Text: John Phelps Fruit, “Beauty,” The Mind and Art of Poe's Poetry (1899), pp. 21-35


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[page 21, unnumbered:]

CHAPTER III

BEAUTY

THERE is a poem entitled Alone (10: 138) that, though not published till 1875, was dated — not in Poe's hand — “Baltimore, March 17, 1829,” which, while it presents nothing that is peculiar to the edition of 1829, is, in a sense, a résumé of what we have had in the volume of 1827; and, because it echoes, especially, the sentiment of loneliness emphasized in The Lake and in Visit of the Dead, it affords a fitting transition from the one period to the other. It reads, —

“From childhood's hour I have not been

As others were; I have not seen

As others saw; I could not bring

My passions from a common spring.

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow; I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone;

And all I loved, I loved alone.

Then — in my childhood, in the dawn

Of a most stormy life — was drawn

From every depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still:

From the torrent, or the fountain,

From the red cliff of the mountain,

From the sun that round me rolled

In its autumn tint of gold,

From the lightning in the sky

As it passed me flying by, [page 22:]

From the thunder and the storm,

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view.”

The edition of 1829 bears the title, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (W. 47). We find several of the poems of 1827 here in new dress. Tamerlane has been thoroughly revised; Visit of the Dead has become Spirits of the Dead (10:128); The Lake has the title, The Lake: To — ; Imitation appears under this, To — —; A Dream; Dreams; Evening Star; and the Song, “I saw thee on thy bridal day,” are the same familiars.

One poem, known in this edition as Preface (10: 231) — put last! — is a sort of confession of his awakening from the romantic dreaming of his boyhood to the stern realities of fact. Romance was to him then a most knowing child, a painted paroquet, a most familiar bird, which taught him his alphabet and to lisp his earliest numbers; but succeeding years were too wild for song.

“O, then the eternal Condor years,

So shook the very Heavens on high,

With tumult as they thunder’d by;

I had no time for idle cares,

Thro' gazing on the unquiet sky!

Or if an hour with calmer wing

Its down did on my spirit fling,

That little hour with lyre and rhyme

To while away — forbidden thing!

My heart half fear’d to be a crime

Unless it trembled with the string.”

The “lyre and rhyme” were forbidden things in a far deeper sense than one would at first suspect. He has discovered the iconoclastic spirit of modern science in its relation to poetry. [page 23:]

In the sonnet to Science which is subtitled A Prologue toAl Aaraaf” (10: 106), he thus expresses himself:

“Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art,

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

Plow should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,

And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?”

That “happier star,” to which escape the figures of old Romance so dear to poet's heart, is Al Aaraaf. And there, there is —

“— nothing earthly save the ray

(Thrown back from flowers) of Beauty's eye,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

— nothing earthly save the thrill

Of melody in woodland rill,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

— nothing of the dross of ours,

Yet all the beauty, all the flowers

That list our love, and deck our bowers.”

Al Aaraaf takes its significance from the sonnet to Science. Poe believes, naturally, in the sentiments as against the feelingless inductions of logic. He is wedded in particular to the sentiment of beauty. We have already quoted that he spoke of something —

“— as a symbol and a token

Of what in other worlds shall be, and given

In beauty by our God to those alone

Who otherwise would fall from life and Heaven.” [page 24:]

Beauty has, heretofore, been with him a well-spring of delight, but when Science says: “Away with the sentiments,” it becomes to him an object of thought and pursuit, and hence an inspiration. This poem stands out as Poe's first effort in the championship of Beauty considered objectively.

He personifies the sentiment in the maiden Nesace, whom he makes queen of the wandering Al Aaraaf. The “Idea of Beauty” sprang into being there, and —

“Falling in wreaths through many a startled star,

Like woman's hair ‘mid pearls, until, afar,

It lit on hills Achaian, and there dwelt.”

The story represents her kneeling and looking into Infinity, —

“Rich clouds, for canopies, about her curled.

Fit emblems of the model of her world,

Seen but in beauty, not impeding sight

Of other beauty glittering through the light, —

A wreath that twined each starry form around,

And all the opaled air in color bound.”

Kneeling upon the richest bed of flowers the poet can picture, the Goddess's song, or message, is sent in odors up to Heaven, to the —

“Spirit, that dwellest where,

In the deep sky,

The terrible and fair

In beauty vie!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Who livest — that we know —

In Eternity — we feel —

But the shadow of whose brow

What spirit shall reveal?”

The message is to the effect that the beings whom Nesace has known, have dreamed for the Infinity of the Spirit “a model of their own” (10: 220); the will of God [page 25:] though has been done through the career of the wandering star. What that purpose was will become known —

“In the environs of Heaven.”

The closing stanza of the song is, —

“By wingèd Fantasy

My embassy is given,

Till secrecy shall knowledge be

In the environs of Heaven.”

She ceased and hid her burning cheek from the fervor of His eye. She spoke not, breathed not, yet there was the sound of silence, called by poets, “the music of the spheres.” In contrast with which our world is a realm of noises, and words, and the word “silence” means quiet.

“All Nature speaks, and even ideal things

Flap shadowy sounds from visionary wings.”

The eternal voice of God answers her in a show of wrath, not towards her, but towards the creatures to whom she had been sent, because they had imagined a model of His Infinity. The consequence is His love is folly, and the crowd think His terrors manifested in the thunder-cloud, the storm, the earthquake, and the ocean-wrath, when in fact there is an “angrier path” in which they will cross Him.

Nesace is bidden to leave tenantless her crystal home, and fly with all her train athwart the heavens, to divulge the secrets of her embassy —

“To the proud orbs that twinkle, and so be

To every heart a barrier and a ban

Lest the stars totter in the guilt of man.”

What is the guilt of man? Evidently that his concep tion of God is anthropomorphic and therefore utilitarian. [page 26:] The crowd cannot accept the revelations given in beauty; she must “wing to other worlds another light.”

Up from her shrine of flowers the maiden rose and bent her way over mountain and plain, but left not yet her “Therassean reign” (10: 221). Thus Part I. of the poem closes.

Part II. opens with a description of a temple —

“High on a mountain of enamelled head.”

The pile was upreared on gorgeous columns on the unburdened air, and flashed from Parian marble that twin smile upon the sparkling wave far below.

“A dome, by linked light from Heaven let down,

Sat gently on these columns as a crown;

A window of one circular diamond, there,

Looked out above into the purple air,

And rays from God shot down that meteor chain

And hallowed all the beauty twice again,

Save when, between the empyrean and that ring,

Some eager spirit napped his dusky wing.”

Now observe the effect of contrast in the further description, —

“But on the pillars seraph eyes have seen

The dimness of this world; that grayish green

That Nature loves the best for Beauty's grave

Lurked in each cornice, round each architrave

And every sculptured cherub thereabout

That from his marble dwelling peered out,

Seemed earthly in the shadow of his niche, —

Achaian statues in a world so rich!”

With a rush of wings, Nesace sweeps into her halls again, cheeks flushed, lips apart, —

“From the wild energy of wanton haste.” [page 27:]

She paused in the centre of that hall to breathe, and punted, —

“Zanthe! all beneath

The fairy light that kissed her golden hair,

And longed to rest, yet could but sparkle there.”

A silence stole over material things, and only the sound that springs from the spirit “bore burden” to the song the maiden sang to the “Bright beings” of her train to rouse them.

After addressing these beings en masse, she singles out Love, —

“Oh, how, without you, Love!

Could angels be blest?

Those kisses of true love

That lulled ye to rest!

Up! shake from your wing

Each hindering thing!

The dew of the night,

It would weigh down your flight;

And the true love caresses,

Oh, leave them apart!

They are light on the tresses,

But lead on the heart.”

Next, she calls upon the harmony of Nature personified in Ligeia, —

“Ligeia! Ligeia

My beautiful one!

Whose harshest idea

Will to melody run,

Oh, is it thy will

On the breezes to toss?

Or, capriciously still,

Like the lone albatross,

Incumbent on night

(As she on the air)

To keep watch with delight

On the harmony there? [page 28:]

“Ligeia! wherever

Thy image may be,

No magic shall sever

Thy music from thee.

Thou hast bound many eyes

In a dreamy sleep,

But the strains still arise

Which thy vigilance keep:

The sound of the rain,

Which leaps down to the flower

And dances again

In the rhythm of the shower,

The murmur that springs

From the growing grass

Are the music of things,

But are modelled, alas!”

We might stop to quote that oft-repeated expression, “Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist,” then adduce Al Aaraaf, and particularly this lyric call to Ligeia, as proof of Poe's Platonisms. He believes in Plato's eternal world of Ideas. The word “modelled,” used thus far more than once in this poem, indicates that all objects of sense are to be regarded as but earthly imitations of their divine prototypes. He expressed in the edition of 1827 his sense of mystery of how these earthly imitations partake of the essence of their divine ideal forms. He used such terms as “the unembodied essence of a thought,” “bodiless spirits.”

And then take the myth of the “Chariot of the Soul” and that of the “Other World” from the Gorgias and the Phædo, and one finds a kinship to Poe's myth Al Aaraaf.

Here is a paraphrase of a passage or two from Plato, quoted here for its appropriateness: “We mortals, says Socrates, know nothing of the real world, for we live along the shores of the Mediterranean like frogs around a swamp; and we think we are on the surface, when we [page 29:] are really only in one of those hollow places of which our earth is full. But if a man could take wings arid fly up wards, he would see the true world, which is a thousand leagues above our own; and there all things are brilliant with color, and sparkle with gold and purple, and a purer white than earthly snow. And there are trees and flowers and fruits, and jewels on. all the hills, more precious than the sardonyx or emerald. And there are living beings there, both men and animals, dwelling around the air; for our air is like their sea, and their air is purest ether. And they know neither pain nor disease; and all their senses are keener and more perfect; and they have temples in which their gods really dwell, and they see them face to face, and hear their voices, and call them by their names. Moreover, they know the sun and moon and stars in their proper nature.”

Again: “The gods and the immortal souls, whose steeds have full-grown wings, are carried by a revolution of the spheres into a celestial world beyond, where all space is filled by a sea of intangible essence which the mind — ‘lord of the soul’ — alone can contemplate: and here are the absolute ideas of Truth and Beauty and Justice. And in these divine pastures of pure knowledge the soul feeds during the time that the spheres revolve, and rests in perfect happiness, and then returns to the heavens whence it came, where the steeds feast in their stalls on nectar and ambrosia. But only to a few souls out of many is it granted to see these celestial visions.”

Poe believed himself to be one of the few to whom revelations in beauty were given.

Then, to take up the poem again, comes the response to the summons, —

“Spirits in wing, and angels to the view,

A thousand seraphs burst the empyrean through — ” [page 30:]

It was the simoon to depopulate that errant but blissful realm, yet —

“Sweet was their death — with them to die was rife

With the last ecstasy of satiate life;

Beyond that death no immortality.”

This is the death the poet ponders, exclaiming, —

“And there, oh, may my weary spirit dwell,

Apart from Heaven's Eternity — and yet how far from Hell!”

Who died that death? There were two in that shrubbery dim who heard not that stirring call. They were a maiden-angel and her seraph-lover, Ianthe and her Angelo.

He was a sentimental creature. Read this, —

“He was a goodly spirit — he who fell:

A wanderer by moss-y-mantled well,

A gazer on the lights that shine above,

A dreamer in the moonbeam by his love.

What wonder? for each star is eye-like there,

And looks so sweetly down on Beauty's hair;

And they, and every mossy spring were holy

To his love-haunted heart and melancholy.”

Despite his sentimentality he is a devotee at Beauty's shrine; but picture the posture of these lovers when the catastrophe comes, —

“The night had found (to him a night of woe)

Upon a mountain crag young Angelo;

Beetling it bends athwart the solemn sky,

And scowls on starry worlds that down beneath it lie.

Here sate he with his love, his dark eye bent

With eagle gaze along the firmament;

Now turned it upon her, but ever then

It trembled to the orb of Earth again.”

He yearned for the beauty he had left behind on earth when Death stole over his senses so softly that not a single [page 31:] silken hair awoke that slept. He said as he looked so far away, —

“The last spot of Earth's orb I trod upon

Was a proud temple called the Parthenon;

More beauty clung around her columned wall

Than even thy glowing bosom beats withal;

And when old Time my wing did disenthrall,

Thence sprang I as the eagle from his tower,

And years I left behind me in an hour.

What time upon her airy bounds I hung,

One half the garden of her globe was flung,

Unrolling as a chart unto my view;

Tenantless cities of the desert too!

Ianthe, beauty crowded on me then,

And half I wished to be again of men.”

How different is the sentiment here from that in Tamerlane! There it was the passionate love of woman, here it is the passionate love of Beauty. Ianthe is undeceived by this last speech, and begins her reply with an exclamation of surprise, —

“My Angelo! and why of them to be?

A brighter dwelling-place is here for thee,

And greener fields than in yon world above,

And woman's loveliness, and passionate love.”

He insisted that her star was the —

“Dread star! that came, amid a night of mirth,

A red Daedalion on the timid Earth.”

She replied, —

“But, Angelo, than thine gray Time unfurled

Never his fairy wing o’er fairer world!

Dim was its little disk, and angel eyes

Alone could see the phantom in the skies,

When first Al Aaraaf knew her course to be

Headlong thitherward o’er the starry sea;

But when its glory swelled upon the sky,

As glowing Beauty's bust beneath man's eye,

We paused before the heritage of men,

And thy star trembled — as doth Beauty then!” [page 32:]

Thus in discourse they whiled away the night that brought no day. They heard not the summons; they fell, and by example point the moral that —

“Heaven to them no hope imparts

Who hear not for the beating of their hearts.”

What has this episode to do with the theme of the poem? To illustrate, perhaps, what it is to “totter in the guilt of man.” It is to emphasize the saving worth of Beauty. The passionate love of Beauty is to be put above the passionate love of sex. It is Poe himself, and not the guise of another, that is speaking in this volume of 1829, and he is out and out Platonic. Beauty must be set above knowledge, that is, scientific knowledge.

After making so much of Beauty in Al Aaraaf, he finds a simile in which to express the “glow of beauty.” The two stanzas entitled To the River —— (10: 132) develop the analogy and are, in effect, climactic to Al Aaraaf, —

“Fair river! in thy bright, clear flow

Of crystal, wandering water,

Thou art an emblem of the glow

Of beauty — the unhidden heart,

The playful maziness of art,

In old Alberto's daughter;

“But when within thy wave she looks,

Which glistens then, and trembles,

Why, then, the prettiest of brooks

Her worshipper resembles;

For in his heart, as in thy stream,

Her image deeply lies —

His heart which trembles at the beam

Of her soul-searching eyes.”

This is an exquisite repetition of the idea quoted above, from the close of Al Aaraaf, as to the behavior of the [page 33:] Earth when that wandering star paused before the heritage of men.

Laying aside the revision of those poems from 1827 that find themselves in this volume, — since there is nothing new in thought in them, — the very topic of every poem, except two, is Beauty. When Beauty is thus obtruded upon our attention, we are apt to see, or imagine we see, the Beautiful. We are in condition of mind to make a wrong estimate of the poems of 1829. The two poems, To —— (10:133), Fairy-Land (10:234), do not take beauty for their topic, yet they bring to us the sense of the pleasure of beauty.

In the first, he conceives her lips to be the bowers whence pours forth, in her lip-begotten words, all the melody of the wantonest singing birds. In dreams he conceives this. Her eyes, enshrined in Heaven of heart, fall upon his funereal mind, desolately, like starlight on a pall. This sentiment takes us back to the dominant mood of 1827. Thus speaking of her lips and thinking of her eyes as expressive of the heart whence these finer issues of life flow, he both laments and moralizes, —

“Thy heart — thy heart! — I wake and sigh,

And sleep to dream till day

Of the truth that gold can never buy

Of the bawbles that it may.”

In the second, Fairy-Land, we have his conception of that shadowy realm into which childhood and youth have made so many excursions. It has dim vales, shadowy floods, cloudy-looking woods where forms are lost in the trees that drip all over. This is his brief topography of the region.

But look up to see huge moons — not one — waxing and waning every moment of the night, putting out the star light with the breath of their pale faces! Now watch one, [page 34:] more filmy than the rest, coming down with its centre upon the very tip of a mountain's eminence. It comes down, and still down, until the wide circumference of its easy drapery spreads over hamlets, rich halls; over strange woods, the sea; over spirits on the wing, and every drowsy creature, and quite buries them in a labyrinth of light! How they must sleep!

“In the morning they arise,

And their moony covering

Is soaring in the skies,

With the tempests as they toss.”

They do not use that moon any more for a tent — what extravagance! —

“Its atomies, however,

Into a shower dissever,

Of which those butterflies,

Of Earth, who seek the skies,

And so come down again

(The unbelieving things!)

Have brought a specimen

Upon their quivering wings.”

Is it worth while to dwell upon the wealth of suggestion in these two poems? You cannot by taking thought exhaust their meaning. For instance, the more you listen to the melody of those lips, the richer becomes the Eldorado of song and soul aback of them. The more you try to fashion in your imagination, “Thine eyes, in Heaven of heart enshrined,” the more is the pleasure multiplied. There is infinite room for the play-impulses of the mind to engage themselves in trying to realize vividly the “lips” and the “eyes” that connote so much.

Or is there not pure pleasure in the exercise of the imagination that pictures that huge moon as it uses the pinnacle of a high mountain as a tent-pole, and spreads [page 35:] itself out over all drowsy things? and then to picture these creatures awaking out of sleep in the morning to behold their moony covering soaring away into the sky; the upper air-currents, however, tear it into pieces and shower it down to them in butterflies whose quivering wings are specimens of its texture? Is this a picture for children? Deep wisdom lies underneath it.

Without mention of beauty, Poe, in these two poems, gives infinite range to the play of the imagination, and therewith the supreme pleasure of the Beautiful. Perhaps the theme is nothing, and the treatment all. We shall see what stress he lays on workmanship.

One thing is sure, he was not utilitarian. In singing —

“Of the truth that gold can never buy,”

he realized that the essential qualities of a thing of beauty are in some way typical of the Divine attributes.


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Notes:

None.

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[S:0 - JFP99, 1899] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - The Mind and Art of Poe's Poetry (J. P. Fruit) (Beauty)