The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [4]
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise, Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Emn from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
The poem, which has its obvious model in William Blake’s “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau” (1803), is conventional enough in subject, but the sound is pure Poe, as in the mellifluous wonder of that last line, where the expected final iambic foot is replaced by an anapest. (That is, Poe adds an extra unstressed syllable before the last word, giving it a peculiar resonance and sway.)
Among the other treasures of Poe’s early verse are “Israfel,” “The Sleeper,” “The Valley of Unrest,” the first of two poems called “To Helen,” and “The City in the Sea.” The last (one of my favorite poems by Poe) was inspired by the History of the Jewish War by Flavius Josephus (written in the first century A.D.). Poe evokes a city much like the corrupt biblical city of Gomorrah, “a strange city lying alone / Far down within the dim West.” The poet’s vision is characteristically frenzied:
No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
The city emerges in a kind of tragic grandeur as Poe imagines a place where numerous artists once lived and worked. He describes “the Babylon-like walls” of the city “Whose wreathed friezes intertwine / The viol, the violet, and the vine.” That last line, as the English poet Swinburne noted many years later, is a small miracle of euphony.
This poem might also be read as an allegory of ambition here: the poet becomes the city, sunk beneath the lurid sea, a place where a chance of revival exists. “But lo, a stir is in the air!” the poet cries in the last stanza. Life seems to prosper in a strange way beneath this symbolic sea, and “The waves have now a redder glow,” which suggests a process of recovery, even regeneration. The poem is hardly a condemnation of the excesses of Gomorrah, as one might expect from a poem written in the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, Poe seems to celebrate the decadence of the city and to identify with it.
“The Sleeper” belongs with “The Valley of Unrest” and “The City in the Sea” as a poem in which doom is evoked and cultivated. It portrays that mysterious state existing somewhere between life and death—a topic Poe would return to often in later poems. The speaker in “The Sleeper” has lost his beloved, and over her grave he prays these chilling, rather morbid, lines:
My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
As it is lasting, so be deep!
Soft may the worms about her creep!
The first of Poe’s two poems called “To Helen” is utterly different. It opens:
Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicèan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea, The weary, way-worn wanderer bore To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
The last two lines quoted above are, of course, among the most famous that Poe ever wrote. The poem itself represents a masterpiece in the elegiac love lyric mode, and it was inspired by the poet’s affection for Jane Stannard, though he changed the unpoetical “Jane” to the more melodic and mythically resonant “Helen”—a name that would mutate in later poems to “Eleanora” and “Lenore.”
Poe never actually ceased to write poetry during any period, but he did seem to focus on fiction and criticism in the late 1830s and early 1840s. The struggle to support himself and Virginia was consuming, and it was much easier to make a living by writing prose than poetry. He did, however, find time to compose some of his best poems, including “The Haunted Palace,” “Dream-Land,” and