[page 179:]

IRENË and THE SLEEPER

The poem published in 1831 as “Irene”(1) was given considerable revision in 1836 and 1837. In 1841 Poe revised it again and changed its title to “The Sleeper.” He continued to work on it — he made minute changes in 1849 — but nothing was radically altered after March 1843. The differently titled versions have too much in common to be regarded as wholly distinct compositions.

Poe himself was well pleased with “The Sleeper.” He named it first in a list of his best poems in a letter of July 2, 1844, to J. R. Lowell. On December 15, 1846, he wrote to George W. Eveleth: “In the higher qualities of poetry, it is better than ‘The Raven’ — but there is not one man in a million who could be brought to agree with me in this opinion.” Killis Campbell (Poems, p. 212) quoted J. T. Trowbridge, who in My Own Story (1902), p. 184, considered Poe's poem “The Sleeper” to be “the most strikingly beautiful of all the productions of that aberrant genius.” But Poe's most sincere admirers find only particular passages to praise.(2)

Poe's interest in the death of beautiful women is too well [page 180:] known to need much comment. “Irenë” and “The Sleeper” are based in part on a commonplace of romantic subject matter, the fair lady who will never awaken. It seems probable that the poem was inspired by the verses of an extremely minor contemporary. In 1826 there appeared a little volume, Rufiana (New York, G. & C. Carvil), by William Rufus of Charleston, a decidedly obscure person. The chances that Poe, when he was at Fort Moultrie in 1827, would have seen a work issued only a year before by a local bard are very great. In the Rufus volume at pp. 27-29 there is the following poem:

These verses are mellifluous enough to have pleased Poe, and the poem is verbally closer to the earliest form of “Irenë” than to later texts.

With this commonplace story Poe combined that of the nucta, or magic drop that comes from the moon. He pretty surely took this from a note in Moore's Lalla Rookh: “The Nucta, or Miraculous Drop, which falls in Egypt precisely on St. John's Day, in June, and is supposed to have the effect of stopping the plague.” The circumstance is ironic; the lady died before St. John's Day, the twenty-fourth of June, ere the healing drop could save her.

Beneficent as the drop may be, it can also be harmful. There is a prominent allusion to this in Macbeth. William B. Hunter, Jr., argues convincingly in American Literature, March 1948 (20:55-57) that Shakespeare's passage is recalled in “The Sleeper,” which has the same metrical form as the scene (III, v, 23-29) where Hecate chants:

Another source of the poems about Irenë has recently been found by the scholarly bookseller, J. J. Cohane, who has generously communicated it for use in the present edition. In an annual, The Anniversary; or, Poetry and Prose for MDCCCXXIX, edited by Allan Cunningham, issued in London and Philadelphia, there is a rather long poem called “Edderline's Dream,” by Professor [John] Wilson (the “Christopher North” of Blackwood's Magazine), which describes a fair sleeper who has a terrible dream (pp. 32-43), The more pertinent passages follow; Poe practically quoted some of the phraseology. [page 182:]

The scene of the action is Castle Oban. The last couplet quoted is especially striking, and it will be noticed that Poe in later versions of the poem removed the echo. Poe's vast improvement in his use of what he took from the rather long and mediocre poem of Wilson hardly needs comment.

[page 186, continued:]

[page 185, continued:]

VARIANTS [[For “Irenë”]]

Title:  Lady Irene (A’); Irene, the Dead (C)

1  ’T is now (so sings / I stand beneath (B); We stand beneath (C); Tis now — so sings the soaring moon — (A’)

2  Midnight in the sweet / At midnight in the (B, C)

3-8  Omitted (B, C)

4  beauty's / Beauty's (A’)

8  ne’er-to-be / ne’er to be (A’)

8  After this A’ inserts a new stanza:

6  romance / Romance (A’)

10  that / yon (B); her (C)

13  see! the lake / (that dim lake!) (A’)

14  A conscious slumber seems to take / The waves a conscious slumber take (A’)

18  bright pines / cedars (B, C)

20  reels with bliss / nodding hangs (B, C)

21  Above yon cataract of Serangs (B, C)

23  With / Her (C)

23-24  Transposed (C)

25  For this is substituted in B, C:

26  camest / cam'st (A’)

31  gentle wind hath / spirit hath softly (A’)

35  this / the (C); after this line is added in B and C: So fitfully, so fearfully

36  Like / As (B); three added lines follow in B and C:

In this passage the manuscript C has:

36-39  For these lines the manuscript A’ has only two lines:

37  Lady awake! awake! awake! (B); Lady awake! — lady awake! (C)

38  Omitted (B, C)

39-59  Omitted (B)

39-40  Omitted (C)

41  dead all / dead all (A’)

42  At least as long as Love doth weep / As long as Love doth mourn and weep (A’)

43  Entranc’d / Entranced (A’, C)

46-59  For these lines the manuscript A’ has only two lines:

48  Its way to Heav’n — and sorrow forsake (C)

49-59  Omitted (C)

60  oh! / O! (A’)

65  chang’d / changed (A’, B)

66-74  Omitted (A’)

72  vampyre-winged / vampire-wing-like (B, C)

73  Flutt’ring / Fluttering (B, C)

[page 188, continued:]

VARIANTS [[For “The Sleeper”]]

11  fog about its / mist about their (D); mist about its (E)

12  Grey towers are mouldering into rest (D)

13  Lethë / Lethé (D, F) [The diaeresis in our text is added editorially.]

16  Followed by: With casement open to the skies (D, E); (Her casement open to the skies) (F, G, H, K)

17  Irenë, with / Irené and (D); Irene and (E); Irené, with (F) [The diaeresis in our text is added editorially.]

19  window / lattice (D, E, F)

20-21  Omitted from D, E, F

26  fringéd / fringed (G, H, K)

33  these / our (E)

35  Stranger thy glorious length of tress (D, E)

36  this / thine (D)

39  Interchanged with 47 (E)

40  chamber / bed being (D, E); changed / chang’d (F)

41  bed / room (D, E)

43  unopened / uncloséd (D, E) [Poe wrote Griswold April 19, 1845, asking that in the new edition of Poets and Poetry of America this word be changed to unopen’d but since his text was stereotyped no change was made.]; unopen’d (F, G)

44  pale / dim (F, G, H, K); line omitted (E) [page 189:]

47  Interchanged with 39 (E)

49, 50  vault / tomb (D, E)

51  wingéd / wing-like (D, E); winged (G, H, K)

54  Some vault all haughtily alone (D)

57  From out whose hollow-sounding door (D); Some vault from out whose sounding door (E)

59  Thrilling / Nor thrill (D, E)

60  groaned / groan’d (E)

[page 186:]

NOTES [[For “Irenë”]]

13  Lethe is the river of Hades, to drink of which brings forgetfulness.

21  The Messenger variant (B) needs comment. A serang is a boatswain of a crew of lascars, hence a turbaned Eastern chief. In the 1831 version of “Tamerlane” Poe spoke of “sultan-like” pine trees.

25  The moon is not often thought of as humming. One suspects that Poe had in mind a Shakespearean parallel, though it is not about the moon. In Macbeth, III, vi, 41-42, a lord says: “The cloudy messenger turns his back / And hums, as who should say, ‘You’ll rue the time.’ ”

29  Compare “The City in the Sea,” line 39: “some far-off happier sea,” and “To F[rances],” lines 9-10: “far-off isle / In some tumultuous sea.”

45-46  This recalls Pope's “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,” lines 55-58:

47-49  For the idea of departed spirits dwelling in the clear water, compare Poe's early poem, “The Lake.”

53-55  The Greeks fancied they could see AI AI, the usual expression of wailing, on the flower that sprang from the blood of the beautiful Spartan youth Hyacinthus, after he was accidentally slain by Apollo. The story is told by Ovid, Metamorphoses, X, 162-219, and is familiar from the reference in Milton's “Lycidas” to “that sanguine flower inscribed with woe.” Poe used a different story about the hyacinth in “Al Aaraaf,” “To Helen,” and “To Zante.”

59  Some have compared a passage quoted by Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chapter xx, from Wordsworth's Prelude, V, 387-388: “that uncertain heaven, received / Into the bosom of the steady lake.”

62  Campbell (p. 213) calls attention to Byron's Giaour, lines 945ff:

71-72  Compare the phrase in “The Bargain Lost”: “a black, heavy and curiously-pannelled door.” Hervey Allen, Israfel (1926), I, 220-221, says that these and the following lines recall “some of the great family tombs on the plantations about Charleston, with the semi-feudal pomp that surrounds them.” He mentions as typical that at Middleton Gardens, near Charleston.

[page 189, continued:]

NOTES [[For “The Sleeper”]]

7-10  These lines and 22-29 were praised for “spirituality” in the London Foreign Quarterly Review, January 1844 (32:322).

20-29  In a review, “Longfellow's Poems,” in the Aristidean for April 1845, Poe cites what he thinks (less improbably than usual) was a borrowing in “Footsteps of Angels”:

26  Campbell (Poems, p. 212) compared to this The Tempest, I, ii, 407: “The fringed curtains of thine eye.”

30-31  Compare “Fairy Land” [II] (version of 1831), lines 39-40; “Isabel! do you not fear / The night and the wonders here?”

47  The line was significantly changed in later versions from its earlier form (compare “Irenë,” line 62), perhaps to make the worm a mystic symbol of immortality. Nevertheless, the reviewer in the London Literary Gazette of January 1846 (p. 237) complained of it as “morbid,” as I think it is. See Edward H. Davidson, Poe (1957), p. 39, for a defense.

59  Doctrinally, we are all “children of sin,” for the sin of Adam and Eve makes us subject to mortality. No personal allusion seems probable here. See Genesis 3:3 and 19.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 179:]

1  Irene (Eir?n?) is the Greek personification of Peace. Although modern Americans who bear the name often rhyme it with Eileen, it is properly trisyllabic, as Poe makes it, and as it is pronounced in England. The Saturday Chronicle text of 1841 had an accent on the final e as well as an accent on the final e of Lethe. I have therefore felt justified in adding a diaeresis in our texts.

2  E. g., Quinn, pp. 184-185, who praises lines 12, 22, and 23, and says that “no defense can be made” for line 47.

[The following foonote appears at the bottom of page 181:]

3  Many editions of Macbeth carried the note, originally by George Steevens in his 1793 edition: “This vaporous drop seems to have been meant for the same as the virus lunare of the ancients, being a foam which the moon was supposed to shed on particular herbs, or other objects, when strongly solicited by enchantment.” Steevens refers to Lucan's Pharsalia, VI, 666, where the Fury Erictho uses this poison when it is shed during an eclipse.