Part 1 (1/2)
The Raven.
by Edgar Allan Poe.
COMMENT ON THE POEM.
The secret of a poem, no less than a jest's prosperity, lies in the ear of him that hears it. Yield to its spell, accept the poet's mood: this, after all, is what the sages answer when you ask them of its value. Even though the poet himself, in his other mood, tell you that his art is but sleight of hand, his food enchanter's food, and offer to show you the trick of it,--believe him not. Wait for his prophetic hour; then give yourself to his pa.s.sion, his joy or pain. ”We are in Love's hand to-day!” sings Gautier, in Swinburne's buoyant paraphrase,--and from morn to sunset we are wafted on the violent sea: there is but one love, one May, one flowery strand. Love is eternal, all else unreal and put aside. The vision has an end, the scene changes; but we have gained something, the memory of a charm. As many poets, so many charms. There is the charm of Evanescence, that which lends to supreme beauty and grace an aureole of Pathos. Share with Landor his one ”night of memories and of sighs” for Rose Aylmer, and you have this to the full.
And now take the hand of a new-world minstrel, strayed from some proper habitat to that rude and dissonant America which, as Baudelaire saw, ”was for Poe only a vast prison through which he ran, hither and thither, with the feverish agitation of a being created to breathe in a purer world,” and where ”his interior life, spiritual as a poet, spiritual even as a drunkard, was but one perpetual effort to escape the influence of this antipathetical atmosphere.” Clasp the sensitive hand of a troubled singer dreeing thus his weird, and share with him the clime in which he found,--never throughout the day, always in the night,--if not the Atlantis whence he had wandered, at least a place of refuge from the bounds in which by day he was immured.
To one land only he has power to lead you, and for one night only can you share his dream. A tract of neither Earth nor Heaven: ”No-man's-land,” out of s.p.a.ce, out of Time. Here are the perturbed ones, through whose eyes, like those of the Cenci, the soul finds windows though the mind is dazed; here spirits, groping for the path which leads to Eternity, are halted and delayed. It is the limbo of ”planetary souls,” wherein are all moonlight uncertainties, all lost loves and illusions. Here some are fixed in trance, the only respite attainable; others
”move fantastically To a discordant melody:”
while everywhere are
”Sheeted Memories of the Past-- Shrouded forms that start and sigh As they pa.s.s the wanderer by.”
Such is the land, and for one night we enter it,--a night of astral phases and recurrent chimes. Its monodies are twelve poems, whose music strives to change yet ever is the same. One by one they sound, like the chiming of the brazen and ebony clock, in ”The Masque of the Red Death,” which made the waltzers pause with ”disconcert and tremulousness and meditation,” as often as the hour came round.
Of all these mystical cadences, the plaint of _The Raven_, vibrating through the portal, chiefly has impressed the outer world. What things go to the making of a poem,--and how true in this, as in most else, that race which named its bards ”the makers”? A work is called out of the void. Where there was nothing, it remains,--a new creation, part of the treasure of mankind. And a few exceptional lyrics, more than others that are equally creative, compel us to think anew how bravely the poet's pen turns things unknown
”to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation, and a name.”
Each seems without a prototype, yet all fascinate us with elements wrested from the shadow of the Supernatural. Now the highest imagination is concerned about the soul of things; it may or may not inspire the Fantasy that peoples with images the interlunar vague. Still, one of these lyrics, in its smaller way, affects us with a sense of uniqueness, as surely as the sublimer works of a supernatural cast,--Marlowe's ”Faustus,” the ”Faust” of Goethe, ”Manfred,” or even those ethereal masterpieces, ”The Tempest” and ”A Midsummer Night's Dream.” More than one, while otherwise unique, has some burden or refrain which haunts the memory,--once heard, never forgotten, like the tone of a rarely used but distinctive organ-stop.
Notable among them is Burger's ”Lenore,” that ghostly and resonant ballad, the lure and foil of the translators. Few will deny that Coleridge's wondrous ”Rime of the Ancient Mariner” stands at their very head. ”Le Juif-Errant” would have claims, had Beranger been a greater poet; and, but for their remoteness from popular sympathy, ”The Lady of Shalott” and ”The Blessed Damozel” might be added to the list. It was given to Edgar Allan Poe to produce two lyrics, ”The Bells” and _The Raven_, each of which, although perhaps of less beauty than those of Tennyson and Rossetti, is a unique. ”Ulalume,” while equally strange and imaginative, has not the universal quality that is a portion of our test.
_The Raven_ in sheer poetical const.i.tuents falls below such pieces as ”The Haunted Palace,” ”The City in the Sea,” ”The Sleeper,” and ”Israfel.” The whole of it would be exchanged, I suspect, by readers of a fastidious cast, for such pa.s.sages as these:
”Around, by lifting winds forgot, Resignedly beneath the sky The melancholy waters lie.
No rays from the holy heaven come down On the long night-time of that town; But light from out the lurid sea Streams up the turrets silently--
Up many and many a marvellous shrine Whose wreathed friezes intertwine The viol, the violet, and the vine.
No swellings tell that winds may be Upon some far-off happier sea-- No heavings hint that winds have been On seas less hideously serene.”
It lacks the aerial melody of the poet whose heart-strings are a lute:
”And they say (the starry choir And the other listening things) That Israfeli's fire Is owing to that lyre By which he sits and sings-- The trembling living wire Of those unusual strings.”
But _The Raven_, like ”The Bells” and ”Annabel Lee,” commends itself to the many and the few. I have said elsewhere that Poe's rarer productions seemed to me ”those in which there is the appearance, at least, of spontaneity,--in which he yields to his feelings, while dying falls and cadences most musical, most melancholy, come from him unawares.” This is still my belief; and yet, upon a fresh study of this poem, it impresses me more than at any time since my boyhood. Close acquaintance tells in favor of every true work of art. Induce the man, who neither knows art nor cares for it, to examine some poem or painting, and how soon its force takes hold of him! In fact, he will overrate the relative value of the first good work by which his attention has been fairly caught. _The Raven_, also, has consistent qualities which even an expert must admire. In no other of its author's poems is the motive more palpably defined. ”The Haunted Palace” is just as definite to the select reader, but Poe scarcely would have taken that subtle allegory for bald a.n.a.lysis. _The Raven_ is wholly occupied with the author's typical theme--the irretrievable loss of an idolized and beautiful woman; but on other grounds, also, the public instinct is correct in thinking it his representative poem.
A man of genius usually gains a footing with the success of some one effort, and this is not always his greatest. Recognition is the more instant for having been postponed. He does not acquire it, like a miser's fortune, coin after coin, but ”not at all or all in all.” And thus with other ambitions: the courtier, soldier, actor,--whatever their parts,--each counts his triumph from some lucky stroke. Poe's Raven, despite augury, was for him ”the bird that made the breeze to blow.” The poet settled in New-York, in the winter of 1844-'45, finding work upon Willis's paper, ”The Evening Mirror,” and eking out his income by contributions elsewhere. For six years he had been an active writer, and enjoyed a professional reputation; was held in both respect and mis...o...b.., and was at no loss for his share of the ill-paid journalism of that day. He also had done much of his very best work,--such tales as ”Ligeia” and ”The Fall of the House of Usher,” (the latter containing that mystical counterpart, in verse, of Elihu Vedder's ”A Lost Mind,”) such a.n.a.lytic feats as ”The Gold Bug” and ”The Mystery of Marie Roget.” He had made proselytes abroad, and gained a lasting hold upon the French mind. He had learned his own power and weakness, and was at his prime, and not without a certain reputation. But he had written nothing that was on the tongue of everybody. To rare and delicate work some popular touch must be added to capture the general audience of one's own time.
Through the industry of Poe's successive biographers, the hit made by _The Raven_ has become an oft-told tale. The poet's young wife, Virginia, was fading before his eyes, but lingered for another year within death's shadow. The long, low chamber in the house near the Bloomingdale Road is as famous as the room where Rouget de l'Isle composed the Ma.r.s.eillaise.
All have heard that the poem, signed ”Quarles,” appeared in the ”American Review,” with a pseudo-editorial comment on its form; that Poe received ten dollars for it; that Willis, the kindest and least envious of fas.h.i.+onable arbiters, reprinted it with a eulogy that instantly made it town-talk. All doubt of its authors.h.i.+p was dispelled when Poe recited it himself at a literary gathering, and for a time he was the most marked of American authors. The hit stimulated and encouraged him. Like another and prouder satirist, he too found ”something of summer” even ”in the hum of insects.”
Sorrowfully enough, but three years elapsed,--a period of influence, pride, anguish, yet always of imaginative or critical labor,--before the final defeat, before the curtain dropped on a life that for him was in truth a tragedy, and he yielded to ”the Conqueror Worm.”
”The American Review: A Whig Journal” was a creditable magazine for the time, double-columned, printed on good paper with clear type, and ill.u.s.trated by mezzotint portraits. Amid much matter below the present standard, it contained some that any editor would be glad to receive. The initial volume, for 1845, has articles by Horace Greeley, Donald Mitch.e.l.l, Walter Whitman, Marsh, Tuckerman, and Whipple. Ralph Hoyt's quaint poem, ”Old,” appeared in this volume. And here are three lyrics by Poe: ”The City in the Sea,” ”The Valley of Unrest,” and _The Raven_. Two of these were built up,--such was his way,--from earlier studies, but the last-named came out as if freshly composed, and almost as we have it now. The statement that it was not afterward revised is erroneous. Eleven trifling changes from the magazine-text appear in _The Raven and Other Poems_, 1845, a book which the poet shortly felt encouraged to offer the public. These are mostly changes of punctuation, or of single words, the latter kind made to heighten the effect of alliteration. In Mr. Lang's pretty edition of Poe's verse, brought out in the ”Parchment Library,” he has shown the instinct of a scholar, and has done wisely, in going back to the text in the volume just mentioned, as given in the London issue of 1846. The ”standard”
Griswold collection of the poet's works abounds with errors. These have been repeated by later editors, who also have made errors of their own. But the text of _The Raven_, owing to the requests made to the author for ma.n.u.script copies, was still farther revised by him; in fact, he printed it in Richmond, just before his death, with the poetic subst.i.tution of ”seraphim whose foot-falls” for ”angels whose faint foot-falls,” in the fourteenth stanza. Our present text, therefore, while substantially that of 1845, is somewhat modified by the poet's later reading, and is, I think, the most correct and effective version of this single poem. The most radical change from the earliest version appeared, however, in the volume in 1845; the eleventh stanza originally having contained these lines, faulty in rhyme and otherwise a blemish on the poem: