Text: Various, “Poetic Tributes,” Edgar Allan Poe: A Memorial Volume, Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers, 1877, pp. 93-95

LE TOMBEAU D’ EDGAR POE.

SONNET.

Tel qu’en lui-même enfin 1’éternité le change,

Le poete suscite avec un hymne nu

Son siècle épouvanté de a’avoir pas connu

Que la mort s’exaltait dans cette voix etrange

 

Mais, comme un vil tressant d’hydre, oyant jadis 1’ange

Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu,

Tous pens rent entre eux le sortif e bu

Chez le fiot sans honneur de quelque noir mdlange.

 

Du sol et de lather hostiles, ˆ grief!

Si mon idde aver ne sculpte un bas-relief

Dont la tombe de Poe eblouissante s’orne,

 

Sombre bloc h jamais chu d’un ddsastre obscur,

Que ce granit du mains montre ‘a jamais sa borne

Aux vieux vols de blasphdme epars daps le futur.

STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ. [page 94:]

POE.

Two mighty spirits dwelt in him:

One, a wild demon, weird and dim,

The darkness of whose ebon wings

Did shroud unutterable things:

One, a fair angel, in the skies

Of whose serene, unshadowed eyes

Were seen the lights of Paradise.

 

To these, in turn, he gave the whole

Vast empire of his brooding soul;

Now, filled with strains of heavenly swell,

Now, thrilled with awful tones of hell:

Wide were his being’s strange extremes,

‘Twixt nether glooms, and Eden gleams

Of tender, or majestic dreams.

 

But sapped by want, and riven by wrong,

His heart-chords took life’s minor song,

Till rhythms of anguish only passed

Athwart their tortured strength, at last:

The angel fled with sigh and moan;

The demon spurned his vacant throne,

And ruled those dark domains alone.

 

Then, to the poet’s brain there came

Nought but fierce visions, breathing flame;

Spectres of gibbering horror pale,

All creatures of the house of bale

His fate remorseless urged him o’er

Oceans that stretched without a shore,

Whose swart waves whispered “NEVERMORE!”

 

Ever, that whisper wandered low,

Across life’s weltering ebb and flow;

It touched at length — a sad refrain —

The sources of his deepest pain,

Set their dull currents rippling by

In concords far too sweet to die,

Wedding despair to harmony. [page 95:]

 

Henceforth, with pinions seldom furled,

His sombre “Raven” roams the world

All stricken peoples pause to hear

The echo of his burden drear;

For ah! the deathless type is he

Of pangs we may not shun, nor flee, —

And grief’s stern immortality.

PAUL H. HAYNE.

EDGAR A. POE.

He loved all shadowy spots, all seasons drear;

All ways of darkness lured his ghastly whim;

Strange fellowships he held with goblins grim,

At whose demoniac eyes he felt no fear.

On midnights through dense branches he would peer,

To watch the pale ghoul feed by tombstones dim;

The appalling forms of phantoms walked with him.

And murder breathed its red guilt in his ear.

 

By desolate paths of dream where fancy’s owl

Sent long lugubrious hoots through sombre air,

Amid thought’s gloomiest caves he went to prowl

And met delirium in her awful lair,

And mingled with cold shapes that writhe or scowl —

Serpents of horror, black bats of despair.

EDGAR FAWCETT.