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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.
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The dying swan by northern lakes
Sings its wild death song, sweet and clear,
And as the solemn music breaks
O’er hill and glen dissolves in air;
5
Thus musical thy soft voice came,
Thus trembled on thy tongue my name.
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Like sunburst through the ebon cloud,
Which veils the solemn midnight sky,
Piercing cold evening's sable shroud
10
Thus came the first glance of that eye;
My spirit met and braved the shock.
Who laid his heart upon thy shrine, [page 226:]
15
When far away his footsteps fall,
Think that he deem’d thy charms divine;
A victim on love's altar slain,
By witching eyes which looked disdain.
[1833?]
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)