The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [5]
“The Haunted Palace” made its first appearance in 1839, in Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” It embodies the themes of that bizarre tale in compressed form, alluding to “evil things, in robes of sorrow.” A. E. Housman, the English poet, remarked that this poem might be considered “one of Poe’s best poems so long as we are content to swim in the sensations it evokes and only vaguely to apprehend the allegory.” Houseman refers to the fact that, in the poem, the fair palace door is meant to be Roderick Usher’s mouth, the pearl and ruby his teeth and lips, and the yellow banners his hair. The “ramparts plumed and pallid” are presumably Usher’s forehead. (One sees what Housman meant.)
“Dream-Land,” written in 1844, explores that region of irrationality and darkness that became one of Poe’s favorite places of visitation. Specifically, he summons a land “From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, / Out of SPACE—out of TIME.” The lyricism found in this poem is apparent as Poe evokes “Bottomless vales and boundless floods, / And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods.” As is often the case in the work of this poet, the narrator wants desperately to escape from the real world into a world of fantasy, a dreamworld where pain is eased and one has merely to pay the price of extreme melancholy.
“The Raven” was published in 1845; it was a poem so original and memorable that Poe woke up soon after its appearance and found himself famous. It was dedicated to the English poet Elizabeth Barrett, whom Poe deeply admired; indeed, he lifted the incantatory rhythms of his poem from Barrett’s own “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.” (Compare Barrett’s “With a murmurous stir uncertain, in the air a purple curtain” to Poe’s “And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain.”)
When Barrett received her copy from the American author, she wrote back: “Your ‘Raven’ has produced a sensation, a ‘fit horror,’ here in England.” Indeed, English and American readers alike were taken by the addictive music of the poem, and its haunting refrain of “Nevermore.” Poe’s symbolic bird seemed to dwell in the same heady air as Coleridge’s albatross, Shelley’s skylark, and Keats’ nightingale; it also had much in common with a fierce raven in Charles Dickens’ popular novel Barnaby Rudge (1841).
Poe himself characterized the poem’s action in an essay written a year after the poem was published:
A raven, having learned by rote the single word “Nevermore” and having escaped from the custody of its owner, is driven at midnight, through the violence of a storm, to seek admission at a window from which a light still gleams—the chamber-window of a student, occupied half in poring over a volume, half in dreaming of a beloved mistress deceased.
Thomas Campion, the English poet (a contemporary of Shakespeare), defined poetry as “a system of linked sounds,” and that definition could hardly be more appropriate for “The Raven.” Its internal rhymes, however overstated, form an intricately satisfying pattern; the reader is drawn into its spiral, and is not released until the end. The poem describes the obsessive mental state of a man who has lost his “maiden whom the angels name Lenore.” The storm raging outside his window is clearly a symbolic storm, a storm of the soul. The “pallid bust of Pallas” (the goddess Athena) that plays uneasy host to the maniacal raven represents wisdom. The raven stands for the intuitive powers of memory, fate, and the dark side of the human mind, each of which preys on hope. The suffering narrator’s frantic questions are all answered negatively, and he is forced to confront the brutal truth that he will not be reunited after death with Lenore, his beloved.
“The Raven” was reprinted again and again in Poe’s lifetime, and has remained a favorite of readers. Oddly enough, the poem seems to have exhausted its creator; from 1845 until his death four years later, Poe wrote only a handful of poems, although most of them are excellent, including “Ulalume,” an elegy for Virginia that has a poignancy and