Text: Burton R. Pollin, “Poe and the River,” Discoveries in Poe, 1970, pp. 144-165 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 144:]

9

POE AND THE RIVER

IN 1827 EDGAR Allan Poe published his first volume, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in Boston. Two of the poems, reprinted on successive pages in his 1829 volume, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, very helpfully highlight the theme of this chapter, namely, that Poe usually and significantly attaches a distinctive complex of associations in his writings to each of three aspects of nature: the sea, the river, and the lake. In illustration I cite “The Lake”:

Surely this demonstrates the attraction lurking for Poe in the dark waters of a remote lake, with its “black rock” and “black [page 145:] wind,” creating “a dirge of melody,” and with its poisoned wave and its solitude, according to Poe's variations.(2) The fatal fascination of the mountain lake or tarn, as Poe calls it, subsequently appears in his creative works.

The preceding page of the 1829 volume (p. 63) carried “To the River”:

This was revised for the 1845 edition of his poems, even more pointedly, to “Fair river! in thy bright, clear flow / of crystal, wandering water. ... ” The darkness of the lake water and of its shores is in sharp contrast with the glinting purity of the flowing stream.

But what attitude does Poe take toward the sea — to add the third type of waterscape? In his earliest volumes of poetry, there is no single poem using the sea as a theme, but some gauge is furnished by the 1829 “Fairy-Land,” containing these lines:

The fatal bird of the Ancient Mariner indicates the trend of Poe's sea-borne thought in his poetry and his fiction. The sea shares the emotive overtones of the lake in being a source and symbol of disaster to man. Usually it is described as rough, stormy, dangerous. Even when calm, it has its sinister side, as I shall show through a survey of Poe's poetry and tales which [page 146:] will consider his major treatments of waterscapes and several minor allusions.

Poe's third collection of poetry in 1831 provides a death-ridden seascape, “The City in the Sea.” The sunken metropolis, replete with shrines and palaces and time-worn towers, is tributary to Death. “Light from the lurid, deep sea / Streams up the turrets silently,” through the “melancholy waters”; “open graves / are on a level with the waves.”(3) In this poem the sea is “hideously serene,” although in Poe it is usually hideously agitated. The tranquillity if not the basic theme reminds one of Shelley's sunken buildings in Baiae's Bay.(4) More usually, as in his poem “To F—” of 1835, there is a “tumultuous sea ... throbbing far and free / With storms.” In “The Valley of Unrest” of 1831 a wind makes the trees “palpitate” as do “the chill seas / Around the misty Hebrides.”(5) In 1827 the dreamer-poet, in “A Dream Within a Dream,” had stood “amid the roar / Of a surf-tormented shore” and could not save the golden sand “from the pitiless wave,” thereby showing how early was his rooted attitude of fear and distaste for the ocean.

These early instances express Poe's characteristic attitudes concerning water scenes. In the small body of Poe's poetry they can all be charted. Al Aaraaf of 1829 is full of the beauty of river scenery, highly artificial and dependent upon Thomas Moore, Chateaubriand, and others, as the poem is. There are the “Valisnerian lotus thither flown / From struggling with the waters of the Rhone” and the “Nelumbo bud that floats for ever / With Indian Cupid down the holy river” (p. 17). By contrast, note the destructive marine element of “The wave / Is now upon thee,” that is, “beautiful Gomorrah” (p. 27). A footnote explains that more than two cities were “engulphed in the ‘dead sea.’ “ There is a “lone lake that smiles, / In its dream of deep rest” (p. 32), to be sure, but also in “Romance” of 1829 appears a “shadowy lake” which does not smile and which produces a general drowsiness (p. 57). Quite consistently, in Al Aaraaf Poe mentions “springs that lie clearest / Beneath the moon ray” (p. 31), the “melody of woodland rill” (p. 13), “fountains ... gushing music” and “bright waterfalls” (p. 28). By contrast:

In his celebrated poem “To Helen” (1831), the beauty of the love object is indeed compared with “those Nicean barks of yore, / That gently, o’er a perfumed sea” bear the “weary, way-worn wanderer” to his native shore. But this gentleness is obviously uncharacteristic, for the next stanza asserts that he was “on desperate seas long wont to roam” (Harrison, 7.46). In the 1831 “The Sleeper,” “the lake / A conscious slumber seems to take, / And would not, for the world, awake” — a slumber in short that resembles death (7.51).

In Graham's Magazine of June, 1844, appeared “Dream-Land” which virtually epitomizes my thesis:

A repetition of the section provides the variant phrase, “sad and chilly,” before mentioning the “swamp / Where the toad and the newt encamp, — / By the dismal tarns and pools / Where dwell the Ghouls.” But he writes of the “river / Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever,” even among the “grey woods.” In “The Raven,” finally completed and published in 1845, we twice find the night's “Plutonian shore,” the second time associated with “the tempest” (Harrison, 7.94-100, stanzas 8 and 17). In “Eulalie” of the same year he speaks of his soul as “a [page 148:] stagnant tide” as in one of his lakes (7.91), and in 1847 “Ulalume” presents a “dim lake” and the “dank tarn of Auber” as its characterizing natural scenery (7.102). In “Annabel Lee” of 1849, Poe's last year, the wind that “chills and kills” Annabel seems to come from the sea, on whose shore the speaker builds the sepulchre (7.117-118). It seems to me that these allusions serve to present the sea as generally cold and dangerously violent, the lake as lifeless and melancholy, and the river as freely flowing and useful to life.

Poe's fiction, I believe, makes the point even more clearly. In his mind the reader can quickly catalogue the short stories according to these three themes. The first is “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” which was one of the “Tales of the Folio Club,” offered for a prize to the Baltimore Saturday Visiter of 1833. At the beginning Poe describes an East Indian “simoom” — his error for typhoons(6) — which hurls “a wilderness of foam” and water upon an unwary ship and drowns or sweeps off everyone except the narrator and an old “Swede.” After five days of miraculous speeding directly south, they are completely wrecked in a “supernatural sea” by a weird black boat, full-rigged, which crashes into their hull; it proceeds with the narrator fortuitously on board. This Flying Dutchman tale, compounded of old legends and the Ancient Mariner, ends when a polar whirlpool engulfs the vessel, leaving behind the narrator's manuscript in a bottle. The entire story describes the menace of the waves, the war of wind and ocean, and the horrors of the polar ice. It is obviously a preliminary study for the strange Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, part of which was serialized in the Messenger of 1837 before it appeared as a book in 1838. Here Poe adds the violent outrage of sea-going man to that of marine nature, including a villainous crew that butchers the officers and their loyal following, maroons the captain, and ultimately destroys even itself. The island aborigines pretend to be ingenuous and affable while harboring beastly plans of slaughter.(7) The sea provides additional horrors of parching heat and vicious sharks. Finally, as in the shorter [page 149:] tale, the narrator and his single companion, Peters, with the native Nu-Nu set out into the Antarctic Ocean in a fifty-foot canoe; their trip ends when in warm and luminous water, before a mysterious cataract, they encounter a giant white human figure.

Written perhaps as early as 1833, although published only in 1841, was “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” with many elements of the hostile sea which echo those of the other two narratives.(8) In this masterpiece the dangerous Norwegian current is rendered more deadly by a terrible hurricane that increases the force of the rising whirlpool and engulfs the boat of the fishermen after a faulty watch has led them to miscalculate the ebb and flow of the “Strom.” The wily survivor, who has cast himself overboard on a barrel, sees his brother sink with the boat into the funnel-shaped water trap, to be battered by the rocks below the surface. The horror of this nautical experience turns the fisherman's hair white and evokes a shiver of sympathy from the most sophisticated reader.

Far different in tone and intention is Poe's early grotesque tale “King Pest: A Tale Containing an Allegory,” dating from the September, 1835 Southern Literary Messenger. It is full of references which show clearly the association of death and the sea. Two seamen, lanky Legs and short Hugh Tarpaulin, of the schooner Free and Easy, flee from The Jolly Tar tavern, without paying their reckoning, into the plague district of medieval London. They take refuge in the wine cellar beneath an undertaker's shop, where six weird survivors of the plague are conducting a bacchanal. Finally a “fatal hogshead” is overturned and inundates the room, much like a great sea wave pouring into a ship's hold. Some revelers are drowned and one floats away in a coffin. Earlier in the story, Poe provides the following dialogue: Says the host, King Pest the First, “We are here this night ... to examine, analyze, and thoroughly determine the ... wines ... and by so doing to advance not more our own designs than the true welfare of that unearthly sovereign whose reign is over us all, whose dominions are [page 150:] unlimited, and whose name is ‘Death.’ “(9) To this Hugh Tarpaulin adds, “Whose name is Davy Jones,” while he pours out a “skull of liqueur” for himself (Harrison, 2.180). Evidently for Poe death is intimately connected with the sea.

This same association occurs later in “The Oblong Box,” published in Godey's Lady's Book of September, 1844. The plot is grotesque but ingenious, preserving a mystery for the narrator and the readers until the end. Only then do we discover that the young artist, Cornelius Wyatt, in a large box had kept the body of his recently deceased wife, which he was trying to convey home to New York from Charleston without agitating the passengers. The Captain alone, knowing about the salt-packed corpse, understands the strange conduct of the young man. When the ship founders in a storm, Wyatt, seeking to rescue the box, throws himself into the waves strapped to the coffin, which immediately sinks. The hurricane wrecks the ship off Cape Hatteras, and the jolly boat brings the survivors to safety at Ocracoke Inlet three days later (Harrison, 5.284-285).

These same two locations (near which Poe spent the year 1828-29 as a soldier on Fort Moultrie) are oddly although indirectly connected with the very last story that Poe wrote: “The Light-House,” also implicitly about a deadly storm at sea. It is an unfinished tale, which remained unpublished during the nineteenth century, preserved on four sheets of manuscript paper.(10) The fragment seems to stress the lighthouse-keeper's diary, his large dog, and the vulnerability of the lighthouse, 180 feet high but with a “hollow interior at the bottom,” which is “twenty feet below the surface of the sea”; the whole is built on a “chalk” island. The cellarage feature goes counter to the startdard accounts of lighthouses that Poe must have seen, such as that of the famous Eddystone lighthouse, which was twice demolished (1703 and 1799).(11) As for the shoals off the coast of South Carolina, with which he was familiar, as early as 1798 there were lighthouses on Ocracoke Inlet and at Hatteras.(12) A secure one was finally established in 1870, by odd coincidence [page 151:] corresponding to Poe's putative building in “The Light-House.”(13) Poe's “hollow interior,” although in rock, suggests the futile attempts to sink a caisson in the outer Diamond Shoal off Cape Hatteras.(14) The problem of ensuring safety in coastal or rock-strewn waters apparently seemed important to Poe, for in the Broadway Journal of March 22, 1845, he is the probable author of the comment on H. L. Raymond's “able article on our light-house system ... the most important one in the magazine. The subject is very justly handled, and the improprieties of our system forcibly exposed” (BJ, 1.183). In August Poe also noted the erection of a lighthouse on the Goodwin Sands (BJ, 2.11). I suspect that Poe's attention was directed in 1848 or 1849 to the subject of lighthouses again through the widespread interest in the new screw-pile type of construction, devised by Alexander Mitchell, with examples being built just then in Delaware Bay and on Minot's Ledge off Boston Harbor.(15) The story itself shows Poe's characteristic handling of scientific details for narrative purposes and also his interest in the predominantly hostile nature of the sea.

Far different is the lake setting of “The Fall of the House of Usher” of 1839, a silent tarn, whence comes “a pestilent and mystic vapor.” This symbolizes the decadent atmosphere within Roderick's mouldy castle with its hints of incest, murder, and sadism. (The word tarn may have crept into Poe's works from its use by Coleridge, one of his favorite poets,(16) in “Christabel” [line 306] or in “Dejection: An Ode” [line 100].) The “black and lurid tarn” is what strikes the narrator of “The Fall of ... Usher” when first he views the entire scene. At the end he flees across the causeway, after seeing Roderick's sister, bloody from the struggle to escape from her tomb, bear down in her death agonies the last of the House of Usher. He watches the fissure in the building widen to a distintegrating gap which sends the castle into “the deep and dank tarn” at his feet.

A curiously melancholy lake occurs in an earlier tale (1835), the long balloon hoax of “Hans Pfaall,” purporting to be the [page 152:] journal of a Rotterdam artisan who learned the equivalent of aeronautics, made a trip to the moon, and then sent home his journal via a moon dweller. The piece was a somewhat grotesque study for Poe's “Balloon Hoax” of April 13, 1844. Only one vivid passage need occupy our attention. As the aeronaut approached the moon his “fancy revelled in the wild and dreamy regions of the moon. Imagination ... roamed at will. ... Then I came suddenly into still noonday solitudes, where no wind of heaven ever intruded. ... Then again I journeyed far down away into another country where it was all one dim and vague lake, with a boundary line of clouds. ... And out of this melancholy water arose a forest of tall eastern trees, like a wilderness of dreams.” As the trees sink into the water and mix with their shadows, the narrator thinks: “This, then, is the very reason why the waters of this lake grow blacker with age, and more melancholy as the hours run on.”(17) Then, he resolutely puts “appalling horrors” out of his mind.

Even earlier than “Hans Pfaall,” although first published in the Baltimore Book of 1839, was Poe's odd “fable” first called “Siope” but published as “Silence: A Fable.” This had been included among the “Tales of the Folio Club” of 1833.(18) It is worth mentioning here only because the entire setting is oddly reminiscent of the dream sequence in “Hans Pfaall.” As if to confirm this relationship Poe excluded from his 1840 reprint of the Tales a passage which specifically relates the scene to “one of those vigorous dreams which come like the Simoom upon the brain of the sleeper ... among the forbidden sunbeams ... which slide from off the solemn columns of the melancholy temples in the wilderness” (Harrison, 2.380). The fable takes place “in a dreary region in Libya, by the borders of the River Zaire,” the old name of the river Congo.(19) There are many links between the lake in “Hans Pfaall” and the whole dreary atmosphere of this mood piece. Here Poe is really talking about a lake, almost an inland sea like the Dead Sea, for perversely and unnaturally the waters “flow not onwards to the sea, but palpitate ... with a tumultuous and convulsive [page 153:] motion. For many miles on either side of the river's oozy bed is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. ... And I stood in the morass among the tall lilies” (2.220-221).

More direct evidence is provided by “The Island of the Fay,” published in Graham's in June, 1841, which is generally assumed to reflect Poe's excursions into the Ragged Mountains near Charlottesville. It is usually overlooked that the major part of this sketch is a description by Poe of one of the plates, engraved by John Sartain from an original by John Martin.(20) Here Poe speaks of a bosky island in a small lake surrounded by “trees dark in color and mournful in form and attitude, wreathing themselves into sad, solemn, and spectral shapes that conveyed ideas of mortal sorrow and untimely death.” A tiny boat is being paddled by a woman, whom Poe imagines to be a fairy, representing the cycle of the years — a last survivor of her race and a symbol of all life, drawing closer to death with each circumnavigation of the island. It is impossible to disregard Poe's faylike wife, Virginia, who at this time was showing unmistakable signs of her fatal consumption.

The theme of the fairy dying in a watery setting was again exploited by Poe in “Eleonora,” written also during that critical year of 1841, when he occasionally took his stricken wife on outings up the Susquehanna and its tributary, the Wissahickon. His use of river scenery in this tale well illustrates his characteristic attitude of pleasure in running water — living water, as the French would have it. By stressing the beauty of the river valley, he develops the lovely and idyllic relationship of the narrator and Eleonora, significantly in the tale his junior by five years and also his cousin. Through their paradise runs a river “narrow and deep” and so clear that they can see “the pearly pebbles.” It produces soft grass and radiant and odoriferous flowers, as well as fantastic tall trees. But when she is fifteen and they have “drawn the God Eros from that wave,” she speaks only of the end of humanity and of herself — a kind of Liebestod. The author promises never to marry after her death, an event which strips the valley of its natural charm and [page 154:] causes him to leave for a strange city. There he marries Ermen-garde and is visited by the forgiving spirit of Eleonora (for treatment, see chap. iii).

George Woodberry aptly pointed out that a passage from “Eleonora” echoes one in the “Journal of Julius Rodman,”(21) the unfinished story of an expedition of 1792 up the Missouri River, which Poe almost compiled, one might say, from many travel accounts by Zebulon Pike, Lewis and Clarke, Captain Bonneville via Irving, and Alexander Mackenzie. These date from the next two decades, of course, but Poe's six installments, May — June, 1840, in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine were presented as being entirely authentic. As Quinn comments, Rodman-Poe is at times rhapsodic and uniformly praises the river scenery (Poe, p. 293). The implicit primitivism of “The Journal of Julius Rodman” has a correspondence with one passage in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” printed in Graham's Magazine, August, 1841. The two souls of the title are discussing not only their own death but also “Earth's dotage” and that “ruin” which was “the price of highest civilization.” By contrast, men knew “happiness” during those “holy, august and blissful days, when blue rivers ran undammed ... into far forest solitudes, primaeval, odorous, and unexplored” (Harrison, 4.200-212).

Another prose piece of this middle period parallels “Eleonora” in its river valley source of inspiration. I refer to his sketch of 1844 at first entitled “Morning on the Wissahiccon” and later “The Elk.” This short composition was first printed in the annual The Opal, with a full-page illustration of an elk in reference to its rather gratuitous and irrelevant ending. Poe first discusses the major attractions of America, among which he lists such river views as the Hudson, Niagara, Harper's Ferry, the Ohio, and the Mississippi, all worthy of a visit from a foreigner who has seen the “arrowy Rhone.” This is a slight topographical indication of Poe's support of American products which was to link him to the “Young America” movement, so prominent in the Broadway Journal of 1845.(22) In “The Elk” [page 155:] he indicates the river valley of “Louisiana” as one of our Edens and speaks in favor of fine river landscapes that can be visited on foot. “River scenery has, unquestionably, within itself, all the main elements of beauty, and time out of mind, has been the favourite theme of the poet.”(23) This is indeed Poe's credo.

Now he wishes to hymn a rivulet, the Wissahickon (modern spelling), which empties into the Schuylkill, about six miles west of Philadelphia. The unusual loveliness, he says, had been pointed out by Fanny Kemble in her Journal of 1833-34 (published in 1835), which Poe had reviewed and publicized in the Southern Literary Messenger of August and December, 1835, and February, 1836. In the sketch Poe gives the reader specific directions for reaching the small stream with its picturesque gorge and varied picnic spots, either by taking a skiff or by “clambering along the banks.” He describes its “pellucid water,” lolling “in gentle flow,” with “richly herbaged land” breaking up the steep banks and the dense foliage.(24) He has seen it, recently, from a skiff at midday, when he imagined that he saw an elk, relic of days of yore, on top of a cliff, but it proved to be a tame animal belonging to a nearby villa. The piece has been highly praised by Quinn and Hervey Allen for its idyllic qualities; it is assumed to reflect his rambles with Henry Hirst, author of The Coming of the Mammoth,(25) and with the eccentric novelist and Rosicrucian, George Lippard.(26) Quinn also thinks that it recalls picnics with Virginia during her intervals of tranquil health.

I must mention that most of the elements described in “The Elk” can also be found in a sketch on the Wissahickon “by a Philadelphian,” which Poe as editor had undertaken to publish in the Messenger of December, 1835. The earlier article, by B. Matthias, provides several striking coincidences of details.(27) For example, in one paragraph of the earlier piece we find a noisy “laboring mill,” the “desolating depredations and officious interference of the march of civilization,” occasional “pic-nic parties,” a reminder of the long vanished “Indians on the summit of this very hill” — but the “savage no longer strolls” [page 156:] and “the active deer no longer bounds.” This becomes in Poe, I believe, “My imagination revelled in visions of ... the ‘good old days’ when the Demon of the Engine was not, when picnics were undreamed of, when ‘water privileges’ were neither bought nor sold, and when the red man trod alone, with the elk, upon the ridges” (Harrison, 5.161). I suspect that the elk seen at the end is a pure figment of Poe's imagination and not a pet from the Spring Bank Asylum on the Wissahickon, traced by Quinn through Weygandt and other historians of the locality.(28) Poe was not disregarding his personal memories of rambles and boating up the stream; but a man with so absorptive a memory could, perhaps unconsciously, utilize remembered details from the writings of others to organize and even express his own observations, especially under the grim demands of datelines.

Another tale with flowing water as part of the setting was soon published in Godey's Lady's Book, April, 1844. Here too is an admixture of personal experience woven into a context closely derived from Poe's reading and imagination. More ingenious and narrative than “The Elk” is “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.” Set near Charlottesville, the tale is assumed to derive from his college-period ramblings, like “The Island of the Fay.” Although he describes the mountain ravines with some pleasure, no river is mentioned until the hallucinatory aspects of the tale are developed. Then the narrator finds himself in India, where at first he is soothed by a spring of water and next delighted by the vista of an oriental city bordering a “majestic river.” He describes the colorful temples on the streets sloping to the water and the bathing places along the bank and even the solitary “graceful maiden,” going to fill her pitcher. At last he beholds a grim attack on “a gay palace, that overhung the river” with a keen interest that ends when a poisoned arrow strikes him on the temple. Eventually Oldeb, the narrator, dies from a poisonous leech, applied to his temple, a fate like that of his double of palindromic similarity, Bedloe. Many details, of course, come right out of Macaulay's [page 157:] essay on Warren Hastings (see chapter ii), but Poe enhances the river, which he calls “gently-flowing” and “magnificent” (Harrison, 5.169-170).

There are three somewhat equivocal river allusions in three of Poe's tales of different periods. The earliest, “Four Beasts in One,” published in the March, 1836 Messenger but dating from 1833, has a reference to the real Syrian river, the Orontes; the tale accurately mentions its being “rapid” and having innumerable falls before it comes to the plain of Antioch, scene of this “Tale of Jerusalem,” as it was formerly and somewhat inaccurately called. Given the chosen mise-en-scene, Poe's use of the river here shows no basic attitude. Similarly innocent of “tendency” is Poe's use of the James River as setting for “The Premature Burial,” when he mistakes the berth of the sloop for a coffin (Harrison, 5.272-273). In “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” published in 1842, Poe's many references to the river Seine might appear at first to indicate another viewpoint. Poe had drawn a parallel, through his many footnotes, between the murder of Marie, a young Parisienne, and the real slaying of Mary Cecilia Rogers of New York, August, 1841. The Hudson River and its environs, where she was last seen and her corpse found, are equated with the Seine. A gruesomely detailed passage tells how long cadavers will float or remain submerged and how soon they will decompose (5.25-27). Yet Poe is not inventing a menacing or dangerous river setting, but simply using an instrument for his plot borrowed from the original account. I attach some slight significance to his gratuitous presentation of loathsome details of drowning. Poe was peculiarly fascinated by this type of death, as “The Pit and the Pendulum” shows. Minor evidence of Poe's antipathy for the sea may be found in his stressing one small alleged clue in the original murder account and clinging to it as reality years later. The man who was the last person seen with Mary Rogers appeared to be a naval officer (Quinn, p. 358). In Poe's tale this became the “sailor's knot” (5.11), and all signs “point to a seaman” as the murderer (5.60). Even in 1848 he wrote to [page 158:] Eveleth: “The ‘naval officer’ who committed the murder (or rather the accidental death arising from an attempt at abortion) confessed it.”(29) This follows his footnote in the 1845 edition of the story in his Tales (Harrison, 5.1). It was either a slight hoax on Poe's part or an indication of his belief that unexplained deaths are likely to be produced by seamen if not by the sea.(30)

“The Landscape Garden” in the Ladies’ Companion of October, 1842, is a preparatory study leading to the most completely developed treatment of the loveliness of river scenery. Here Poe, chronically impecunious himself, presents us with young Ellison, inheritor of a fabulous income, which enables him to reshape a vast natural setting, grandly but artistically. In 1847, Poe again took up the unfinished task of Mr. Ellison in “The Domain of Arnheim,” published in the March issue of the Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine. After four years of searching for a site for his new Fonthill, the millionaire finds an ideal tableland, traversed by a river. The approach — a gorge with pellucid water — shares elements with the gorge of the Wissahickon. As in “Eleonora,” there are delightful alabaster pebbles and rich vegetation, ever more luxuriant as the river widens between the gentle slopes. A lavish imagination and purse richly vary the entire landscape; this is indeed “the playful maziness of art,” mentioned in Poe's 1827 “To the River.”

The imaginary idyll beside the stream still needed one more element — a female presence. Two years later and four months before his death, in the Flag of Our Union of June 9, 1849, Poe published “Landor's Cottage, a Pendant to ‘The Domain of Arnheim’ “ as he called it. Now he moves Ellison's domain — and entirely removes Ellison — from its original location, vaguely Monticello plus Philadelphia, to one of the “river counties of New York.” Different memories are fused together in this document from a rather chaotic period in Poe's life, for he speaks of a “Virginia mountain wagon” and of “velvet grass” such as “we seldom see out of England.” The girl Eleonora of [page 159:] his early river tale is transformed into Annie, that is, Mrs. Annie Richmond, one of the several ladies being courted at this time, while Landor's cottage is clearly now the Fordham cottage of Poe. The approach has become a carefully constructed, “pittoresque,” infinitely varied river route. Poe borders the valley with precipitous granite cliffs, like those of the Wissahickon, and gentle, carefully tailored slopes. The profuse vegetation includes trees that never could survive in the Hudson region, and inevitably Poe devotes space to the clear, pebble-strewn rivulet, bubbling its way past the cottage. The details make us certain that the unseen person who calls, “Annie, darling,” from the interior will turn out to be Muddy Clemm. Nor do we have any need for the proposed sequel to glean “some particulars of Mr. Landor himself,” Mr. Landor-Poe, so soon to be at rest in Baltimore.(31)

Many supporting suggestions and statements about the theme could be drawn from Poe's large body of criticism and literary theory. Perhaps one will suffice — his review of Passaic, a Group of Poems, touching that river, with other musings by Flaccus (or Thomas Ward), published in Graham's Magazine of March, 1843 (20.195-198; Harrison, 11.160-174). First Poe quotes “an entire page of even remarkable beauty,” from which I select a few lines: “Beautiful Rivers! that adown the vale / With graceful passage journey to the deep / ... yes, from your birth / Has beauty's shadow chased your every step: / I ... From deep mysterious wanderings your springs / Break bubbling into beauty” (11.161-162). But Poe is dissatisfied with what follows after “so fine a beginning.” Flaccus, then, “instead of confining himself to the true poetical thesis, the Beauty or the Sublimity of river scenery, ... descends into mere meteorology” (11.163).

I should now like to correlate Poe's treatment of waterscapes with two areas of inquiry: the background experiences inclining him toward this type of emphasis and the manifestations of partiality toward rivers in his own life. As a boy in Richmond, Virginia, from 1811 to 1815, and upon his return from [page 160:] England in 1820, up to 1826, Poe must have had many agreeable experiences on the broad James River. Pleasure boats used the river and numerous commercial vessels came up to Richmond to discharge their cargoes and load up with Virginia goods. Agnes Bondurant in Poe's Richmond and Hervey Allen in Israfel give a good picture of what the river meant, first to the small child and then to the adventurous youth ripened into a young sportsman by English games and standards.(32) We know about his boating along the river and swimming for six miles against what he calls “one of the strongest tides ever known in the river” (Ostrom, 1.57). Poe compared himself in swimming prowess with Byron, asserting his superiority over his early poetic idol. A clear, flowing river must always seem more attractive to a good swimmer than a weed-grown stagnant lake. But, of course, this is no explanation. One broad factor must have been Poe's opportunities to observe various types of streams as well as the ocean in all its moods. We can authenticate the unpleasantness of his voyage to England, June 22 to July 28, 1815, from the letters of the Allan family (Quinn, pp. 64-65). The sea was rough and the niggardly captain kept them inadequately supplied with essentials.

Once in Scotland in August, Poe seems to have stayed for an undetermined period in Irvine with John Allan's sisters, Mary and Jane.(33) It is by no means certain that he went to the old Kirkgate school in this seaport on the river, with picturesque stone houses and a bridge celebrated even then.(34) Local history, of course, is firm in this matter and also records a family sailing trip to the island of Arran where Poe, it is said, saw a “tarn” to be used in “The Lake.”(35) Perhaps Poe's reference to Ben Nevis in western Scotland (Harrison, 2.170) may be a trace of a trip up from Oban to the head of Loch Linnhe, to see the highest British peak. By the end of September, Edgar was accompanying the Allans to London, via Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Newcastle; according to Hervey Allen much of the approach was by a sea voyage that provided “notable scenery.”(36) [page 161:]

He was back in Richmond, Virginia, in 1820 to continue his pleasant “riverside” life. In 1825 he moved with the Allan family to their new home, Moldavia; there he occupied a northeast corner room from which he had a panoramic view of the river down the hill. During 1826, while a student at the University of Virginia, he engaged in rambles through the valley of the Rivanna River, which Quinn finds reflected in portions of Tamerlane (Poe, p. 98) and which we have also found in two tales, “The Island of the Fay” and “Tale of the Ragged Mountains.” In Richmond again after his quarrel with Allan over debts incurred at college, Poe chose to work his way by ship to Boston, under the pseudonym of Henri Le Rennet, and enlisted as Edgar A. Perry. (It must be borne in mind that even after the advent of the railroad, much ordinary travel would proceed via shipboard on the ocean, rivers, and canals.)

From Boston harbor “Edgar A. Perry,” on November 8, 1827, sailed aboard the Waltham for a ten-day trip to Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina. This was to form the setting for “The Gold-Bug” and the terminus for the voyage in “The Balloon-Hoax.” Poe's biographers generally ignore the storminess of this November passage. Only Henry Campbell Davis in his “Poe's Company Tempest-Tossed” has paid attention to the freezing gales during the early part of the trip, which caused the Waltham's officers to tender a printed card of thanks to Captain Webb for “his nautical abilities ... in extricating the vessel ... from most imminent danger.”(37) Hervey Allen gives the best account of the subtropical oceanic atmosphere which surrounded Poe from 1827 until his transfer in December, 1828, to Fortress Monroe, Virginia, but he treats it rather as an idyllic period of rambles and relaxation in an army resort area; omitted are the hurricanes which Poe included, for fatal effect, in “The Oblong Box” and, by implication, in “The Lighthouse.”(38) While serving in Virginia he was promoted to the rank of sergeant major and was honorably discharged on April 15, 1829. His appointment to West Point came in March, 1830. [page 162:]

In June, 1830, he was living in the academy on the Hudson, at that noble river's most spectacular stretch. His enchantment was indicated in a letter of November 6, 1830, to John Allan, who had recently been in New York without seeing Edgar: “I was indeed very much in hopes that the beauty of the river would have tempted yourself and Mr and Mrs Jas Galt to have paid us a visit” (Ostrom, 1.39). Clearly, to Poe this river had become one of the “lions,” worthy of a tourist visit. Yet the discipline and general atmosphere of West Point became stultifying to the young poet, who contrived his own court martial and dismissal in February, 1831.

Not long afterwards, he had recourse to the home of his aunt, Maria Clemm, in Baltimore. The city is situated on the Patapsco River, where it enters Chesapeake Bay amid “romantic scenery,” as Washington Irving called it.(39) Certainly Poe could indulge his riparian proclivities during this obscure period of his life, before his return to Richmond in 1835 to edit the Messenger. He settled in Richmond for two years, married to Virginia with Mother Clemm keeping house. Early in 1837 we find the family removed to New York, where Poe managed to complete his sea tale of Arthur Gordon Pym and very little else. The shift to Philadelphia in the summer of 1838 marked the beginning of his most creative period. In that city Poe's varied residences included a little house on Coates Street near the present Fairmont Park, which is bounded by the Schuylkill on one side. It is across from the famous reservoir which was to figure in one of Poe's last ramblings in 1849. I have cited Horace Wemyss Smith previously for evidence of Poe's frequent visits to the old Smith homestead where he used to read or gaze out over the river scene, near the Wissahickon.

The Poe-Clemm family returned, in 1844, to New York City on shipboard from Perth Amboy, the cheapest route possible. Poe found a succession of dwelling places for the ailing Virginia and her mother. Many of them had river views, probably to provide purer air for his wife's weak lungs and to indulge his partiality. The house at 130 Greenwich Street then had a clear [page 163:] prospect of the Hudson. After other changes of residence, he took rooms in the Brennan farmstead, at about 84th Street in the Bloomingdale section of Manhattan. A large storage room in the attic with windows looking out on the slopes descending to the Hudson provided an ideal view for the artist at work. (The prominence of the site had induced General Washington to make his headquarters in that very building.) Closer to the water's edge was a high rock, known as Mount Tom, on which “Poe would often sit, write, and dream.” Sometimes he would go down to the river, accompanied by a few of the ten Brennan children.(40) Despite the beauty of the location, late in 1844 he moved his family to the more convenient No. 15 Amity Street, to escape the cold of the winter in the Bloomingdale countryside and to put him into closer touch with journalist circles.(41)

Early in 1846 the Poes spent a brief period in a dwelling at the foot of East 47 Street, in the Turtle Bay area, again for Virginia's benefit.(42) During this period he often rambled along the East River shores of Manhattan, whose conversion from forest and meadow to residences and commercial buildings he lamented in Doings of Gotham.(43) When he moved out into West Chester County, to Fordham, now in the Bronx section of the city, he seemed far from water perhaps, save in Landor's imagination, as we have seen. Yet from a nearby ledge he could see beyond the meadows and even the distant East River over to the Long Island Hills. Thanks to Mrs. Whitman, there is vividly preserved for us Poe's view of another river prospect, that of the Harlem:

Virginia died in the Fordham cottage on January 30, 1847, and after this Poe's life became a constant search for the adequate [page 164:] income and the ideal woman, the two in one if possible. He can be followed, biographically, up to Boston for lectures and visits to Mrs. Annie Richmond; to Richmond, Virginia, for lectures and visits to Elmira Royster, now the widow Shelton; and to Providence, where he almost married the widow Mrs. Sarah Whitman. One visit was to John Sartain, the engraver of “The Island of the Fay.” Sartain, now a magazine publisher, had bought “Annabel Lee,” which he issued in 1850, although he was not the earliest to publish it. Poe had embarked by steamboat from Brooklyn for Richmond but stopped at Philadelphia for business on July 2nd or 9th, 1849. While there he yielded once again to taking the “one drink too many” and threw himself upon Sartain's hospitality in a state of terror or dementia and without any of his luggage. He begged Sartain to take him to the Schuylkill River; wearing the engraver's slippers, he accompanied Sartain in an omnibus along the river to his old strolling-haunt, the Fairmont area. On a bridge overlooking the stream and the reservoir, Poe told a lurid tale — probably false — about his recent imprisonment for drunkenness and about a radiant dream figure, very like Virginia. He spent several days in Philadelphia, during which he was aided by old friends such as Lippard and Charles Chauncey Burr, before proceeding to Richmond.(45) Several months later, after lecturing and wooing, he was returning to Philadelphia, probably by boat, and inexplicably found his way to Baltimore and to death, early in October, 1849. In his alleged last words some biographers find traces of a “phantom ship” bearing him into darkness.(46)

I have made no assumption about fundamental or psychological causes for attitudes implicit in Poe's waterscapes. Certainly it would be misleading to offer an explanatory motivation that would require one to select and emphasize only a few of the many instances(47) or that would reduce the varied work of this complex and extremely mutable author to a single pattern, misleading in its simplicity.(48) Poe was one of the many [page 165:] who like the possibilities for change, for movement, and also for mere drifting — if only in imagination — provided by a stream which can carry voyagers away from the intolerable present. Not for him the monotonous and sometimes violent stretches of ocean or the unfathomable depths of the lake. The clear waters of the running stream were the ideal scene for Poe; and, on occasion, in his poetry and his prose, if not in his life, they carried him to brilliant success.