The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [225]
During his last years, Poe’s preoccupation with Virginia’s illness and subsequent death as well as his struggle for survival gave his poems a sharper urgency. “Lenore” signals his return to the death-of-a-beautiful-woman motif and builds on an early poem (“A Paean”) as Poe insinuates that the “sweet Lenore” dies unmourned by her plighted husband (Guy de Vere) and despised by his family, while an unnamed speaker “wild” with grief weeps for the “dear child” who should have been his bride. Both the title and long poetic lines of the 1844 version of “Lenore” anticipate the extraordinary narrative poem composed later that year, “The Raven.” A sustained meditation on memory and forgetting, this much parodied verse stages a fantastic dialogue between a speaker trying to escape his grief in scholarship and a seemingly diabolical bird whose refrain of “Nevermore” leads the writer to pose insidious questions that finally betray his anxieties about a spiritual afterlife and reunion with his dead beloved. Much as the speaker wishes to “forget this lost Lenore,” the bird’s presence ensures his excruciating remembrance, traced in octosyllabic stanzas with relentless internal rhyming. If “The Raven” rehearses Poe’s anticipated loss of Virginia, the mystical “Ulalume,” written three years later, dramatizes his experience after her demise. Using esoteric astronomical imagery, the poem stages a dialogue between the poet and his soul as it represents the speaker’s unconscious, compulsive return to Ulalume’s tomb on the anniversary of her death.
Something of the despair that menaced Poe can be glimpsed in the short but affecting “A Dream Within a Dream,” which concludes with the question, “Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within an dream?” The poet’s inability to save one grain of sand from time’s “pitiless wave” epitomizes the futile transience of mortal life. In its final incarnation “The Bells” dates from the same period and represents a tour de force of sonority, a performance piece that evolved into a four-part poem defining a succession of bells, each representing a season of life. Alliteration, repetition, and rhyme complement the headlong metrical effect that simulates a mounting frenzy approaching derangement. By contrast, the restrained lyric “Eldorado” expresses a philosophy of defiance: The seeker of riches must “boldly ride,” according to the “pilgrim shadow” who exhorts an aging, dispirited knight. In Poe’s symbolic landscape, Eldorado lies not in California (the poem’s implied inspiration) but “Over the Mountains / Of the Moon, / Down the Valley of the Shadow”—implicitly, beyond love and death.
Poe’s last poems reflect his grasping for emotional support. “To My Mother” suggests that after his wife’s death, Mrs. Clemm became his principal source of affection. Yet his insistence on his love for Virginia must also be read in the context of his feverish quest for a second wife. In addition to the unremarkable verses composed for Sarah Helen Whitman, briefly his fiancée in 1848, he wrote “For Annie” as a token of devotion to Annie Richmond, his young confidante of the same period. Apparently penned after an overdose of laudanum, the poem mirrors his emotional confusion and self-pity, contrasting the hectic “fever called ‘Living’ ” (perhaps his multiple courtships) with the deathlike serenity he achieves in a vision of intimacy with Mrs. Richmond. The much cited “Annabel