The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1576]
It was night, in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year.
Immemorial, according to the Oxford Dictionary, means: 'that is beyond memory or out of mind; ancient beyond memory or record: extremely old.' None of these meanings seems applicable to this use of the word by Poe. The year was not beyond memory—the speaker remembers one incident in it very well; at the conclusion he even remembers a funeral in the same place just a year earlier. The line of Tennyson, equally well known, and justly admired because the sound of the line responds so well to the sound which the poet wishes to evoke, may already have come to mind:
The moan of doves in immemorial elms.
Here immemorial, besides having the most felicitous sound value, is exactly the word for trees so old that no one knows just how old they arc.
Poetry, of different kinds, may be said to range from that in which the attention of the reader is directed primarily to the sound, to that in which it is directed primarily to the sense. With the former kind, the sense may be apprehended almost unconsciously; with the latter kind-at these two extremes-it is the sound, of the operation of which upon us we arc unconscious. But, with either type, sound and sense must cooperate; in even the most purely incantatory poem, the dictionary meaning of words cannot be disregarded with impunity.
An irresponsibility towards the meaning of words is not infrequent with Poe. The Raven is, I think, far from being Poe's best poem; though, partly because of the analysis which the author gives in The Philosophy of Composition, it is the best known.
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore, Since there is nothing particularly saintly about die raven, if indeed the ominous bird is not wholly the reverse, there can be no point in referring his origin to a period of saintliness, even if such a period can be assumed to have existed. We have just heard the raven described as stately; but we are told presently that he is ungainly, an attribute hardly to be reconciled, without a good deal of explanation, with stateliness. Several words in the poem seem to be inserted either merely to fill out the line to the required measure, or for the sake of a rhyme. The bird is addressed as 'no craven' quite needlessly, except for the pressing need of a rhyme to 'raven'-a surrender to the exigencies of rhyme with which I am sure Malherbe would have had no patience. And there is not always even such schoolboy justification as this: to say that the lamplight 'gloated o'er' the sofa cushions is a freak of fancy which, even were it relevant to have a little gloating going on somewhere, would appear forced.
Imperfections in The Raven such as these—and one could give others—may serve to explain why The Philosophy of Composition, the essay in which Poe professes to reveal his method in composing The Raven—has not been taken so seriously in England or America as in France. It is difficult for us to read that essay without reflecting, that if Poe plotted out his poem with such calculation, he might have taken a little more pains over it: the result hardly does credit to the method. Therefore we are likely to draw the conclusion that Poe in analysing his poem was practising either a hoax, or a piece of self-deception in setting down the way in which he wanted to think that he had written it. Hence the essay has not been taken so seriously as it deserves.
Poe's other essays in poetic aesthetic deserve consideration also. No poet, when he writes his own art poitique, should hope to do much more than explain, rationalize, defend or prepare the way for his own practice: that is, for writing his own kind of poetry. He may think that he is establishing laws for all poetry; but what he has to say that is worth saying has its immediate relation to the way in which