Text: James Wood Davidson, “Poe's Guardian Angel,” Home Journal (New York, NY), April 21, 1871, p. ?, col. ?

[page ?, column ?:]

Eds. Home Journal. — It is now a month since the death of this lady was announced. It occurred on the sixteenth of February. The event has elicited very little comment from the press. Indeed, the many scarcely knew her name, and the few who remembered it in connection with that of Edgar Poe knew little else of it, and most of them had concluded that her being here had ceased with his.

This few will remember that she was the mother of Poe's wife — the more than mother to himself, as he expressed it in one of the most affectionate poems. His words, addressed to her, soon after the death of his wife, are these:

Nothing that that wayward being ever wrote is so human as these lines — nothing so earnest, and, doubtless, nothing so sincere. And she deserved it all. From the marriage of her daughter to Edgar Poe, this guardian angel of the wayward poet devoted her life to him. During the long illness of Mrs. Poe, in the floom which followed that event, and in the succeeding years of trial and sorrow for both, Mrs. Clemm devoted herself entirely to her darling Eddie, as she constantly called him. And after his death — in 1849 — she devoted herself to his memory; and continued to do so until the date of her own death.

Her devotion to him and to his [[memory]] is the very strongest proof yet adduced by those desirous of proving that there was native good in the strange being she guarded — in that living paradox of a hundred sharply-defined contradictions, which the world has known and admired as Edgar Poe.

This thought appears so admirably in the words of the late Mr. Willis at that time an editor of the Home Journal, in his notice of the death of Edgar A. Poe, that I cannot refrain from quoting a few sentences. Mrs. Willis, speaking of Mrs. Clemm, says: — “the countenance of this lady, made beautiful and saintly with an evidently complete giving up of her life to privation and sorrowful tenderness, her gentle and mournful voice urging the plea, her long-forgotten but habitually and uncommonly refined manners and her appealing and yet appreciative mention of the claims and abilities of her son, disclosed, at once the presence of one of those angels [column ??:] upon earth that woman in adversity can be. It was a hard fate she was watching over. Mr. Poe wrote with fastidious difficulty, and in a style too much above the popular level to be well paid. He was always in pecuniary difficulty, and, with his sick wife, frequently in want of the merest necessaries of life. Winter after winter, for years, the most touching sight to us, in this whole city, has been that tireless minister to genius, thinly and insufficiently clad, going from office to office with a poem, or an article on some literary subject, to sell — sometimes simply pleasing in a broken voice that he was ill, and begging for him — mentioning nothing but that ‘he was ill,’ whatever might have be the reasons for his writing nothing — and never, amid all her tears and recitals of distress, suffering one syllable to escape her lips that could convey a doubt of him, or a complaint, or a lessinging of pride in his genius and good intentions. Her daughter died a year and a half since, but also did not desert him. She continued his ministering angle — living with him, caring for him, guarding him against expose, and, when he was carried away by temptation, amid grief and the loneliness of feelings unreplied to, and awoke from his self-abandonment prostrated in destitution and suffering, begging for him still. If woman's devotion, born with a first love, and fed with human passion, hallow its object, as it is allowed to do, what does not a devotion like this — pure, disinterested and holy as the watch of an invisible spirit — any for him who inspired it?”

For several years after the death of Poe, Mrs. Clemm lived in Alexandria, Va.; and for several immediately preceding her death, she was an inmate of the Church Home in Baltimore. Her age was about eighty-one.

Edgar Poe's grave is in Baltimore, in the cemetery of the Presbyterian church, on the south-east corner of Fayette and Greene Streets. The last wish of Mrs. Clemm in that matter was gratified; which was, to rest with her Eddie.

At a high and true example of self-forgetting devotion of one whom few cared to cling to, Mrs. Clemm will live in the memory of men as long as Edgar Poe's matchless poems themselves shall endure; and they can have no limit but time itself.

Columbia, S. C., March 20, 1871.