Text: Edgar Allan Poe (ed. T. O. Mabbott), “Fanny,” The Collected Works of Edgar Allan PoeVol. I: Poems (1969), pp. 225-226 (This material is protected by copyright)


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[page 225, continued:]

FANNY

This poem, like the preceding “To ———” beginning “Sleep on,” was signed “Tamerlane” when published in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter on May 18, 1833, a week after “To ———.” It was first reprinted, with the other poem, by the discoverer, John C. French, in Modern Language Notes for May 1918 (33:266). The verses are surely Poe's, written, presumably, for a lady's album, but the lady addressed has not been plausibly identified. Poe's foster mother was named Frances, but she did not disdain him.

The text is that of the Visiter, but two misprints, “Sing's” in the second line and “alter” in the seventeenth, are corrected.


[page 226, continued:]

NOTES

1  Stories of the swan song abound in literature, and are not wholly fabulous. Dr. Robert G. Murphy refers me to the Handbook of British Birds (1939), III, 169, which says that the final expulsion of air from the long convoluted windpipe of the whooper swan (Cygnus cygnus) produces a wailing, slow, and flutelike sound. This is not true of the mute swan, another species, better known in England and America.

7-8  The simile is unusually incorrect for Poe.


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Notes:

None.


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[S:1 - TOM1P, 1969] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Editions-The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (T. O. Mabbott) (Fanny)