∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
A LAMENT FOR EDGAR A. POE.
——
WOE for thine early doom,
Thou star of glory set in shades of night!
The wailing winds that haunt thy lonely tomb
Breathe, sadly breathe, thy tale of early blight;
Quenched is thy glorious eye’s resplendent light;
Hushed is the voice that swayed the listening crowd;
Cold is the kingly brow of marble white;
Low lies the martial form so nobly proud; ——
Wail on, ye storm-winds, wail, and chant his dirge aloud!
Woe for thy shattered lyre!
The soul that sorrowing earth bewailed, so young,
Glowed with a poet’s glad, ecstatic fire,
And, high and sweet, those numbers wildly sung
Fame’s clarion voice charmed not thy soul to rest,
The lofty songs that trembled on thy tongue
Soothed not thy worn and passion-haunted breast,
Nor won sweet, holy Peace for thy delightful guest.
Thy genius, wild and strange,
Strove to portray creation’s earliest years,
And loved through earth’s grim ghastly realms to range,
To trace the deepest woes and darkest fears,
And weave thy tales of anguish and of tears;
To tell of secret crime and dungeon gloom,
Of black despair, of horror’s awful spheres,
Of haunted hearts where gladness could not bloom,
And struggling life confined in death’s revolting tomb.
Woe for thy lonely life!
The clouds of sorrow dimmed thy sunless day —
Wan, spectral forms of want and care and strife
Haunted thy path, and quenched hope’s rising ray,
And clothed thy nightly dreams with dark dismay,
Thy soul sat down upon a desert shore
And listless saw thy pleasures drift away
To vanish like the “loved and lost Lenore,”
While madness cursed the waves that far thy treasure’s born.
Woe for thy mournful grave!
Would that thy spirit’s wild exulting fire
Had glowed a guiding star on life’s dark wave,
To rouse the voyager’s heart with pure desire —
That heavenly joy had waked thy wondrous lyre; —
Then hadst thou sat by sweet Siloam’s rill,
And soared on spirit-wings that could not tire,
And sung so sweet that Nature, listening still,
Might hear the strains resound from every joyous hill.
J. G. S.
Groveland, Mass.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
Notes:
The poem is reproduced, from the original publication, by Kenneth Walter Cameron, The New England Writers and the Press, Hartford, CT: Transcendental Books, 1980, p. 41. In the original publication, the author is identified only by the initials “J. G. S.,” but on October 19, 2014, Ton Fafianie wrote to the Poe Society of Baltimore to note that the poem appears under the same title in the Valley of the Merrimack (New York: Grafton Press, 1901), pp. 58-60. The author was Julia [Granby] Noyes Stickney (1830-1910). In the collection of her poems, it is stated that the poem for Poe was written in 1855, which was also the year of her marriage, to Charles Stickney.
A copy of the poem, from the Independent, was sent by Julia Deane Freeman to Sarah Helen Whitman on January 5, 1860. Mrs. Whitman wrote a gracious note in reply.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
[S:0 - NEWP, 1860] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Aritcles - A Lament for Edgar A. Poe (J. G. S., January 5, 1860)