Text: John Phelps Fruit, “Master-Strokes,” The Mind and Art of Poe's Poetry (1899), pp. 127-134

[page 127:]

THERE is a circle of poems that, in topic and handling, seem to issue from, or be connected with, Lenore. They are The Raven, Eulalie, Ulalume, Annabel Lee, For Annie.

Lenore, — of The Raven, — Eulalie, Ulalume, Annabel Lee, Annie, are the different phases of the poet's Platonic ideal, showing through the mid-region of his gloom.

His love is apotheosized as Lenore in the poem Lenore. She is riven —

This poem is not allegorical, but it shows why the others are; out of it comes the thread that binds the chaplet.

The Raven celebrates his sorrow for the lost Lenore, for that rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore. Lenore closed with —

With this (“light”) mood Eulalie is in fine accord. What, can you imagine, would be more like “a Paean of old days”?

In Lenore, she, “the fair and debonair,” with —

was to have been his bride; but in Eulalie, “the fair and gentle,” “the yellowed-haired young Eulalie,” is his bride: the bride of his soul.

The motive that prompted the paean is two-fold: it is not merely that Lenore was translated to a high estate in Heaven, but that she was snatched from more than fiends on Earth. It is the predominance of the one side of the motive that gives us Eulalie, the predominance of the other side giving us Ulalume. There is a natural revulsion from a feeling for her sake, to a feeling for himself left alone in a world among more than fiends.

It is not the bright eyes of Eulalie that draw him, but it is the door of a tomb, — of the vault of his lost Ulalume, that stops him. The thought and sentiment of the two poems are. from every point, in diametrical contrast.

Annabel Lee is connected in thought with both these poems. It was because the angels, not half so happy in heaven as these two lovers, went envying them, that the wind came out of the cloud by night, chilling and killing Annabel Lee; it was because of a love that was more than love, that her highborn kinsman, the winged seraphs of heaven, came and bore her away from him, and shut her up in this sepulchre by the sea.

In the spirit of Eulalie, he sings, —

That he feels her bright eyes, and calls her his bride, recurs to Eulalie; that she is in her sepulchre suggests Ulalume.

Read the last stanza, —

The poem, For Annie, seems to take its cue from the idea of the lover's lying down by the side of his darling in her sepulchre.

He thanks Heaven that the fever called “Living” is conquered at last, and that he lies composedly in his bed, his narrow bed, where his tantalized spirit blandly reposes where it lies happily —

There thus appears to be among these poems a sort of sequence, that renders all susceptible of allegorical mean ing. As to the art of series, they are of one type, asso nance being the marked characteristic. What it is in its richness, variety, fitness, and force, has been made manifest in The Raven.

Eulalie is the radiant girl who redeems his soul from its stagnant tide in a world of moan. The poet has the lover to sketch her features. He speaks of being alone —

Observe with what effect the form of the repetend is used to impress the lines and colors of the dear girl. She is “fair and gentle,” and “blushing;” she is “yellow-haired young,” and “smiling.” Her eyes are bright as the stars, but her curls! [page 130:]

But as to her eyes, he says Astarte shines, all day long,!) right in the sky, —

The poem is not written to the sense of hearing is why there is so little onomatopeia in it; it is a picture for the mind's eye in which the ideo-motor ideas to sight-percep tion are made rhythmical through the melody of the verse. With what skill the poet has put the differences sweet into ( forms framed of like words!

Ulalume relates the story of a lone walk, and a talk, with his soul. So distressful is the condition of feeling de picted, that it must be for the loss of his Eulalie. — that bright name to be changed to Ulalume. Think of the place! By the dim lake, by the dank tarn, of Auber, in the misty mid-region, in the ghoul-haunted woodland, of Weir. It was in October when the skies were ashen, and the leaves crisped and withering and sere.

Note the description, —

There is movement and picture and sound to suit, with repetend on repetend, and rhythm and rime to aid!

At the end of their path a light from nebulous lustre is born. Watch the process, —

Do the words “senescent,” “liquescent,” and “crescent” have a strange sound in company with such words as “morn,” “born,” and “horn”? But, “inceptives,” they repeat so delicately the idea and function of the stanza.

He was ready in his gloom to welcome this new light as pointing, “To the Lethean peace of the skies;” but Psyche would mistrust it, letting her wings, in terror, trail in the dust. To encourage her —

The birth of the light of hope in the gloom of his soul is for the “Lethean peace;” this is coquetted into a “sibyllic [page 132:] splendor,” which he is quickly ready to trust, “since it flickers up to Heaven.” The verse tells this part of the story with all the archness of a new love winning a wid owed heart.

But, the dénouement, —

It was the “sky” that had grown ashen and sober, in the first stanza, but now it is his heart that is crisped and sere as the leaves in the lonesome October. The memory of the old drives out the new.

There is a love that is not false and flattering, it is Child-Love. This the poet has the lover sing in Annabel Lee. “It was many and many a year ago,” in a kind of fairy-realm, it seems now: “In a kingdom by the sea,” where there was no other thought for two dear children than to love and be loved by each other.

Tamerlane (1827) thought his Ada was worthy of all love, and that his childish love, because it lacked “its passion” was without sin. He felt that —

The vehemence of the sentiment comes as an echo from the humanism of the Renaissance. Platonic? It strikes [page 133:] one that way! But the vehemence of the sentiment has, in a fitting sense, the vehemence of a name: Annabel Lee. That is a name musical enough to charm with. The farawayness of the event, in childhood, — in a sepulchre by the sounding sea, excuses the first impression that the poem is but a recollection of “the nothing of a name.” It is executed in the spirit of the fairy story. It does not begin with “Once upon a time,” but with the more poeti cal “It was many and many a year ago.” It was in a “kingdom” they lived, and a “highborn kinsman” came and bore her away; but nothing, neither angels nor demons, —

The equalities and fitnesses here, as in the other poems of the series, challenge admiration.

If any one poem, more than another, exhibits in its out ward form a closer correspondence to its sentiment, that poem is entitled For Annie. The lover is represented as composing himself, after the fever called “Living” is over, in his narrow bed for his final slumber. The very confinedness of the thought is seen in the short lines of the stanza, —

There is here none of the roominess suggested in the stanza of The Raven. A more interesting feature is that every stanza of the poem is a paradox. The words them selves declare one sentiment, that of rest and composure, [page 134:] while the movement of the words in a stanza contradict with the spirit of restlessness, —

Here is another, illustrative, —

The paradoxical nature of the stanza issues logically from the conception that the lover is dead, yet telling how he fell —

In this round of poems Poe has proved his faith by his works. The simple ballad form held, for him, all the “essentialities” of verse. By varying and extending the equalities of the simple form with what he termed “embellishments,” he enlarged the function and possibilities of melody in verse, in evidence whereof these poems, master pieces, stand to his praise.