The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [29]
Aged 19
HE
was the writer of several poems
in the Lynn Mirror, signed LILLIE
Thy genius gave the wound that laid thee low And virtue mourns the loss that bids our sorrows flow
The inscription follows the form of the urn, with the rhymed lines as a kind of table beneath the pedestal. The leaves of the willow branches that droop over the lip of the urn are manifold, and fill every comer of the page.
I am arrested by this mourning drawing, for several reasons. First, the mourned young man was a contemporary of Poe’s in place and time—and that he seems to have killed himself adds immeasurably to the pathos of their connection. In his most desperate early years, when he had been cut off financially by his adoptive father and expelled from West Point, Poe himself often threatened suicide. (That this Solomon Moulton was probably the sort of poet for whom Poe would have expressed great scorn seems beside the point.)
It seems to me as well that there is an aesthetic connection between such “primitive” or “folk” drawings and Poe’s poems. Not only in their melancholy preoccupation, but in their flatness, their literalness, their effort to fill the page with detail, their yearning after classical symmetry, and their effort at memorialization—these pictures suggest another light in which to see Poe’s poetry.
His poems are often just a little too long, just a little too much; the effects are sometimes too self-conscious and overdone; and the effort to capture and memorialize certain emotional events can seem strained. Like the artist drawing the weeping willow, Poe fills every inch of his canvas with leaves.
This is not all bad; these drawings can be deeply moving, and pleasing—but we may conclude that, rather than the sophisticated art forms of Attic vases and heroic couplets to which they allude, they are what we call “primitive.” They are like a child’s version of Greek art, or poetry. Again, with Poe, the childlike timbre of his poetic voice, its appeal to the child within us—is not necessarily a defect, but we must be aware that it is not always what was intended.
Poe wrote longingly of ease, of calm, of sweet sounds and pure love. Like that exquisitely furnished room in “The Philosophy of Furniture,” his poems are filled with curves and perfumed oils, with beauty to look at and taste and hear. One notes, in light of his dislike of straight lines, how there are almost no straight lines in his poems—how he chose to fill his stanzas with lines of irregular length curving down the margins, and how he typically disarranged the regimentation of regular iambic verse with the unexpected presence of anapests, trochees, and dactyls.
Since he wrote expansively about his methods of poetic composition, we can be in little doubt that Poe was consciously aiming for certain effects. Like a magician in off-hours, he enjoyed describing in detail how a poem came to be. Indeed, it may be in his own mechanical efforts at effects that he tried too hard, and opened that rift between intention and result. To return to his essay on “The Raven”:
Having made up my mind to a refrain, the division of the poem into stanzas as, of course, a corollary; the refrain forming the close to each stanza. That such a close, to have force, must be sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis, admitted no doubt: and these considerations inevitably led me to the long o as the most sonorous vowel, in connection with the r as the most producible consonant. The sound of the refrain being thus determined, it became necessary to select a word embodying this sound, and at the same time in keeping with the melancholy which I had predetermined as the tone of the poem. In such a search it would have been absolutely impossible to overlook the word “Nevermore.” In fact, it was the very first which presented itself.
Do we necessarily believe that this was exactly how “Nevermore” occurred to him? It doesn’t matter. His fiction of mastery in his method of composition is telling, even if it is, in part, a fiction.
On several occasions in his adult life, Poe