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CHAPTER V
POE, THE POET
But I pass on to speak of Poe the poet, in which character his popularity is greatest perhaps with the mass of English readers, for such as are unacquainted with our language cannot possibly appreciate poems which are incapable of translation. And here it is very difficult to say wherein exactly consists the charm of Poe's verses. The gratification they afford would seem to me purely an intellectual one, were it not for the aerial melody of the rhythm which falls on the sense with a sweet beguiling melancholy of its own, which is only not pathos because it never produces a deeper feeling than that of pensiveness. There is less flesh and blood about the poems of Poe than any compositions of the kind ever yet presented; they may be denominated, in a few words, ideality set to music. And his theory of the “Poetic Principle” differs as widely as possible from what he actually produced in verse. The passage in which he sets forth the vision of the poet — whence he should seek for incentives to song and what phenomena it is his specially to interpret, is so exceedingly beautiful that I make no apology for quoting it entire, in connection with what I have to say on this branch of my subject:
The poet, he says,(1) “recognizes the ambrosia which nourishes his soul, in the bright orbs that shine in Heaven — in the volutes of the flower — in the clustering of low shrubberies — in the waving of the grainfields — in the slanting of tall, Eastern trees — in the blue distance of mountains [page 28:] — in the grouping of clouds — in the twinkling of half-hidden brooks — in the gleaming of silver rivers — in the repose of sequestered lakes — * in the star-mirroring depths of lonely wells. He perceives it in the song of birds — in the harp of Aeolus — in the sighing of the night wind — in the repining voice of the forest — in the surf that complains to the shore — in the fresh breath of the woods — in the scefnt of the violet — in the voluptuous perfume of the hyacinth — in the suggestive odor that comes to him, at eventide, from far-distant, undiscovered islands, over dim> oceans, illimitable and unexplored. He owns it in all noble thoughts — in all unworldly motives — in all holy impulses — in all chivalrous, generous, and self-sacrificing deeds. He feels it in the beauty of women — in the grace of her step — in the lustre of her eye — in the melody of her voice — in her soft laughter — in her sigh — in the harmony of the rustling of her robes. He deeply feels it in her winning endearments — in her burning enthusiasms — in her gentle charities — in her meek and devotional endurances — but above all — ah, far above all — he kneels to it — he worships it in the faith, in the purity, in the strength, in the altogether divine majesty — of her love.”
Surely this is eloquent, and not less true than eloquent. I rejoice to repeat the passage because it shows that the poor, unhappy poet — ”the blackguard of undeniable mark” — was not wholly indifferent to whatsoever things are pure and honest and lovely and of good report. But turning to his own poems, we do not discover that he looked to these sources of inspiration or that he tuned his wondrous lyre to those themes which the world's great minstrels have sung since the first strain of poesy was uttered upon earth. The brightness and glory and joy of woods and fields and streams find no thankful and jubilant recognition in his verses; he celebrates in preference the “dim lake of Auber in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir,”(1) he bids the gallant knight seek for [page 29:] Eldorado “Over the mountains of the Moon down the Valley of the Shadow,”(1) and instead of writing about the Hudson, the Potomac or the Ohio, he revels in the Dream-Land of
Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
For the dews that drip all over;
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging, unto skies of fire;
Lakes that endlessly outspread
Their lone waters — lone and dead —
Their still waters — still and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily.(2)
Poe was not without the capacity of loving tenderly and deeply, and his affection for his wife, his watchful solicitude for her in illness and his poignant anguish at her death, abundantly prove that he did love with a holy and unselfish passion. But the mistress of his heart was not the angel of his poems. This latter personage has small claims to be enrolled among the Loves of the Poets, who have been generally very unethereal creatures indeed. Byron's Maid of Athens became plain, unsentimental Mrs. Black — Goethe's fair-haired flames had enormous appetites, and Beranger's Lisette was overfond of suppers and champagne. Burns dowered with immortality his bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked “Highland Mary,” a substantial being whose foot, however small [page 30:] and well-shaped, made its impression on the heather of Scotland, and Wordsworth's “phantom of delight” was a
creature not too bright and good
For human nature's daily food
living near him among the hills and lakes of Westmoreland, but the Lenores and Helens of Poe had no counterparts on this earth of ours; they were not sketched from the fair young woman who gladdened with her presence his cottage at Fordham — they existed only in that airy world which his imagination lighted up so vividly; there they sang their gelebt und geliebet, and from that sphere they look down upon us with their calm, violet eyes, the most beauteous apparitions ever conjured up by the spells of enchantment.(1)
Much of the effect of Poe's poetry is due to the charm of the versification. He was the Beethoven of language, combining it with marvellous skill to exercise a witchery over the reader, and the music of his stanzas was a “Spirit Waltz” to which his embodied ideas kept time. Though doubtless conscious of the gift of genius, he was mechanical to the last degree in the construction of his poems, and as he did not disdain to make his penmanship as legible as printing, so he patiently elaborated his verse until it admitted of no further improvement. The melody of words certainly reaches its acme in the following stanza from “Ulalume.” I cite it altogether without [page 31:] reference to its meaning, and only as a specimen of articulate music:
And now as the night was senescent
And star-dials pointed to morn —
As the star-dials hinted of morn —
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn, —
Astarte's bediamonded crescent
Distinct with its duplicate horn.
and the following lines from “To One in Paradise” are scarcely less melodious:
And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where they grey eye glances,
And where they footstep gleams —
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.
In considering Poe's claims as a poet, you will naturally expect me to say something of the most wonderful of all his productions — ”The Raven” — and yet it would seem almost gratuitous to dwell upon an effort which is enshrined in the memory of every lover of poetry in the land, and whose mournful majesty no criticism, however thoughtful or discriminating, were it even such as Addison gave to the “Paradise Lost,” could enhance in the estimation of the reading world. The million of readers agree with entire unanimity in assigning to this deathless strain an effect upon the imagination beyond that of any similar composition in the language, and the fame of Poe might rest securely upon it forever. [page 32:] The thought, the imagery, the diction, the measure, the refrain, are all in perfect harmony, and the syllables fall upon the ear like the notes of a harp struck, not by the invisible fingers of the wind but by the hand of some unearthly being — it is such music as might have swept across Dante and Virgil in the Inferno when the forms of “Francesca di Rimini” and her guilty lover floated by on the wings of darkness.
That this poem was the result of patient labor we know, for while we may not wholly credit the account given by the author of his manner of writing it, which resembles the solution of an algebraic problem, — the word “Nevermore” representing, like “X,” an unknown quantity to be determined in the end — it is certain that no improvisation was ever so exact in its measures or so orderly in its movement towards the catastrophe. The frequency with which the “Raven” has been parodied attests at once the extent of its popularity and the utter destitution of feeling and good taste, I had almost said principle, in those amazingly clever persons who think it the smartest thing in the world to burlesque the beautiful which they cannot reach, and bring into ridicule the sentiment which is beyond their conception. In reading some of the miserable travesties of this glorious poem, I have been often reminded of the protest of poor “Haynes Bayly” against the impertinences of the rhymers who parodied his famous song of “I’d Be a Butterfly.” Turning the tables upon them, he wrote:
I'd be a Parody, made by a ninny
And set to an air with a popular tune, [page 33:]
Not worth a ha’ penny, sold for a guinea,
And sung in the Strand by the light of the moon.(1)
It is strange that among the hundreds of unfriendly critics whose praise was reluctantly extorted by the “Raven” and who would have rejoiced to find in it some point of successful attack, not one of them should have discovered in it an unquestionable plagiarism which needs only to be pointed out to be instantly acknowledged. The assurance I feel that it is not an accidental imitation detracts in no degree from my unbounded admiration of the “Raven.” If a diamond of wondrous size had crystallized around a pearl, supposing such a thing to be possible in mineralogy, the superior gem would lose nothing of its value thereby, and the “Raven” surpasses the poem whose beauties it has borrowed as the Koh-i-noor outshines the most exquisite jewel that ever slept in the bosom of the Indian sea.
Among the modern productions of the English muse there was no single effort which Poe himself dwelt upon with more enthusiasm than the “Lady Geraldine's Courtship” of Mrs. Browning. Some of his most careful criticism was expended upon its rhymes, its happy and striking epithets, and the passion which elevates and transfigures the whole conception. But admiring it as he did with a fervor which induced him to dedicate to Mrs. Browning the published volume of his own poems, he was frank enough to declare that in his judgment it was itself an imitation of Tennyson's “Locksley Hall.” Regarding [page 34:] the “Raven,” as I do, with an admiration that I cannot sufficiently express, you will pardon a similar frankness in me in believing it to have been suggested in part, at least, by Lady Geraldine, and you will indulge me in making such a reference to the latter as will establish the justice of this belief.
It is a long story, wherein a young poet, named Bertram, who has more genius than he has stock in the threeper-cents, is invited to the house of a young lady, beautiful, rich, and high-born, and is there treated by her with great kindness and distinction. Very innocently and ignorantly, the poet falls in love with the lady, but does not know what is the matter with him, till he overhears a conversation, in which the Lady Geraldine declares that she will marry no one who is not noble, and wealthy, and of a birth that she will not blush to remember. Straightway he rushes into her presence, reproaches her bitterly for her pride and arrogance, and, instead of listening to what she has to say in return, drops down in an apoplexy. He comes to himself in his own chamber, to which the servants have carried him, and writes to an absent friend, describing all that has happened to him, and announcing his determination to depart the next morning. This resolution, however, he is induced to reconsider by the Lady Geraldine herself, who comes to visit him, and explain her words in favor of the poet himself — to wit: that,
Very rich he is in virtues; very noble — noble certes;
And I shall not blush in knowing, that men call him humbly born.
From the conclusion of the poem, I beg to recite the [page 35:] following stanzas, in which you will hardly fail to recognize some notes of the “Raven”:
Soh! how still the Lady standeth! ‘tis a dream, a dream of mercies!
'Twixt the purple lattice-curtains, how she standeth still and pah!
'Tis avision, sure, of mercies, sent to soften his self-curses,
Sent to sleep a lovely quiet, o’er the tossing of his wail.
* * *
With a rustling stir, uncertain, in the air, the purple curtain,
Swelleth in and swelleth out around her motionless pale brows;
While the gliding of the river sends a rippling noise forever,
Through the open casement, whitened by the moonlight s slant repose.
* * *
Ever, evermore the while in a slow silence she kept smiling —
And approached him, slowly, slowly, in a gliding, measured pace,
With her two white hands extended, as if praying one offended,
And a look of supplication, gazing earnest in his face.
* * *
Ever, evermore the while in a slow silence she kept smiling,
But the tears ran over lightly from her eyes, and tenderly;
“Dost thou, Bertram, truly love me? Is no woman far above me,
Found more worthy of thy poet-heart, than such a one as I?”
Besides the obvious resemblance which pervades the two poems we cannot overlook the identity of the line
With a rustling stir, uncertain, in the air, the purple curtain
with this well-remembered one from the “Raven”
And the silken, sad, uncertain, rustling of each purple curtain
nor the scarcely less palpable coincidence of
Ever, evermore the while in a slow silence she kept smiling,
with Poe's
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling.(1) [page 36:]
The constant recurrence, also, of the word “evermore” in the one poem and the refrain “Nevermore” in the other makes the demonstration complete that it was after dreaming over “Lady Geraldine's Courtship” that Poe began that wondrous song, a Miserere(1) of the spirit, “once upon a midnight dreary” which is to reecho down the corridors of time forever and forever.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 27:]
1 From Poe's: “The Poetic Principle.”
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 28:]
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 29:]
1 From Poe's poem, “Eldorado.”
2 Second stanza of Poe's “Dream-Land.”
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 30:]
1 A recent British Poe writer has pointed out that “poets are less in love with a woman than with an idea, and are so concerned with the beautiful expression of that love that the woman herself may sometimes be forgotten for the sake of the poem she has inspired.”
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 33:]
1 It has been written: “A Parody generally indicates sudden, deserved, and therefore lasting popularity; while the travestier, himself, is, very frequently, an earnest admirer of the composition travestied and its author.”
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 36:]
1 From an article by Thompson in the Southern Literary Messenger.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 36:]
1 See the stanza in Thompson's poem “Virginia,” reading:
And still another child Virginia nursed,
Who had her glories loftily rehearsed,
But that his genius sought “a wild, weird clime,”
Beyond the bounds of either space or time,
From whose dim circuit, with unearthly swell,
A burst of lyric rapture often fell,
Which swept at last into a strain as dreary
As a lost spirit's plaintive Miserere;
Unhappy POE, what destiny adverse
Still hung around thee both to bless and curse;
The Fairies’ gifts, who on thy birth attended,
Seemed all with bitter maledictions blended;
The golden crown that on thy brow was seen,
Like that Medea sent to Jason's queen,
In cruel splendor shone but to consume,
And decked its victim proudly for the tomb.
From a rare pamphlet, Richmond, 1856.
The poem was delivered in the Chapel of William and Mary College, Williamsburg, Va., before the Virginia Alpha Beta Kappa Society, July 3, 1856.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - JRT29, 1929] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - The Genius and Character of Edgar Allan Poe (Thompson)