Text: Fred Lewis Pattee, “Poe's ‘Ulalume’,” in Side-Lights on American Literature, New York: Century Co, 1922, pp. 327-342

POE was preëminently a lyrist. With a soul abnormally sensitive, with nerves that every harsh note jangled, endowed with an intense longing for human sympathy, yet with a nature that was fated by its very elements to be misunderstood at every point, with a pride that forbade explanations, that curled the lip and suffered in silence, Poe early became self-centered and introspective. If a man needed sympathy and help it was he, yet he received none. With his sensitive physical nature an indulgence that in another man would have been but a slight misstep was with him a fall, yet the world made no distinctions. Misunderstood, out of touch with normal humanity, he became bitter. He found no companionship save his own soul, no food save his own heart, and this rendered morbid his thoughts, distorted his perspective, and made abnormal all his standards of measure. Like Byron, he projected himself into all that he did. At length it became impossible for him to look at life objectively. He must be the hero of his stories; he must use no scenery, no atmosphere save that found in [page 328:] his own soul. If he sang, it must be a bitter song about his own bitter life. Even his dramatic fragments are lyrics. To him any poetry save the short impassioned lyric, which owing to its very intensity must be brief, was impossible. In his ‘Poetic Principle,” he contended that even “Paradise Lost” was but “a series of lyrics.”

With this conception of the nature of poetry, Poe, who, whatever else he might have been, was a consistent artist, took up the lyre only in moments of passion; and that these moments came but seldom is shown by the scantiness of his lyrical product. Few poets have won commanding place with so small a margin of actual accomplishment. Poe's whole poetic product makes but a thin volume, and if from it we remove those poems which almost alone establish his fame, we shall reduce it to a dozen pages. Poe walks among the great lyrists of the world by virtue of not more than ten lyrics. Roughly in the order of their production these lyrics are “The sleeper,” “The City in the Sea; “Israfel,” “The Haunted Palace,” “The Conqueror Worm,” “The Raven,” “Ulalume,” “The Bells,” “For Annie,” and “Annabel Lee.’ But even with a list as small as this Poe is secure in his fame. There is an atmosphere about these lyrics that is wholly undefinable; a weird music that is half unearthly; a mysterious force that is all but irresistible. They seize upon [page 329:] the imagination of the reader and bear it into the regions that only the imagination may tread, through strange lands with names from the realms beyond Xanadu, they harrow him with exotic cadences, they chill him with a fear of he knows not what, and everywhere they follow him with that low, wild music that suggests the accompaniments of Eastern necromancy.

The most spontaneous of all his lyrics, the one that flashes its light into the greatest number of chambers in the poet's soul, is “Ulalume,” perhaps the least understood of all Poe's writings. The average reader gets from it very little save a strange melancholy music and a sense of the terrible that he finds difficult to explain. To some it has seemed humorous. Willis, its first critic, classed it as “a curiosity in philologic flavor.” To him it was simply a “skilful exercise of rarity and niceness of language.” To some critics it has seemed but the wild vagaries of an insane master poet, to others a fanciful elegy for an idolized wife, to others it has been inexplicable. Not long ago a university lecturer, after dwelling upon the nameless atmosphere and the unearthly music of the poem, declared as his opinion that no one would ever be able to discover what the poet had really meant. He doubted if Poe had known himself what he meant. It is very sure that without the life of the poet as a [page 330:] commentary “Ulalume” is a hopeless enigma. Read after a careful study of the circumstances that created it, however, it becomes clear, and, what is more, it throws light upon the poet's inner life. “Ulalume” is not an elegy; it is not a threnody for a lost wife or an etherealized Lenore; it is not a display of mere verbal dexterity; it is not the incoherence of an insane master — it is an honest lyric that leads us to a man's heart; it is a cry of utter despair from a man's inmost soul.

Poe wrote this poem in the autumn of 1847, at the lowest ebb of his career. One year earlier, in the autumn of 1846, he had found the limit of his physical powers. Constant overwork and unrelieved mental strain had combined with dissipation to reduce him to a state bordering upon collapse. His brain refused to obey him; it became impossible for him to work, and upon him depended the support of a sick wife and her mother. During the late autumn and early winter of 1846-47 this little family suffered all the extremes of poverty. Unable to furnish sufficient fire, or covering, or food, Poe saw his wife, who needed the most delicate care, in want of the bare necessities of life, and sinking daily lower and lower. The well-known description of this home, written by Mrs. Gove, who late in January happened to discover the perishing family, is one of the most pathetic in our literary annals: [page 331:]

There was no clothing on the bed, which was only straw. . . . The weather was cold and the sick lady had. the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever of consumption. She lay on the straw bed, wrapped in her husband's greatcoat with a large tortoiseshell cat in her bosom. . . . The coat and the cat were the sufferer's only means of warmth except as her husband held her hands and her mother her feet.

The end came January 30, and Poe, after following on foot the coffin to the grave, sank in almost total collapse. “I did not feel much hope,” writes Mrs. Shew, his nurse, who was also a physician, “that he could be raised up from brain fever, brought on by extreme suffering of mind and body — actual want and hunger and cold having been borne by this heroic husband in order to supply food, medicine, and comforts to his dying wife, until exhaustion and lifelessness were so near at every reaction of the fever that even sedatives had to be administered with extreme caution.”

Poe rallied from this first fever only to suffer in March a relapse which for weeks threatened his life. The summer and autumn of 1847 were a period of slow convalescence. He had been near to death, and near to insanity. The extremely sensitive organism had been so rudely shaken that never again was it to be in adjustment. At first a great [page 332:] horror, a darkness, and utter despair had settled — over him, but little by little he began to lay hold on the threads of life. At length he could even hope for brighter days. Though shattered in body and nerve and mind, he began to plan a great prose poem, “Eureka,” which was to be the crowning effort of his life. The sympathy and help of Mrs. Shew, who with his mother had snatched him from death, began to arouse in him the pale, uncertain vision of a new life of love and hope. But such dreams were only for intervals. His old past, with its horrors, confronted him at every step. It ruled him like a demon and drove him powerless into despair. Poe lived two and a half years after the death of his wife, and during it all his life was an alternation between brief and feverish intervals of hope, and long periods of half-insane delirium, of blackness, and despair. He yearned with all the power of his nature for sympathy. “Unless some true and tender and pure womanly love saves me,” he wrote to Mrs. Shew only a year before the final tragedy at Baltimore, “T shall hardly last a year longer alive.” All those half-insane loveepisodes of this period of Poe's life were but results of this eager longing for some one who could understand, some one who could rescue him from his past that was hurrying him on.

With this chapter of Poe's life understood, “Ulalume” [page 333:] becomes at once clear. It was written at the close of Poe's year of horrors — the October of his “most immemorial year’ — immemorial since it seemed to drag its horrible length back to the utmost bounds of his memory, and since it lay as a vague, half-forgotten dream. The poem, like ‘The Raven,” “The Haunted Palace,” and others, is an allegory, though not all of its imagery is symbolic. The poet no longer lives in the old familiar world. He has entered a “misty mid region” that is not life, that is not death — a ghoul-haunted forest of cypress, a region of unrelieved horror and blackness. His heart is hot and volcanic; it is like a sulphurous current of lava hissing and groaning through an Arctic waste of death. He is alone; he has no companion, no confidant, save his own soul; he is driven to commune with himself. But his active brain has become sluggish and palsied, and at times he forgets his awful surroundings. It even seems at times as if there was to be a morning; to his palsied consciousness there appears a hint of dawn. A pale nebulous light appears in the east. It is like the rising of a new hope; it is a goddess who has seen his tears and has understood the torment, the neverdying worm in his soul, who, despite the horror which surrounds him, has dared to come to him, and to look upon him “with love in her luminous eyes,’ who will lead him by the hand from the [page 834:] horrors in which he is powerless into the path to the skies. ‘The lines quiver and throb with passion. Oh, the ecstasy of being at last understood, of being in contact with one who could know and sympathize!

Was it Mrs. Shew who first gave Poe this vision of a new hope? If one reads the poem “To L. M. S —— ,” the first recorded word of Poe after his escape from death, and “To —— ,” “Not long ago the writer of these lines’ — written to Mrs. Shew just after “Ulalume’‘ — and then reads the despairing letter of June, 1848, he will find it hard to believe it otherwise. In “To —— ‘” he clearly asserts that it is Mrs. Shew whom he sees at the end of the cypress vista:

But the world of despair rushes quickly back upon his soul. A moment of ecstasy and then his sluggish brain remembers. This pale star, too pale to be real, is sent but to increase his torment. It is the work of ghouls, a thing of horror, to shudder [page 335:] at and to fear. In an agony of revulsion of feeling his soul sinks into the dust. But his wavering, palsied brain cannot long be constant either to hope or despair. Again the vision beckons him upward; hope and joy and beauty seem about to bloom once more in his blackened life. Eagerly he follows the pale star which is so full of hope and beauty and which “flickers up to heaven through the night,” but he is “stopped by the door of a tomb.” The star is but a phantom, the work of a demon who knows how to make his hell complete; after every struggle he is thrown back helpless upon his own blasted soul. Mrs. Shew respected him, pitied him, admired him, but she did not love him. Her answer was final. There is no escape. Fate has taken every precaution “to bar up the way and to ban it’‘; he is alone with his dead in the ghoul-haunted cypress, and all visions of hope are but to mock and torment him.

This, then, is the meaning of “Ulalume.” It is a sob from the depths of blank despair; it is the most pathetic poem in American literature. Everything about it attests its genuineness. It is not finished; it is a spontaneous outpouring of feeling, unpolished, unrevised. Such work was uncommon with Poe, who labored over his lyrics sometimes for years. I am inclined to believe that the account of the composition of “The Raven” is largely true. [page 336:] The more spontaneous the song the nearer we get to the heart of the singer. From the mechanical point of view “Ulalume” is the most unfinished of the poet's productions. Its monotony of expression; its snail pace; its frequent discords; its cockney rimes; its abundance of pleonasm are positive blemishes, and yet they increase the value of the poem as a human document. Perhaps the most notable peculiarity, not to say defect, of “Ulalume”’ is its repetition. Yet this is significant. It shows that the poet's mind was almost in a state of collapse. It worked feebly. An idea, when it came, was hovered over and repeated with slight change until another idea came to reinforce it.

That the poem is the work of an abnormal mind is stamped everywhere upon it. For the poet to imagine two personalities within himself, which held converse with each other, which strenghtened and fortified each other, is in itself a symptom of insanity. It is this strange separation of the poet into two personalities that is the chief source of ambiguity in the poem. At every point the poem seems remote from ordinary human experience. Its geography is not of this world; its proper names, “Auber” and “Yaanek,” belong to another planet: its atmosphere is that of ghoul-land, of the “misty mid region” that no man has ever actually known. Its haunting music comes from its abundant alliteration [page 337:] and rime, but more from its abnormal repetend, which we have shown to be a symptom of intellectual disease.

It was Poe's fate to be misunderstood. His own generation looked only at his external life. He was marvelously gifted, they said, but he was an unholy thing, a demoniac from the tombs, who tore himself upon the rocks and whom no man might bind, a victim of vices and passions. They made no excuse for him, they tried to cover none of his defects, they sought for none of the hidden fountains of his life. The present judges him more kindly, but even now it is not fully understood what manner of man he really was. No one can study to its heart a lyric like “Ulalume” and not feel the pathos that lay in its creator's soul. The fatal gift of genius separated him from his fellow-men, deprived him of human sympathy, and drove him for companionship to live a hermit with his own soul. What wonder that his perspective became distorted, that he became morbid and unnatural, the companion of strange fancies? What utter pathos in his bitter cry for help: “For months I have known that you were deserting me, not willingly, but none the less surely — my destiny —

“Ulalume” is the epitome of Poe's last years. It is the picture of a soul hovering between hope and inevitable despair, a soul longing passionately for a sympathy which it can never have, a soul struggling toward the light yet beaten back at every point, a soul that realized as few other souls ever have the supernal beauty which is possible in human life, yet condemned like Tantalus never to share its joys.

ULALUME