Text: William Mentzel Forrest, “World End and Judgement,” Biblical Allusions in Poe, 1928, pp. 76-83 (This material may be protected by copyright)

[page 76:]

In the Bible the end of the world is conceived purely from the religious point of view. Philosophy or science does not determine it, and colors it but little. A complete change of the old order is required. Creation has become involved in man's moral ruin.(1) When the end comes heaven and earth are to pass away; all things are to be made anew.(2) Nothing of all this, however, is hinted at in the oldest biblical writings. Even when the prophets found things too much out of joint to admit of a proper glorification of Israel in a world such as they knew, their visions of the future hardly went beyond a poetic description of greatly improved physical and spiritual conditions.(3) But the apocalyptists went much further, and under their influence, and with a certain element of Greek speculation added, the Jews by New Testament times looked for the fiery overthrow of their universe, of which the earth was the center. Its rehabilitation would make it a fit abode for the saints.(4)

With Poe the end of the world, and indeed of the [page 77:] universe of which it is so small a part, is taken for granted:

He even hints at the possibility of the universe being involved in the consequences of man's sin, to its undoing: “Lest the stars totter in the guilt of man.”(6)

Created anew, the world will become a fit abode of the spirits that have passed through death:

So far we are on scriptural ground, and the parallel is close. But Poe could not be satisfied without seeking some scientific and philosophical theory to explain his belief. That, with its wide divergence from the Bible, has already been set forth in the examination of his pantheism as reflected chiefly in his Eureka.(8)

The idea of judgment stands out with startling [page 78:] clearness in Poe. For the most part it is pictured as the consequences of evil falling in this life upon the evil-doer. With terrific vividness this conception is brought out in such tales as The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Imp of the Perverse, William Wilson, The Man of the Crowd, Hop Frog, and A Cask of Amontillado. In them all it is “poetic justice” that is stressed. What has been abused and wronged becomes the instrument of doom. In Morella the unloved wife whose death caused no regret, is so passionately loved when incarnated in her child that her wrongs are avenged when the child's death plunges the husband in deepest grief.

Now this is singular, for it is primitive, and prosaic, and at times necessarily immoral. It is hardly what would be expected of a man of Poe's imagination, however true to experience it may sometimes prove.

The ancient Hebrews held such ideas. Their Lex Talionis followed that principle. When they thought of a future, divine judgment it was to be upon the same lines, and in this world. Enemies who mistreated them were then to be mistreated.(9) They who had suffered were then to triumph. Those who had feasted would then fast. Thinking usually of the land of the dead as a drear abode away from God's presence, when they extended their ideas of judgment into the remote future beyond the great doomsday, the “Day of the Lord,”(10) they conceived of a new [page 79:] earth wherein the good would dwell in bliss.(11) Its antithesis for the evil was a lower part of Sheol, the Pit, or the region of Abaddon.(12) Later still it was Gehenna.(13) What happened to its denizens is shown in the New Testament parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, which reflects the popular ideas.(14) It was all much in accord with the principle of the Hindu sage: “Whatsoever food a man eats in this world, by the very same is he eaten again in the other.”(15) To which there is added a portrayal of shrieking men who are chopped up and burnt by other men who yell aloud: “Thus have they done to us in yonder world, and so we do to them again in this world.”(16)

Although this species of retribution has been styled “poetic justice,” and has given their livid lights to the pages of Dante and Milton, it has been challenged as crass and crude, Hebraic and Puritanic. Says Schopenhauer: “Only the dull, optimistic, Protestant-rationalistic, or peculiarly Jewish view of life will make the demand for poetical justice and find satisfaction in it.”(17)

Yet here is Poe, whose poetic imagination has been thought most daringly original, and whose fate it has been to suffer infamy through real and exaggerated [page 80:] departures from Hebrew and Puritan ideals! “Is Saul also among the prophets?”

The later Jewish thought of judgment beyond death finds little reflection in Poe. He spoke of a deep Hell, the abode of demons down under the sea. If, as Griswold represented, Poe considered it his destined place as a victim of damnation, he assigned none of his characters there. Tamerlane knows of a Hell where woeful ones lie on beds of fire.(18) But even the murderer on the eve of his execution simply questioned where he would go.(19) Lenore was snatched from fiends below and borne aloft to heaven.(20) Only the lovers in Al Araaf, who fell because they heard not heaven's behests for the mad beating of their hearts, were left in a night whose waning brought no day. Even they, though far from heaven, were equally far from hell.(21) Whether kept by his conviction that the horrible is out of place in poetry(22) from picturing the horrors of an eternal judgment, or by lack of belief in it, Poe, in that respect, was more akin to the ancient Hebrews than to the modern Puritans.

This review of Poe's thoughts on eschatology, coupled with what has been seen in the earlier chapters of this study, would certainly support the thesis that he was deeply interested in spiritual things. However, a microscopic examination of his every religious [page 81:] thought and sentiment shows that he might have written them as well eighteen centuries before Christ as eighteen centuries after. With the exception of a few phrases reflecting the form but not the thought of New Testament passages, hardly a trace of Christian conceptions is discoverable. He is always theistic, when he is not pantheistic, referring often to God as any pious pagan might.

References to Christ are very rare. Several merely express what is generally implied in dates of the Christian era.(23) Several others are stereotyped uses of conventional titles, as “Our Saviour,” “the Redeemer.”(24) With these may be classed “our holy religion,” and “a strong argument for the religion of Christ.”(25) The quotation in his Criticisms of a verse containing the name of Christ is for the purpose of condemning the fanatical folly of its users.(26) An allusion in his poems is of doubtful meaning, but is certainly not appreciative:

The beautiful Hymn to the Virgin, with its implication of the deity of her son, is put into the mouth of the Catholic Morella, where it voices the sentiment of the character and not of the author. But even so, it was removed from later editions of the tale.(28) The [page 82:] name Jesus Poe used but once in his writings as he left them in their finished form. He tells of its use by another.(29) He used it in the first edition of one poem in calling upon the dead to awake “For the holy Jesus’ sake!” This was deleted in later revisions.(30)

This is a mystery of mysteries in Poe and other men whose writings show keen appreciation of beauty. The ideal poetry and moral grandeur of the life and teaching of Christ, it would seem, must have attracted him. Yet he gave no sign of it in poem or tale or essay or criticism or letter. His failure to respond to Christ might have been due to lack of social enthusiasm or broad human sympathy. Or it might have resulted from a consciousness of moral delinquency on his own part. Or hard and narrow things in the prevailing creeds of his day perhaps repelled him. Or maybe he was driven into repugnance in childhood by the man who wielded the rod of cruel punishment all the week in the school room, and preached the gospel of love on Sundays in the church.(31) Or it is within the bounds of possibility that a veil of reverent silence hid from all eyes what he held most sacred in his heart.

Be that as it may, when he was at last confronted by death and the grave and the final accounting of which he had so often written, a woman answered his anxious queries concerning his future in the name and with the words of him who said, “Let not your [page 83:] heart be troubled”; and he departed, gently saying, “Lord, help my poor soul.”(32) That account is not necessarily in conflict with the report of Dr. Snodgrass, though it now seems hopeless to try to get a consistent record of Poe's death. Weak and overborne by his terrible appetite which he felt had conquered him despite all his struggles, he might well have expressed his sense of shame and worthlessness by crying in the bitterness of his soul, “My best friend would be he who would take a pistol and blow out these damned wretched brains.”(33) Better that than the blasphemous flippancy of the dying Heine: “Oh well, God will forgive me, that's his business.”

Perchance what he wrote of the dying Tamerlane was true of himself as he hovered between the unconsciousness of delirium and the lasting unconsciousness of death, the old enemy who had always terrified while he fascinated him, proving a friend as he drew near:

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 76:]

1 Gen. 3:17-19; Rom. 8:19-22.

2 Rev. 21:1-5.

3 Isa. 65:17-25.

4 2 Pet. 3:10-13.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 77:]

5 Eiros and Charmion, IV. 3. 8.

6 Al Araaf. VII. 29.

7 Monos and Una. IV. 205.

8 XVI. 309; see above. Ch. II.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 78:]

9 Isa. 49:23-26: Mic. 7:17,

10 Zepb. 1:14-18.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 79:]

11 Isa. 66:22-24.

12 Ezek. 26:19-21: Rev. 9:1, 11.

13 Matt. 5:22. R. V. m. Gehenna was to the Old Testament Sheol what Hell is to the New Testament Hades.

14 Lk. 16:19-31.

15 Deussen, The Upanishads, 324.

16 Ibid.

17 World as Will and Idea, Trübner, 6th ed.. p. 328: cf. Poe. VIII. 11.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 80:]

18 VII. 8.

19 Imp of the Perverse, VI. 153.

20 VII. 54.

21 VII. 36, 39.

22 XII. 22.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 81:]

23 II. 203, 205.

24 VIII. 270; XIV. I, 43, 56.

25 XI. 123; XVI. 169.

26 VIII. 268.

27 The Coliseum, VII. 56.

28 II. Notes 319. 320.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 82:]

29 XIV. 60.

30 The Sleeper, VII. 51, 52: Note 179. For table of such references see p. 199, 334.

31 William Wilson, III. 301, 302.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 83:]

32 Biography, I. 337, 336: reported by the attending physician, Dr. J. J. Moran, and his wife.

33 Ibid. 334.

34 VII. 8.