Imagens da página
PDF
ePub

And I lie so composedly
Now in my bed,
Knowing her love,

That you fancy me dead;
And I rest so contentedly
Now in my bed,

With her love at my breast,

That you fancy me dead-
That you shudder to look at me,
Thinking me dead.

But my heart it is brighter
Than all of the many
Stars in the sky,

For it sparkles with Annie

It glows with the light

Of the love of my Annie—
With the thought of the light

Of the eyes of my Annie."

After all the great poems I have been studying, I cannot read this without fresh surprise at the potentialities of poetry. Its death-cold passion is overpowering. I am inclined to rank it highest in Poe's poetic work. Nothing surpasses it in soaring fancy, or equals it in ideas and spiritual power.

At the same time, in method of workmanship I see little difference between it and the rest of his minute body of verse. In it, as elsewhere, I observe the deliberate laying of snares to surprise; the same habit of recurrence to one theme. I find between it and, for instance, The Raven, a yet more intimate analogy; a relationship of one to the other as its converse. Thus, in The Raven, the reader is continually led on to expect an event of import which never happens; in For Annie, the very ordinary idea which we supposed we were contemplating develops into a monstrosity of fancy at once ghastly and beautiful.

Contrasted as are the results, I believe the art to be virtually identical. The effect Poe desired to compass by a poem was that of a single long-drawn sob or moan, floating one does not know whence; a thrill as when an untouched harpstring breaks in the dead night from a white-shrouded instrument in a dimly lighted room. It was a point of pride with him, both that he should be able to tell himself he had accomplished his object in conformity with rigid rules, and that his readers should never guess them.

He himself paraded in print the absence of spontaneous inspiration from his composition of The Raven. It was, he has told the world, the product of a mechanical operation he had cunningly devised. He who had boasted that with him 'poetry was not a purpose, but a passion', details elaborately how and why he introduced beauty, with its highest expression, sadness, and death; a refrain, with a bird-by choice a raven-to repeat it, in unconscious unison with the throbbings of despair in dead Lenore's lover; and, beneath all, a suggestive undercurrent of meaning ;-deliberately confining the whole within a few more than one hundred lines.

The explanation at the time tasked the capacity of popular belief more even than the weirdness of the poem hypnotized common understandings. A natural conjecture was that Poe either deceived himself into measuring back step by step ground his fancy had already taken in its stride, or simply was diverting himself with an experiment on public credulity. Really, however, what else would have been an altogether unlikely mystification if imputed to another poet, and poem, ceases to be incredible in respect to The Raven and him. The iron rigour with which there the thread-chain rather-of the central idea is stretched stiff and taut indicates, as I began by intimating, artifice rather

than the unpremeditated harmony of imagination. With himself confirming the suspicion, it becomes at least practicable to persuade ourselves that we smell the sawdust and oil of the workshop.

Although no critic, not even Poe himself, has attempted to apply the extreme mechanical theory to others of his poems, it cannot be denied that in general they are liable to the charge of an excess of art. None breathe of simple nature. Even the elegance of the lines to Helen with her 'Naiad airs', which bring admirers

[blocks in formation]

is but dumb sculpture, though of ivory and gold. Even though a spontaneous spark-a lurid one-from the soul kindled the dead man's appeal to his love For Annie, its rush of fire was constrained, as if it had been Ulalume; it had to flame along a line ruled for, not by, it. Never was verse of such apparent, and so little real, freedom as all of Poe's; or, consequently, so exquisite, which is less satisfying; so pure of loose taint with less of wholesome freshness. No healthful breeze blows from off its Dead Sea surface. No singing birds fly over it; though itself, in its ebb and flow, makes song, enthralling harmony, fairy music. Whatever he wrote, from his precocious and libertine, not idle, youth to the delirious end in the Baltimore hospital, possesses the same qualities of unfailing grace and tone. But the whole is like a reverie between sleep and waking, always fascinating, never restful, with an atmosphere about it as of a sepulchral vault.

The Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by James Hannay. London: Charles Griffin & Co., 1852.

1 The Raven, stanzas 1, 7, 18, pp. 35, 38, 44.

Lenore, st. 1, p. 46.

Ulalume, st. 2, p. 71.

• Ibid., st. 2, p. 46.

The Bells, st. 4, p. 65.

6 Annabel Lee, stanzas 1, 2, 4, pp. 67-8.

' For Annie, stanzas 1, 3, 6, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, pp. 102-6.

• To Helen (Poems written in Youth), st. 2, p. 191.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

1807-1882

THE poetry of echoes, of shadows, of wandering clouds, which have caught sunset purples. Literature numbers poets without family or descent, the first, some the last, of their line. Such were Homer, the Attic dramatists, Chaucer, the Elizabethans, Chatterton, Burns. There have been poets, great poets, with ancestry and successors, like Pope. Others, genuine too, there have been; manifestly foster children, suckled on milk of strangers, and in an atmosphere not their own. In default of examples and models from without, they might never have sung. Such is Longfellow. If inspiration ever were traceable, it would be seen that his library had inspired him. Diction and manner he seldom borrows; impulses, emotions, constantly. The limitations observable in his work are the inevitable consequences. No Pindaric strain is to be expected; no soaring to the heights. Momentum thus adventitious is exhausted too soon to supply impetus for a free career. It is an admirable supplement to native sweetness, intelligence, tenderness, sense of picturesqueness. A hundred delicate chords must have been thrilling through Longfellow's temperament, as the vibrations of extraneous, scarcely alien, minstrelsy touched them into music. To many natures the counter-note is actually more delightful, more awakening, than the unsoftened, full principal. Certainly the reflected character of the melody is the secret of the charm of a lovely ghost of medievalism like the Golden Legend.

« AnteriorContinuar »