The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [6]
Many of Poe’s last poems were addressed to the women he had either flirted with or attempted to marry after Virginia’s death. The best of them is the second “To Helen,” written to honor a poet called Helen Whitman, to whom Poe grew attached after visiting her in Rhode Island in 1845. It opens with a remarkably casual few lines that are unusual in Poe in being so conversational: “I saw thee once—once only—years ago: /1 1 must not say how many—but not many.” The poem is a model of linguistic control and sensual music.
One of Poe’s most widely anthologized poems is “The Bells,” an onomatopoeic tour de force written in four stanzas that describe the good and bad resonances of bells of various kinds: sleigh bells, wedding bells, alarm bells, and church bells. It is a silly, late poem that Poe obviously wrote for the sheer joy of the sounds he discovered he could make in verse. While the poem is devoid of deeper levels of meaning, it remains entertaining to read and, especially, to recite aloud.
In May 1849 Poe finished his last, and one of his finest, poems, “Annabel Lee.” It is an intensely auto-biographical poem in which the narrator mourns the death of a beautiful young woman, his child bride. Poe’s readers will have encountered this theme in many of his previous poems, including “Lenore,” “The Sleeper,” “To One in Paradise,” “The Raven,” and “Ulalume.” In “Annabel Lee,” however, a promise of reunion with the deceased lover is finally held out:
But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we—Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in Heaven above, Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE.
The beauty of this language, where rhythm and meaning are so perfectly attuned, has been justly praised by writers from Tennyson to Vladimir Nabokov. The poem was written to the one and only Virginia, Poe’s own child bride. It was his dream of dreams, in which he recounts the joys of a lost love, a time when they were children in their “kingdom by the sea.” He summons in the poem’s final stanza a vision of eternal love and reunion with the woman he called “my darling, my darling, my life and my bride.”
For Edgar Allan Poe, the art of poetry was ultimately about the contemplation of ideal beauty. Though obsessed with death, and with states of unreality and nightmare, he looked for moments of transcendence, believing that visionary insights were attainable only “in brief and indeterminate glimpses.” In his best poems, he creates a rhythmical language in which a melodious chiming on vowel sounds and consonants works to impress his lines deep in the reader’s memory, giving them the literary equivalent of eternal life. As T. S. Eliot once said, “Only after you find that a poem by Poe goes on throbbing in your head,” he wrote, “do you begin to suspect that perhaps you will never forget it.”
—Jay Parini
Tamerlane
Kind solace in a dying hour!
Such, father, is not (now) my theme—
I will not madly deem that power
Of Earth may shrive me of the sin
Unearthly pride hath revell’d in—
I have no time to dote or dream:
You call it hope—that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire:
If I can hope—oh. God! I can—
Its fount is holier—more divine—
I would not call thee fool, old man,
But such is not a gift of thine.
Know thou the secret of a spirit
Bow’d from its wild pride into shame.
O yearning heart! I did inherit
Thy withering portion with the fame,
The searing glory which hath shone
Amid the jewels of my throne,
Halo of Hell! and with a pain
Not Hell shall make me fear again—
0 craving heart, for the lost flowers
And sunshine of my summer