Perhaps, like Pym and Augustus, Edgar and Henry enjoyed an “intimate communion.”

Poe’s allegories of Henry’s death and Eliza’s performance in Pym would have been difficult for the reader of Poe’s time to ascertain, since these allegories were dependent on knowledge of such personal matters. Probably only those people who were close to the author fully fathomed the private concerns of the novel. Yet perhaps more readers would have found Pym’s other allegories accessible, since these were based on a shared text, the Bible.

We must here return to the Norfolk newspapers’ February 1836 account of the destruction of the Ariel. To understand more of Poe’s thinking as he read that account, we should consult further his critical writing at the time. The February 1836 issue of the Messenger featured Poe’s piece on “Palæs tine,” which closes with mention of the destruction of Jerusalem. As a reader of the Bible, Poe would have known that Jerusalem is there referred to as Ariel: “Woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the city where David dwelt!” (Isaiah 29:1). Accordingly, when he came upon the news story about the destruction of the vessel Ariel, he would have realized the story’s potential for suggesting another level of meaning—the destruction of Jerusalem. Thus he would have seen an opportunity to solve a problem that the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had declared insurmountable. In Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which Poe read, and which he commented on in the April 1835 Messenger, Coleridge contended:

. . . the destruction of Jerusalem is the only subject now left for an epic poem of the highest kind. Yet, with all its great capabilities, it has this one grand defect—that, whereas a poem, to be epic, must have a personal interest,—in the destruction of Jerusalem no genius or skill could possibly preserve the interest for the hero from being merged in the interest for the event. The fact is, the event itself is too sublime and overwhelming.

Coleridge was, as acknowledged by early Poe biographer George Woodberry, “the guiding genius of Poe’s early intellectual life”; in fact, he was the author of poems that Poe would draw on for Pym—“The Wanderings of Cain,” “Christabel,” and, most important, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Coleridge’s assertion of a literary problem—and of his own failure to solve it—would have intrigued Poe. We can reasonably infer that Poe would have thought about Coleridge’s challenging comment regarding “the only subject now left for an epic poem of the highest kind” and worked up the novel Pym in part to accomplish what his hero Coleridge could not—to offer the “genius or skill” to “preserve the interest for the hero” by allegorizing the destruction of Jerusalem.

We can see that Poe anticipated the destruction of Jerusalem in Pym in chapter 19 with an allegory of the siege of Jerusalem: Pym and eleven shipmates (the twelve tribes of Israel) sit in the native chief’s tent (a word associated etymologically with “tabernacle”) while the Tsalal natives surround the tent (the Romans surround Jerusalem) and the “palpitating entrails” of a slim-legged hog are passed to Pym and his friends for dinner (a hog is passed by the Romans to the Israelites as a supposed joke). (This was the same story that Poe had written less cryptically in “A Tale of Jerusalem.”) And Poe rendered the destruction of Jerusalem in the story of the wreck of the Ariel in chapter 1 (and in its retelling in chapter 24) and in the inversion of the prophecy in Isaiah 33:20 regarding “Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shall not be taken down; not one of the stakes thereof shall ever be removed, neither shall any of the cords thereof be broken”: at the end of chapter 21, the natives of Tsalal pull on “cords” (mentioned four times) that are attached to “stakes” embedded in the earth (mentioned six times), thereby causing a landslide that kills most of the men from the Jane Guy.

Poe’s use of the ship Penguin to rescue Pym and his allusion to the play Tekeli are clarified by the final allegory of the novel. Even as Jerusalem is destroyed, the New Jerusalem is prophesied. Notably, there are many suggestions of Jesus in the novel—for example, “the light of the blessed sun” (chapter 9), the “heavy cross sea” (chapter 14), “a series of cross questioning” (chapter 19), and the cry of the natives, “Lama-Lama!” (chapters 18 and 19), recalling one of the last words of Jesus: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34): “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The landslide itself (chapters 20 and 21) is described with language echoing that of the 1831 tale attributed to Poe, “A Dream,” concerning the crucifixion of Jesus. (The fall of Jerusalem was often considered resonant with the crucifixion.) Critically, Pym’s white “shrouded human figure” has been seen as Jesus in the Vision of the Seven Candlesticks (Kaplan, Wilbur)—“one like unto the Son of man” whose “head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow” (Revelation 1:13-14). Observing Poe’s association of the Penguin with Wales (chapter 1) and Poe’s affection for the etymologies in dictionaries, we may note that in the Johnson and Webster dictionaries (with which Poe was familiar), the word “penguin” is derived from the Welsh for “white head” (“guin” is white, as in Guin evere, and “pen” is head). Accordingly, we may infer that the ship Penguin suggests the white head of Jesus, who has come to prophesy the New Jerusalem. The use of the term “Tekeli” is highly important, since Poe’s mother appeared in the play Tekeli in the part of a young bride named Christine—that is, she represents, for Poe’s purposes, a triumphant image in Christian eschatology: the union of bride and bridegroom—the Church and Christ—at the end of time.

If we wish to pursue the connection between the biblical allegories and the aforementioned issue of race in Pym—a book of black and white opposition—we might consider the special significance of Jerusalem in the American South in the 1830s. After all, Poe, living in Baltimore in August 1831, would surely have known of the widely reported rebellion of the slave Nat Turner and his supporters as they advanced on Jerusalem, Virginia. It is interesting to conjecture whether a secondary implication of Poe’s biblical allegory of the destruction and recovery of Jerusalem may be the Turner insurrection and its eventual defeat.

If we wish to assess the connection between the biblical allegories and the literal and biographical levels of the novel, we may readily realize that the complex work has a thematic unity—all three levels concern loss and recovery. Even as the Ariel is lost, the Penguin recovers the survivors; even as Jerusalem is destroyed, the New Jerusalem is prophesied; even as Henry and Eliza Poe die, they are implicitly to be reunited with Edgar in the hereafter. Pym is a work of sorrowful memory and hopeful anticipation. And its dynamics are evident, in varied forms, throughout Poe’s oeuvre, and nowhere more clearly than in his cosmological disquisition, Eureka. Here Poe discusses the expansion and contraction of the universe. He maintains that “A diffusion from Unity . .