The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [305]
2 William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine (1769) went through many editions and would have encouraged the narrator’s preoccupation with physical symptoms; Edward Young’s The Complaint; or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742) was typical of the “graveyard school” of melancholy poetry.
3 Carathis explores Hell in William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) and Afrasiab figures in Persian mythology—as does the River Oxus—but the reference is unlocated.
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
1 At the point of death.
Bereavements The Assignation
1 Propriety.
2 Poe refers, apparently, to a sixteenth-century scholar named Jean Tixtier, but no work by this title has been found.
3 The best sculptor has never had an idea that a block of marble did not contain.
Berenice
1 My companions told me that if I visited the tomb of my beloved, my grief would be in some measure relieved.
2 The “paradoxical sentence” of Tertullian may be translated: The son of God is dead; believable is that which is beyond belief; he is risen from the tomb; certain is that which is impossible.
3 Of Madame Sallé, a ballerina, it was said that every step was an emotion; the narrator says of Berenice that all of her teeth were ideas.
Morella
1 Through its association with the sacrifice of children to the god Moloch, the Valley of Hinnon near Jerusalem was renamed Gehenna (hell).
2 Reincarnation.
Ligeia
1 Poe possibly invented this quotation from Glanvill; the textual source has never been located.
The Fall of the House of Usher
1 His heart is a suspended lute; as soon as it is touched, it resonates.
2 The Latin title is Vigils for the Dead according to the Church at Mainz. The esoteric works cited here all allude to real books.
3 The author and volume, as well as the cited passages, were invented by Poe.
Eleonora
1 Under care of a certain sort the soul is safe.
2 Poe cites the same ancient geographer, Al Idrisi, in “A Descent into the Maelström.” The quotation may be translated, They went upon the Sea of Darkness so that it might be explored.
Antagonisms Metzengerstein
1 Living I was your plague, dying I will be your death. Luther addressed these lines to the Pope.
2 Comes from the inability to be alone.
3 The quotation, probably devised by Poe, does not make complete sense in French but suggests that although the soul inhabits a human body only once, it may, as an intangible likeness, take an animal form.
William Wilson
1 Poe apparently invented this passage, which does not appear in Chamberlayne’s verse narrative, Pharonnida (1659).
2 Punishment strong and severe, which traditionally meant being pressed or crushed to death.
3 The quotation from Voltaire may be translated, Oh, what a good time it was, that age of iron.
The Tell-Tale Heart
1 A species of beetle that produces a clicking or ticking sound as it burrows into walls.
The Imp of the Perverse
1 In this discussion of the first causes (prima mobile) of human behavior, Poe includes among those explanations constructed upon theory and empirically unverifiable (hence à priori), the nineteenth-century “science” of phrenology, developed by Gall and Spurzheim, which analyzed human character based on the shape of the cranium.
The Cask of Amontillado
1 No one injures me with impunity.
2 Rest in peace.
Hop-Frog
1 Rare bird on earth.
Mysteries The Man of the Crowd
1 This great misfortune, to be unable to be alone.
2 It does not permit itself to be read.
3 The darkness that was once upon them.
4 Poe alludes to an obscure devotional text from 1500 (“The Spirit of the Garden”) said by Isaac D’Israeli to contain unseemly illustrations.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
1 And all that sort of thing.
2 The first letter has lost its original sound.
3 Poe evokes a character in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme