The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [27]
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone—
They are neither man nor woman-
They are neither brute nor human—
They are Ghouls:—
And their king it is who tolls:—
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A paean from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the paean of the bells!
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the paean of the bells—
Of the bells:—
Keeping time, time, time
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells—
Of the bells, bells, bells—
To the sobbing of the bells:—
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells—
Of the bells, bells, bells—
To the tolling of the bells—
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.
AFTERWORD
Returning to the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, I find myself amazed by how many lines and phrases I already know by heart, and this is surely a common experience for readers. “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore’ ”; “the pallid bust of Pallas”; “ ’Twas many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea”; “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome”—these passages and dozens of others can be found in the great collective warehouse of tags where nursery rhymes, lines from Shakespeare, ballads, scraps from the Bible, and lullabies are also stored. If it seems that Poe’s poems are just a little over-the-top, and that to love them as I do may be an embarrassing lapse in taste, the central fact of their tenacity rebukes any easy dismissal—as does the sheer enjoyment many of us experience on reading them, aloud, again and again. “Lenore,” “Ulalume,” and “The Bells” unfailingly fill the mouth and ears with pleasure; the early poem “Sonnet—To Science” has that unforgettable final line: “The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree”; and even some of the less familiar ones, such as “Bridal Ballad,” or the heart-wrenching “Alone,” have the miraculous quality of seeming to be known before they are read, so that they are simultaneously mysterious and familiar, like the old friend who suddenly astonishes you with his strangeness or the new acquaintance whom you are convinced you must have known since childhood.
How is it that Poe’s words have this power to inhabit our psyches? One answer has to do with the peculiar charms of his prosody, about which more later. But additionally, if we can somehow scrape away the legends and clichés—that famous photograph that makes him look so sinister; the B-horror-movie versions of his tales; our gloomy knowledge of his strange marriage, poverty, and early death—if we can try to see Poe as a writer afresh, we may be struck by some unexpected qualities. First, that he is very funny—even in his serious stories and poems, a sense of buffoonery and self-mockery is never far from the surface. (In his famous essay about the composition of “The Raven,” he admits that he “approach[ed] as nearly to the ludicrous as was admissible.”) Humor, mixed as it is in Poe’s imagination with so many somber and melancholy themes, brings an added flavor, like salt in a sugary treat that makes the whole irresistible. At least as compelling is that in his stories and to a certain extent in his poems, he created a particular American hero—the naïf led astray, often by the dark and sophisticated charms of the Old World.
Take “The Pit and the Pendulum,” one of his most famous stories. The narrator finds himself undergoing the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition—and although a trial is alluded to, there is no suggestion as to the nature of the supposed crimes for which he was condemned; and indeed, the innocence of the narrator and the arbitrariness of his fate is a given of the tale. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” an unsuspecting fellow falls into a world of decayed English aristocracy and fetid sexuality. Nearly all the tales are set in the cities