[page 323, continued:]

THE CONQUEROR WORM

This major poem, first published in Graham's Magazine for January 1843, is unsurpassed in its power and pessimism. Kent has pointed out that the five stanzas symbolize the five acts of a tragedy.(1) In 1845 it was put into the second version of Poe's tale “Ligeia” as a hint that the heroine of that story would not succeed in permanently returning to life. This nuance had been discussed by Philip Pendleton Cooke and Poe in letters of September 16 and 21, 1839, but the poem was probably not written with this specific purpose.

One inspiration may have come, as Ingram observed, from a little verse romance, The Proud Ladye (1840), by an obscure New York poet, Spencer Wallace Cone, who is not even given a place in Poe's “Literati” papers or in Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America. Poe reviewed Cone's poem in Burton's for June 1840 and there quoted the pertinent lines from the beginning of Part III, which I find at page 6 of the original volume: [page 324:]

It is more likely that Poe's impulse to write his poem came from a passage in a review in Graham's Magazine for February 1841 of Dr. James McHenry's epic, The Antediluvians (Philadelphia, 1840). Poe did not write that review,(2) but the discussion of McHenry can hardly have escaped his eye. The reviewer quoted a passage from The Antediluvians, page 202:

This he calls a feeble imitation of Shakespeare. He gives, slightly abridged and misquoted from Measure for Measure, II, ii, 117-122:

Poe seems to take ideas from both quotations, and especially the frailty of man is significant. In the play, Shakespeare wrote of “proud man” and likened him to “an angry ape.” Neither pride nor anger has a place in Poe's poem.(3) [page 325:]

[page 326, continued:]

VARIANTS

Title:  None (C, E, K)

3  An angel / A mystic (A, B, D); bewinged / bewing’d (B, D, H)

4  drowned / drown’d (B, C, D, H)

13  formless / shadowy (A)

19  chased / chas’d (B, C, D)

31  seraphs / the angels (A, B, D, F, H, L); the seraphs (C, E, K)

34  quivering / dying (A)

37  And the seraphs, all haggard and wan (A); And the angels, all pallid and wan (B, C, D, E, F, H, K, L)

40  And its / Its (A, B, D, H)

[page 326, continued:]

NOTES

Title:  See also Poe's tale “The Premature Burial,” for the phrase “conqueror worm” in 1844.

2  See the phrase “the lonesome latter days” in Poe's “Addenda” to Eureka. This probably alludes to I Timothy 4:1: “... in the latter times some shall depart from the faith.” According to a note by Richard Wilbur (Poe, p. 142), Poe here suggests that the end of the world approaches. [page 327:]

3-6  Compare Henry Hart Milman's “Hymn for Palm Sunday,” beginning “Ride on, ride on in majesty,” stanza 3:

7  The music of the spheres is fitful because of the disharmony of the degenerate world, Wilbur explains (Poe, p. 142).

9  See also “The Black Cat” for “a man, fashioned in the image of the High God.” The reference is to Genesis 1:27 — “So God created man in his own image.”

15  All the known condors are confined to the Americas and inhabit the mountains near the western coasts. There are several species of these birds, the best known being the Andean condor, generally said to be the largest living bird capable of flight, the wing expanse sometimes exceeding twelve feet. Their plumage is almost wholly black, and after flapping their wings to gain altitude, they seem to soar almost without wing movement. Their voracity is proverbial, and although they occasionally attack living prey, they usually subsist on dead animals. In “Romance” Poe speaks of “eternal condor years” that devour the dead past. In the story “The Assignation” he compares a Venetian gondola at night to “some huge and sable-feathered condor.” Poe seems to have had both of the foregoing ideas in mind in “The Conqueror Worm.”

17  Motley is the costume of fools; the allusion is to them, both natural and professional.

19  The phantom is Happiness.

21-22  The division of the word “into” between two lines in a rhymed poem is as unusual as it is effective. An opinion of Croesus, the Lydian king, is recorded in Herodotus, I, 207, that “there is a wheel in human affairs, which continually revolving, does not suffer the same men always to be successful.”

33-36  Compare the fifth and sixth stanzas of Thomas Campbell's “Last Man”:

36  The curtain comes down with the rush of a storm of which the audience is unaware unless there is no applause. Those who have seen John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln, where applause is withheld by request until the final curtain, will recall the effect.

Possibly Poe had in mind a well-known remark of Augustus Caesar, who, “on the last day of his life, received a number of his friends, and said ‘Do you think that I have acted my part on the stage of life well?’ and quoted two [page 328:] lines of Greek, meaning ‘If I’ve played well, applaud me.’ ” See the ninety-ninth chapter of his Life by Suetonius.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 323:]

1  Harrison, ed., Complete Works, VII, 204.

[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 324:]

2  Harrison thought he did, and collected it in Complete Works, X, 105f., but we now know that Poe did not join the staff of Graham's until March, and the review is inconsistent with his kindly remarks in “Autography,” in Graham's for January 1842, on McHenry as the victim of a clique.

3  Lest it be supposed overlooked, I mention a “suggested source” of Poe's poem in a piece called “Death of Time,” which appeared in a volume called Nacoochee ... With Other Poems by T. H. Chivers, M.D. (1837) — it is “a play, with God as dramatist, and Christ as leading man”(!) and “the setting for the end of the world.” See S. Foster Damon, Thomas Holley Chivers (1930), p, 216, and Charles Henry Watts II, Thomas Holley Chivers (1956), p. 158. I can find no similarities in the two poems, nor did Chivers himself ever think there were any.