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

bode ill for the conjurer. After all, the hour is midnight during the season of the death of the year, and the narrator does mention a “ghost” as emanating from his hearth, all of which might hint at supernaturalism. Learning that “ghost” was nineteenth-century slang for the shadow formed by dying embers, however, we may suspect that Poe’s narrator is not really beset by otherworldly torments, but that his mind is gradually disintegrating. Is Lenore an actual dead woman or a significant emotional part in the protagonist’s self that he has managed to “kill” or repress? She never appears as a physical being. She is “nameless,” and yet the narrator keeps invoking her; her name derives from the same root as “Helen,” and we have already seen that that name conveys brilliant light and great beauty. Could this “rare and radiant” Lenore be an ideal, without which the narrator goes mad? His “chamber” may symbolize the interior of a mind, and a closing mind at that. The protagonist doesn’t venture outside his opened door, and seeing “darkness” beyond may momentarily placate him, but creating such an entryway, along with opening the window, could in magical lore suffice to admit the bird and the nonrationality it represents. Once this power is implicitly invited inside, there’s no telling how it may operate. Using the means of Gothic themes (anxiety, fear, loss) and setting (a haunted chamber), “The Raven” gives us the interior of a human head/mind as its “world.”
    A companion piece in suspense and terror, “Ulalume” moves us through foreboding outdoor scenery as the nameless speaker and his companion, Psyche, journey during what may be Halloween night. Psyche, the nurturer and illuminator (of the soul more so than the body), attempts to dissuade the speaker from proceeding, though he feels compelled to do so. Although they are outdoors, where they can easily observe planetary signs in the skies, there is an unmistakable sense of constriction and limitation connected with initially oblique hints about love (toward which planetary manifestations are unfavorable). The pair appropriately come to a decided stop when they arrive at Ulalume’s tomb, a destination the speaker hadn’t seemed to notice they were approaching. Confronted by the actual abode of death, as well as being melancholy over the loss of Ulalume, the speaker represents death-in-life as the poem ends. He rapidly becomes as emotionally “withering and sere” as the leaves. His stasis occurs because Psyche’s counsel went unheeded. Therefore we may detect in the speaker an inability to yield to any female presence in his makeup. The consequences of such egotism are disastrous. The name “Ulalume” has variously been construed as implying both light and wailing, and this speaker’s inability to reconcile with the female creative and intuitive element in the self has caused his “light” to dim and die. Consequently he is left to “wail,” and the nature of the spoken word, in a poem that constitutes a lament, serves in its monotony as an apt means of rendering the speaker’s muttered sorrow.
    Poe’s dictum, that the “most poetic of all themes is the death of a beautiful woman,” is surely represented in many of his poems, but one may well ponder the exact meaning of the phrase. It does not mean that Poe himself was hostile toward women or that symbolic murders and burials in his writings reflected personal hostility. His thinking on this topic might have had strong origins in everyday life around him, when the average life span was short, and that for women often less than that for men. The phrase might also spring from a more jocular impulse (that is, he divined his own abilities in creating such situations). “Poetic” and “poet” might be read or heard as “Poe-tic” and “Poe-t,” and Poe indeed punned on his name on several occasions. Then, too, the phrase may indicate that his female characters,