Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF

physique is obscured, but the ideal of her beauty is a restorative that brings about a settled state for the speaker. When in the final stanza the speaker has reached his home and Helen becomes Psyche (a legendary female with a lamp), the leitmotif is maintained. Nurturing Psyche’s “light” symbolically inspires the speaker, who then assumes the role of poet (a word that derives from the Greek for “creator”) within the poem as he “creates” images and rhythm. More to the point, this poet offers us an exquisite joining of theme (beauty as harmonizer) with form (exquisite lyric tone and movement). “To Helen” numbers among Poe’s few nonhorrific poems, although the speaker’s awe resembles that in many other, less pleasantly situated Poe characters.
    Other poems—for example, “The Valley of Unrest,” “The City in the Sea,” and “The Coliseum”—depict weird dreamscapes that elicit wonder, as they evoke vanished glories and leave tantalizing mysteries for those who respond to their effects. The first poem pictorializes a takeover of a once populated and appealing locale by desolation as foreboding restlessness arises in all natural phenomena there. “The City in the Sea” partly derives from the biblical account of the destruction of the sinful cities Sodom and Gomorrah and partly from the legend of Atlantis, the fabled sunken city that periodically resurfaces and sinks again into the ocean. “The Coliseum” closes on a more positive note than the others because the stones that once teemed with the activities of sports and spectators retain an ability to captivate a contemporary beholder. Mood is everything in these poems, and Poe’s melodic sound effects suggest the meandering visionary experiences of the onlookers, who call up visions via song (enchantment) for readers. A similar principle informs “Dream-Land,” with its speaker who has gone imaginatively free-floating and who returns recalling lasting effects of the surreal world, “Out of SPACE—out of TIME.” where his emotions have transported him. While “Dream-Land” leaves the protagonist shaken by what he saw and heard, “Sonnet—Silence” is a tour de force of contrasting sound effects with a theme of the terrifying soundlessness of the “shadow” silence, evil double of the “corporate Silence” (a silence that results from geographic desolation). The fateful silence is that which desiccates the will.
    Kindred silence descends upon the speaker and his antagonist at the end of “The Raven,” Poe’s most famous poem. Silence becomes even more terrifying here because the inexorably repeated “still” in the closing lines means absolute cessation of speaking, hearing, motion—physical representations of the will’s powerlessness. The setting resembles those in other works in its gradual constriction of the protagonist. The raven may not actually be terrifying, but he certainly paralyzes the narrator emotionally and physically. Folklore often has ravens in league with the devil; Poe’s raven may, however, be no more than a very ordinary creature seeking shelter and warmth on a cold winter night. That this bird has been taught to articulate the single word “nevermore” may be unusual but not necessarily supernatural. The bird’s speech is turned ghastly by the overwrought narrator, whose “Lenore” may in fact be as imaginary as the raven’s diabolic power.
    Ambiguities abound in “The Raven.” 3 That a bird admitted to the indoors on a cold December night would immediately seek the highest spot for his safety may be wholly plausible; that that perch is the head of a white marble bust of Pallas (Athena), goddess of wisdom and intellectuality, is also plausible. The protagonist may have been poring over books of magic spells as he nodded (and the incantatory sounds in the poem strengthen this possibility); somehow, his interaction with these books may have conjured the bird, consequently unleashing forces that