These comments are ironic. The narrator does learn for himself what is going on within the mansion, although his unwitting perceptions are like those of many other Poe protagonists. Maillard’s counsel about hearing and seeing, notably the latter, make him near literary kin to Dupin (in “The Purloined Letter”), who sees through what mystifies others, and who is thought mad by some, according to his companion.

  51 (p. 386) Upon the whole ... all sorts of conventional customs: This sentence is similar to one in “The Masque of the Red Death,” as are some other features in the tale. Poe may have intended “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” to function, in part, as a parodying of “The Masque of the Red Death,” as it is of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Purloined Letter.” Such comic purpose also gives this late tale affinities with “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” because both suggest that Poe is having fun at the expense of his own methods and themes.

  52 (p. 389) “then there was Bouffon Le Grand ... Cicero ... Demosthenes ... and Lord Brougham’s from the mouth to the chin”: Bouffon Le Grand literally means “The Great Clown” in French; some Poe specialists think that Poe may also allude to Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788), a renowned French scientist who published a 44-volume work on natural history. Cicero refers to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106—43 B.C.), the renowned Roman orator and statesman. Demosthenes (384?—322 B.C.) was an impressive Greek public speaker who practiced speaking with pebbles in his mouth, standing near the sea, to develop his oratorical talents. Henry Peter Brougham (1778-1868) was an English politician and writer who was a founder of the Edinburgh Review, an influential ninet
eenth-century periodical. The combination of clown attributes with those of grave thinkers and orators carries along the theme of deception and grotesquerie that has already been established.

  53 (p.390) “Madame Joyeuse was a more sensible person, as you know”: Joyeuse is French for “joyful”; that she is joyful and high-spirited becomes evident in her imitation of a crowing cock. Madame Joyeuse may derive from an episode of similar comic cock-crowing imitation in Charles O‘Malley (1841), by Irish novelist Charles Lever, which Poe reviewed in Graham’s Magazine (March 1842). As in some of his earliest tales, Poe here insinuates a jibe at a popular author.

  54 (p. 390) “but there was really much sound sense, after all, in the opinion of Eugénie Salsafette”: This last name comes from salsify, or oyster plant, an edible root vegetable. Given the dinner-table context, it may hint of human identity blurring with that of food, thus enhancing the aura of craziness central to the story. A link with “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in which Roderick is preoccupied with interconnections between animal and vegetable life, is also possible, as is a backward glance at the food-drink motifs permeating most of the “Tales of the Folio Club.”

  55 (p. 391) My nerves were very much affected.... I now ventured to inquire the cause of the disturbance: This paragraph, in which intrusive noise frightens the assembled company, who are, excepting the narrator, all posing or masking, recalls the kindred effect of the clock’s appalling striking in “The Masque of the Red Death.”

  56 (p. 393) “I am happy to acknowledge as belonging of right to the celebrated Fether”: Finally, the title is explained, and the peculiar name spellings only point up the off-centeredness pervading the tale, which the narrator doesn’t comprehend. In some respects, his deadpan stance resembles that of Huckleberry Finn.

  57 (p. 393) pandemonium in petto: That is, chaos in secrecy (in petto is Italian for “in the breast”). The lunatics give way to their deranged emotions within the walls of the remote asylum, where nobody is likely to discover them. Pandemonium, in English poet John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost (1667), is the palace of Satan in Hell, a natural locale for uproar and confusion. Pandemonium does indeed ensue, once the real keepers break in upon the mad revelers.