The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe Read Online

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 melancholy all its own. The name itself, representing the lost love of the poem’s soulful narrator, was coined by Poe, although it seems to allude to the Latin word ulalure—to wail. One also hears an echo of lumen, meaning light. The poem is set in a misty atmosphere reminiscent of “the region of Weir,” a reference to Robert Walter Weir, a painter of the Hudson River school.

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 hours!
The undying voice of that dead time,
With its interminable chime,
Rings, in the spirit of a spell,
Upon thy emptiness—a knell.

I have not always been as now:
The fever’d diadem on my brow
I claim’d and won usurpingly—
Hath not the same fierce heirdom given
Rome to the Caesar—this to me?
The heritage of a kingly mind,
And a proud spirit which hath striven
Triumphantly with human kind.

On mountain soil I first drew life:
The mists of the Taglay have shed
Nightly their dews upon my head,
And, I believe, the winged strife
And tumult of the headlong air
Have nestled in my very hair.

So late from Heaven—that dew—it fell
(‘Mid dreams of an unholy night)
Upon me with the touch of Hell,
While the red flashing of the light
From clouds that hung, like banners, o’er,
Appeared to my half-closing eye
The pageantry of monarchy,
And the deep trumpet-thunder’s roar
Came hurriedly upon me, telling
Of human battle, where my voice,
My own voice, silly child!—was swelling
(O! how my spirit would rejoice,
And leap within me at the cry)
The battle-cry of Victory!

The rain came down upon my head
Unshelter‘d—and the heavy wind
Rendered me mad and deaf and blind.
It was but man, I thought, who shed
Laurels upon me: and the rush—
The torrent of the chilly air
Gurgled within my ear the crush
Of empires—with the captive’s prayer—
The hum of suitors—and the tone
Of flattery ’round a sovereign’s throne.

My passions, from that hapless hour,
Usurp’d a tyranny which men
Have deem‘d, since I have reach’d to power,
My innate nature—be it so:
But, father, there liv’d one who, then,
Then—in my boyhood—when their fire
Burn’d with a still intenser glow
(For passion must, with youth, expire)
E’en then who knew this iron heart
In woman’s weakness had a part.

I have no words—alas!—to tell
The loveliness of loving well!
Nor would I now attempt to trace
The more than beauty of a face
Whose lineaments, upon my mind,
Are—shadows on th’ unstable wind:
Thus I remember having dwelt
Some page of early lore upon,
With loitering eye, till I have felt
The letters—with their meaning—melt
To fantasies—with none.

0, she was worthy of all love!
Love—as in infancy was mine—
‘Twas such as angel minds above
Might envy; her young heart the shrine
On which my every hope and thought
Were incense—then a goodly gift,
For they were childish and upright—
Pure—as her young example taught:
Why did I leave it, and, adrift,
Trust to the fire within, for light?

We grew in age—and love—together—
Roaming the forest, and the wild;
My breast her shield in wintry weather—
And, when the friendly sunshine smil’d,
And she would mark the opening skies,
I saw no Heaven—but in her eyes.

Young Love’s first lesson is—the heart:
For ‘mid that sunshine, and those smiles,
When, from our little cares apart,
And laughing at her girlish wiles,
I’d throw me on her throbbing breast,
And pour my spirit out in tears—
There was no need to speak the rest—
No need to quiet any fears
Of her—who ask’d no reason why,
But turn’d on me her quiet eye!

Yet more than worthy of the love
My spirit struggled with, and strove,
When, on the mountain peak, alone,
Ambition lent it a new tone—
I had no being—but in thee:
The world, and all it did contain
In the earth—the air—the sea—
Its joy—its little lot of pain
That was new pleasure—the ideal,
Dim, vanities of dreams by night—
And dimmer nothings which were real—
(Shadows—and a more shadowy light!)
Parted upon their misty wings,
And, so, confusedly, became
Thine image and—a name—name!
Two separate—yet most intimate things.

I was ambitious—have you known
The passion, father? You have not:
A cottager, I mark’d a throne
Of half the world as all my own,
And murmur’d at such lowly lot-
But, just like any other dream,
Upon the vapor of the dew
My own had past, did not the beam
Of beauty which did while it thro’
The minute—the hour—the day—oppress
My mind with double loveliness.

We walk’d together on the crown
Of a high mountain which look’d down
Afar from its proud natural towers
Of rock and forest, on the hills—
The dwindled hills! begirt with bowers
And shouting with a thousand rills.

I spoke to her of power and pride,
But mystically—in such guise
That she might deem it nought beside
The moment’s converse; in her eyes
I read, perhaps too carelessly,
A mingled feeling with my own—
The flush on her bright cheek, to me
Seem’d to become a queenly throne
Too well that I should let it be
Light in the wilderness alone.

I wrapp’d myself in grandeur then
And donn’d a visionary crown—
Yet it was not that Fantasy
Had thrown her mantle over me—
But that, among the rabble—men.
Lion ambition is chain’d down—
And crouches to a keeper’s hand—
Not so in deserts where the grand—
The wild—the terrible conspire
With their own breath to fan his fire.

Look ‘round thee now on Samarcand!—
Is she not queen of Earth? her pride
Above all cities? in her hand
Their destinies? in all beside
Of glory which the world hath known
Stands she not nobly and alone?
Falling—her veriest stepping-stone
Shall form the pedestal of a throne—
And who her sovereign? Timour—he
Whom the astonished people saw
Striding o’er empires haughtily
A diadem’d outlaw!

0, human love! thou spirit given,
On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!
Which fall‘st into the soul like rain
Upon the Siroc-wither’d plain,
And, failing in thy power to bless,
But leav’st the heart a wilderness!
Idea! which bindest life around
With music of so strange a sound
And beauty of so wild a birth—
Farewell ! for I have won the Earth.

When Hope, the eagle that tower‘d, could see
No cliff beyond him in the sky,
His pinions were bent droopingly—
And homeward turn’d his soften’d eye.
’Twas sunset: when the sun will part
There comes a sullenness of heart
To him who still would look upon
The glory of the summer sun.
That soul will hate the ev’ning mist

So often lovely, and will list
To the sound of the coming darkness (known
To those whose spirits harken) as one
Who, in a dream of night, would fly
But cannot from a danger nigh.

What tho’ the moon—the white moon—
Shed all the splendor of her noon,
Her smile is chilly—and her beam,
In that time of dreariness, will seem
(So like you gather in your breath)
A portrait taken after death.
And boyhood is a summer sun
Whose waning is the dreariest one.