Poe
It is no accident that at an impressionable age so many of us are entranced by the deadly earnestness of Poe. His haunting words seem whispered as though he expected that kindred spirits would be listening through the ages. Even to a hard-nosed kid like myself Poe's writings were instilled with a “cool” factor that was missing from most of the other classical poets that I stumbled across, not to mention that he held an advanced level of fame and, for most of us a youthful cognizance of "The Raven". I cannot recall my initial readings of either The Raven or Annabel Lee, so I cannot say they "stopped my in my tracks." Rather, I seem to have always been aware of the "shorn and shaven" raven cawing "nevermore" in the night, and of the distraught young man “lying down in the night-tide, at the side of his lost bride, in her tomb by the sounding sea." For these reasons I made an easy victim for Poe to lure into his desolate darkness.
It helped that the thing which brought me to poetry in the first place was not romance, as it is with so many, but death; the dawning realization at thirteen years old that I was indeed mortal, and that death would one day find me, growing in me a need to explore that further, to find those things which Mommy and Daddy held back for my “protection”. I have stated in other writes that my poetry journey began in the 7th or 8th grade with John Donne’s “Death, Be not Proud”, a poem found in the forward of a required read entitled “A Separate Peace”. That part of my poetry story is still true, but that poem was merely the beginning, and if it is morbidity you seek from the written word, it is Poe you will find.
The heart of the writer is the thing that captures a reader. A writer unwittingly includes pieces of himself in his work. Discovering another someone’s truths is why we read. Even fictional writings, by their nature, reflect who that someone is, what she has experienced, and what it is inside her that she feels the need to share. A writer seldom gets far away from who he or she is as a person; some being lovers, some dreamers, some realists, and some (like Poe) fatalistic and morose… although at least one talented bard managed to be all of the above.
Poe married his cousin Virginia when she was thirteen years old and he twenty-five. Twelve years later he sat at the foot of their bed rubbing his beloved Virginia’s feet in a vain attempt to warm her as she died from tuberculosis (the same disease that took his mother, father, and foster-mother, so he understood as he nursed her what Virginia’s eventual fate would be). A somewhat awkward outsider, Poe was losing the one person throughout his life who “got” him. Within three years of his Love’s passing Poe would join her in death.
Two years before Virginia’s death Poe wrote The Raven, the poem that made him famous, if not rich. Virginia was already very sick as he penned her ode, and his masterpiece. Even then Edgar and Virginia foresaw the end of their story.
“Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if that in that distant Eden,
it shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named, Lenore.
Clasp that rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore.
Nameless here, forevermore.”
Poe was paid $10 for The Raven. The poem saw immediate success. After it was published, due to copywrite laws of the time, it was free to be re-published by anyone and everyone... and it was. Poe did readings of the work in attempts to profit from it. They say that Poe recited in a quiet, somber, deliberate tone that spellbound his audiences as he recited, but still he failed to make the fortune he craved, even though the poem was sweeping America and the rest of the English speaking world.
And then a year later Edgar gazed in as the light died in his sweet Virginia’s eyes.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love -
- I and my Annabel Lee.
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Went envying her and me.
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Could ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
There are varying accounts of Poe’s final three years of life, and also of the events surrounding his mysterious death, but it is simple to discern that it was not the alcohol, drugs, or madness that killed him, but rather the broken heart those elixirs sought to cure.
Annabel Lee was written after Virginia’s death. It was given to a friend in payment for a loan, and was not published until after Poe's own demise. Poe’s was a world of disease and death, lived in a time when children were not expected to survive into adulthood. Scarlet Fever, small pox, tuberculosis and cholera, among others, ravaged through his world with no cures in sight. Living in a time of death it was no accident that death and a dying love became the major themes in his greatest works.
Nor is it accidental that those themes still bring a shiver to his reader’s today.
(I bitted and pieced the poems to get the parts I wanted, and paraphrased on top of that, so if you see mistakes it is because I didn't consider it necessary to make it perfect. I also failed to follow the prompt to the letter, but this is what I got. Thanks for understanding!)