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APPENDIX 5. VARIANT READINGS IN VERSES CITED BY POE
That Poe heavily rewrote his poems — sometimes for the better — is too well known to require documentation. Accordingly it is fitting (but still surprising) that, in the reviews and essays above, Poe should four times base his criticism on readings which their authors later modified.
1. Bryant. — The 1836 text of ‘The conjunction of Jupiter and Venus” which Poe had before him when writing his review, reads in part:
Let me believe,
Awhile, that they are met for ends of good,
Amid the evening glory, to confer,
Of men and their affairs, and to shed down
| Kind influence. Lo! their orbs burn more bright, |
And shake out softer fires! The great earth feels
The gladness and the quiet of the time.(1)
The gap between A and w in the first full line cited is not a space, but the normal result of founding cuneiform letters on parallelepipedal type bodies. In the edition of 1834 the verse between | | reads
Kind influences. Lo! their orbs burn more bright,(2)
The 1836 reading is found in editions from 1837 to 1843. In the edition of 1847 the verse reads
Kind influence. Lo! they brighten as we gaze,(3)
We now proceed to scan these lines. The injunction Lo! is capable, in suitable surroundings, of standing as a monosyllabic foot;4 Bryant's lines do not leave it space so to stand.
1834: Kind in | fluences | Lo! their | orbs burn | more bright | ;
a line of five spondees, legitimately varied by an anapaest in the second foot. This verse, unexceptionable in itself, is too heavy — [page 212:] too moratory — to consort with Bryant's ordinary decasyllables, or even with decasyllables as measured by Whelpley.(5)
1836: Kind in | fluence | Lo! their | orbs burn | more bright | .
Poe makes heavy going of this verse, apparently from a conviction that trochaic substitution is possible only in the first foot. The line is not richly musical, but presents no impediment to correct scansion and reading.
1847: Kind in | fluence. Lo | they bright | en as | we gaze | .
If we follow Poe's strict quantitative theory, that an anapaest can not replace an iambus, we must scan the second foot as a bastard iambus:(6)
fluence. Lol u *+
For Bryant's express opinions about trisyllabic substitution, see Appendix 1.
The word orbs in 1834 and 1836 implies a mixed metaphor. Orb is a technical term in astrology: the orbs of the planets are the distances at which one body can affect another when in conjunction or other aspect.(7) Jupiter is said to have an orb of 10°; Venus, of 5°. Mention of orbs continues the astrological metaphor begun by Bryant in kind influences, Jupiter and Venus being accounted beneficent(8) planets. But burn more bright can apply only to the visible disks of the planets, and not to the orbs, which are not luminous. The 1847 reading is preferable in that the full stop after influence separates the astrology from the astronomy.
Bryant's image of the brightening orbs should be contrasted with Poe's dim disk.(9)
2. Cranch. — ,My thoughts” as printed by Griswold, begins with the six lines:
Many are the thoughts that come to me
In my lonely musing;
And they drift so strange and swift,
There's no time for choosing
Which to follow, for to leave
Any, seems a losing.(10)
In Cranch's Poems,(11) the second verse ends with a comma, and the third verse ends ‘bright and swift,’. The reading bright obviates the difficulty of reconciling the strange thoughts of v. 3 of Griswold with the trite(12) thoughts of v. 15.
3. Holmes. — Poe's text of ‘The last leaf’ agrees verbally with no other print that we have seen. The reading So forlorn in v. 15 occurs in The harbinger(13) and in Griswold.(14) Harbinger prints passed in v. 2 and But now in v. 31; Griswold prints pass’d and And now.
We print below the text which Holmes passed for press on [page 213:] 12 July 1894; the punctuation, particularly the full stop after v. 39, suggests that Holmes (aged 85) was careless in his proof-reading ‘
I saw him once before
As he passed by the door,
And again
The pavement stones resound,
5
As he totters o’er the ground
With his cane.
They say that in his prime,
Ere the pruning-knife of Time
Cut him down,
10
Not a better man was found
By the crier on his round
Through the town.
But now he walks the streets,
And he looks at all he meets,
15
Sad and wan,
And he shakes his feeble head,
That it seems as if he said
“They are gone!”
The mossy marbles rest
20
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom,
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.
25
My grandmamma has said —
Poor old lady, she is dead
Long ago, [page 214:]
That he had a Roman nose;
And his cheek was like a rose
30
In the snow.
But now his nose is thin,
And it rests upon his chin
Like a staff,
And a crook is in his back,
35
And a melancholy crack
In his laugh.
I know it is a sin
For me to sit and grin
At him here.
40
But the old three-cornered hat
And the breeches, and all that
Are so queer!
And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
45
In the Spring,
Let them smile as I do now
At the old forsaken bough
Where I cling.(15)
The radical change at v. 15 is best explained in Holmes's words:
The Poem as first written had one of those false rhymes which produce a shudder in all educated persons, even in the Poems of Keats and others who ought to have known better than to admit them.
The guilty verse ran thus: —
But now he walks the streets
And he looks at all he meets
So forlorn,
And he shakes his feeble head
That it seems as if he said
“They are gone!”
A little more experience, to say nothing of the sneer of an American critic in an English periodical, showed me that this would never do. Here was what is called a “cockney rhyme,” — one in which the sound of the letter r is neglected, — maltreated as the letter h is insulted by the average Briton by leaving it out everywhere except where it should be silent. Such an ill-mated pair as “forlorn” and “gone” could not possibly pass current in good rhyming society. But what to do about it was the question. I must keep
“They are gone!”
and I could not think of any rhyme which I could work in satisfactorily. In this perplexity my friend, Mrs. [Susannah Sarah] Folsom, wife of that excellent scholar, Mr. Charles Folsom, then and for a long time the unsparing and infallible corrector of the press at Cambridge, suggested the line
“Sad and wan,”
which I thankfully adopted and have always retained.(16)
4. Wordsworth. — The quatrain quoted by Poe is in fact the first four lines of a Spenserian stanza. The lines first appear in 1798:
There was a youth whom I had loved so long,
That when I loved him not I cannot say.
‘Mid the green mountains many and many a song
We two had sung, like little birds in May.(17)
In 1820, among other changes, the lines have become: [page 215:]
There was a youth whom I had loved so long,
That when I loved him not I cannot say.
‘Mid the green mountains many and many a song
We two had sung, like gladsome birds in May.(18)
Poe's quotation agrees verbally with the 1820 text. As finally reworked by Wordsworth, ‘The female vagrant’ had become incorporated in a longer poem, and there is no full stop before the end of the stanza:
There was a Youth whom I had loved so long,
That when I loved him not I cannot say:
'Mid the green mountains many a thoughtless song
We two had sung, like gladsome birds in May;
When we began to tire of childish play,
We seemed still more and more to prize each other;
We talked of marriage and our marriage day;
And I in truth did love him like a brother,
For never could I hope to meet with such another.(19)
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 211:]
1 Bryant, Poems, 1836, pp. [191]-192.
2 Poems, Boston: Russell, Odiorne, & Metcalf, 1834, p. 153, v. 3.
3 Poems, Philadelphia: Carey & Hart,1847, p. 185, 5.
4 Poe's later nomenclature, a caesura: see p. 54 ; and p. note 25.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 213:]
5 See Appendix 3, pp. 198, 204.
6 See p. 134.
7 Sepharial [i.e. Walter G. Old], New dictionary of astrology, London: W. Foulsham, 1963, p. 80.
8 Alan Leo, The progressed horoscope, &c., London: L. N. Fowler, 1906, p. 160.
9 See p. 119, note 77.
10 Griswold, Poets & poetry, 1842, p. 413.
11 Christopher Pearse Cranch, Poems, Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1844, p. 55.
12 Griswold, Poets & poetry, p. 413, vv. 13-18:
Some so merry that I laugh,
Some are grave and serious,
Some so trite, their last approach
Is enough to weary us;
Others flit like midnight ghosts,
Shrouded and mysterious.
13 The harbinger: a May-gift, Boston: Carter, Hendee, 1833, pp. 34-36.
14 Griswold, Poets & poetry, p. 346.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 215:]
15 Holmes, The last leaf, illus. G. W. Edwards & F. H. Smith, Cambridge [Massachusetts]: Houghton Mifflin, 1895, pp. 6-8.
16 Ibid., pp. [52-53].
17 [William Wordsworth], ‘The female vagrant” Lyrical ballads, with a few other poems, Bristol, J. Cottle [et al.], 1798, p. 73. The reprint of these verses in [William] Wordsworth and [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge, Lyrical ballads 1798, ed. H. Littledale, Oxford Univ. Press, 1911, p. 73, vv. 64-67, is correct literatim et punctatim.
18 Wordsworth, Miscellaneous poems, vol. 1, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1820, p. 132, vv. 10-13.
19 ‘Guilt and sorrow, or incidents upon Salisbury Plain’, Poetical works, ed. Selincourt & Darbishire, Oxford Univ. Press, 1940, p. 109, vv. 244-252.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - JAG68, 1968] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - EAP: The Rationale of Verse — a preliminary edition (Greenwood)