Text: Josephine Poe January, “Edgar Allan Poe's ‘Child Wife’,” Century Magazine (New York, NY), vol. LXXVIII, no. 6, October 1909, pp. 894-896

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BETWEEN the summits of Edgar Allan Poe's literary mastery and the sad valleys of discussion and abuse of him lies that midland of his human daily life.

The only knowledge of its fair way comes to us now through a few precious personal letters. Among these is one from the poet to his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, who was later his mother-in-law. It is filled with assurances of his ability to care for Virginia, descriptions of the little house in Richmond which he could take, and much resentment of what he called the cruelty [column 2:] of those who would separate him from his love. These hard-hearted ones were sister and brother-in-law of Virginia, who only wanted to keep this lovely child of fourteen in school another year before she should marry her ardent cousin.

On the same sheet of paper, at the bottom of this letter written by Edgar Allan Poe to “the mother of the one I loved so dearly,” as he later describes Mrs. Clemm in a poem, is a most tender love-letter to Virginia-a love-letter to the beloved written quite frankly beneath a letter to her mother! How remote such things seem [page 896:] to-day! But to this girl in Baltimore, long ago, listening perhaps while her mother read it to her, this seemed the natural way for “Eddie” to write to her, as natural as her unchanging love for him. So the wishes and the opinions of the “cruel” family were set aside, and in a few months Virginia Clemm married Edgar Allan Poe.

Eleven years later she wrote to her husband this little acrostic valentine, now yellow with age and stained where a lock of her black hair lay. The first letters of each line spell his name in full — thirteen letters, marring the possibility of a sonnet, if the still childlike heart ever sought such poetic attainment.

In February, 1846, after some years in Philadelphia, Poe and his wife were again living in New York, and the little valentine is directed to him there. Part of the line — in which Virginia writes that love shall heal her weakened lungs-is sad autobiography. For in the use of her full, beautiful contralto voice she broke a blood-vessel in her throat, and consumption quickly followed.

Perhaps during all these years, in one or another of the cities where they had lived, Virginia saw in vision a cottage for her home; and this wish of hers probably brought about the move to the little cottage at Fordham to which the Poes went very soon after the valentine was written. And one likes to think that sixty-three years ago there was a rich cypress vine covering the bare porch.

Only another year was left Edgar Poe and Virginia together, for while the poet sang for the world's later hearing his exquisite “Annabel Lee,” the maiden who in truth “had lived with no other thought than to love and be loved” by him was dying there in the comfortless little cottage by the Fordham road. One sees it now, and thinks of the poverty, the sorrow, the renunciation, of those two, and at first it seems so pitifully little that life gave to them. But is it little? To him the gift of song, to her the gift of love.

 

 

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