[page 171, continued:]

ISRAFEL

This poem is one of Poe's great accomplishments. It may justly be called a masterpiece, for even in its first version it shows the power of his original genius.

“Israfel” presents no problem of interpretation. The poet acknowledges the superiority of the angel to a man, but says that, in his own proper sphere, the mortal poet is doing very well. The sentiments set forth by Poe in the poem are underlined by his quotation in a review of Lord Brougham's Critical and Miscellaneous Writings, in Graham's Magazine for March 1842, repeated in the “Marginalia” of the Southern Literary Messenger of June 1849 (our number 229): “ ‘He that is born to be a man,’ says [page 172:] Wieland in his ‘Peregrinus Proteus,’ ‘neither should nor can be anything nobler, greater, or better than a man.’ The fact is, that in efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it.” This comment is in a London translation of Christoph Martin Wieland's Private History of Peregrinus Proteus (1796), I, 43, but Poe probably picked it up from Bulwer, who used it as a motto for chapter iv of Book V of Ernest Maltravers (1837), a favorite source of wit and wisdom for Poe.

Inspiration for “Israfel” obviously comes from Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh, where there are two passages concerning the angel. The first has a note, “ ‘The angel Israfil, who has the most melodious voice of all God's creatures.’ — Sale.” Poe made this the motto for the first version of his poem. But there is another passage, very near the end of Lalla Rookh, with a footnote cross reference to the earlier note, and it is this that, I think, inspired Poe:

There may also be an echo in Poe's poem of “A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687” by John Dryden, lines 17, 21-23:

Poe presumably also knew of a reference to “Israfil” in Amir Khan (New York, 1829), by the once famous child poet, Lucretia Maria Davidson. Poe's spelling suggests his use of at least one source besides those named.

It has become customary to identify Poe with his angel; the name is the title of Hervey Allen's biography. The practice probably began with Mrs. Osgood's “Echo Song,” published in the Broadway Journal of September 6, 1845.(2) The transfer of the name, however, is unfortunate, since it disregards the main point made in the poem, the excellence of Man.

[page 175, continued:]

[page 175, continued:]

VARIANTS [[for version A]]

21  Omitted (B)

23  yon / a (B)

43  stormier / loftier (B)

[page 177, continued:]

VARIANTS [[for version G]]

Motto:  And the angel Israfel, or Israfeli, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who is the most musical of all God's creatures. KORAN. (C); [D and E read like G but credit the motto to Sale's Koran.]

10  enamoured / enamour’d (D, H)

15  Transferred to follow 12 in C

19  owing to / due unto (C)

21  That trembling living lyre (C)

22  Of / With (C)

23  skies / Heavens (C)

25  Where / And (D, E); Love's a grown-up / Love is a grown (C)

26  Where / And (D, E); the Houri / Houri (C)

28  a / the (C) which also inserts after the line another line: The more lovely, the more far!

29  Therefore, thou art not / Thou art not, therefore (C, D, E)

31  unimpassioned / unimpassion’d (D, H)

43  thy perfect / thy (C)

45  could / did (C)

48  so wildly / one half so (C)

49  A mortal melody / One half so passionately (C)

[page 177, continued:]

NOTES [[for version G]]

Motto:  That Poe was using Moore is confirmed by the fact that, as Campbell observed (Poems, p. 203), Poe's motto is not in the Koran itself but in George Sale's “Preliminary Discourse” to his translation of the Koran, which Moore quoted in his notes.

A lute is actually shaped like a heart (the anatomical, not the playing-card variety). Poe may have had in mind the lines from Letitia E. Landon's “Eastern King” in The Golden Violet (1827), p. 141:

A similar conceit is in some lines from “Le Refus” by Béranger, which Poe added as a motto to “The Fall of the House of Usher” in 1845. It is improbable that Poe could have seen them before 1841, hence Campbell's suggestion that they were a source for “Israfel” may be dismissed. See the notes on Poe's story in the Tales and Sketches.

2-21  Wilbur (Poe, p. 136) compares “Romance,” lines 20-21: “My heart would feel to be a crime / Unless it trembled with the strings.”

3  Philip Pendleton Cooke, writing of Poe in the Southern Literary Messenger for April 1846 (12:200), calls attention to “an unconscious appropriation” from Byron's Bride of Abydos, II, xxviii, 41: “He sings so wild and well!”

9-10  Compare these lines with lines 67-68 of Il Penseroso: “To behold the wandering moon, / Riding near her highest noon.” [page 178:]

12  “Levin” is an obsolete word for lightning, revived by Scott.

13-14  The star cluster called the Pleiades is mentioned in Job 9:9. It is situated in Taurus, and consists of seven stars. One of them became fainter, within the memory of man, and two thousand years ago was thought invisible. It has become brighter again and can now be seen by sharp eyes in clear weather. The stars were said by the Greeks and Romans to be sisters, the daughters of Pleionë, translated to the skies. According to one of the classic stories related by Ovid (Fasti, IV, 170ff.), one of the sisters loved a mortal and, as the price of willingly sharing his mortality, faded from sight.

There are poems on the subject by many writers of Poe's time, including a favorite of his youth, Letitia E. Landon (“The Lost Pleiad,” published in The Venetian Bracelet, 1829, p. 69). But Poe did not add the Pleiades to his poem until 1841; he may have noticed George Hill's poem about them, which had a long introductory note, in the New-Yorker of May 25, 1839 (7:152). In it Ovid's words (actually Quae septem dici, sex tamen esse solent) are quoted as quae septem — sex, the terseness of which is as effective as Poe's magical phrase.

18  “Israfeli” means grammatically “my Israfel,” but Dr. John L. Mish tells me the usage is almost unknown, and Poe's note, which suggests that he thought “Israfeli” a variant nominative, makes one feel that here Poe builded better than he knew.

20  The houris are the nymphs of the Mahometan paradise; the name comes through the French from the Persian huri, and is derived from an Arabic word referring to the dark eyes of these ladies, like those of a gazelle.

21  Charles Henry Watts II, Thomas Holley Chivers (1956), p. 162, cites the doctor's “God Dwells in Light,” later part of “The Song of Seralim”:

This appeared in the Magnolia for January 1843. Poe first used “wire” in his poem in the Saturday Museum text, presumably prepared late in February of the same year. This is the only “borrowing from Chivers” by Poe that seems to me at all likely.

23  Wilbur (Poe, p. 136) complains of the line as defective, the tense being changed to get a rhyme, and the word order inverted (something rare with Poe) — but great emphasis on “skies” is effective here.

37  Campbell (Poems, p. 206) compares Edmund Waller, “On a Girdle,” “My joy, my grief, my hope, my love.”

39  Harry T. Baker in Modern Language Notes, March 1910, compares these lines to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, V, 74-75: “And now it is an angel's song, / That makes the heavens be mute.”

42  Compare Wordsworth, “Peter Bell” (which Poe ridiculed in his “Letter to B——”), I, 58-60: [page 179:]

45-51  Campbell (Poems, p. 207) compares the last stanza of Shelley's “To a Skylark,” but there are no close verbal parallels.

50  Compare “The Poetic Principle”: “We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels.”

51  In the earlier versions Poe wrote as if the lute and the lyre were identical, but later corrected this mistake. He may have observed Thomas Moore's note on his Twenty-third Ode of Anacreon, where a similar error by Madame André Dacier is discussed.

[[Footnotes]]

1  Jubal was, according to Genesis 4:19-21, a son of Lamech and Adah, and “the father of all such as handle the harp and organ.” See also Mark Van Doren, The Poetry of John Dryden (New York, 1920), p. 333.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 173:]

2  See p. 234, below.