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

Thoreau himself (jocularly) called Walden Pond—a “walled-in” pond. Poe’s eerie lake casts a literal and figurative “pall” (the cloth covering a coffin and within this poem an obstacle to psychological ease) over the protagonist. Thus “The Lake—To—” stands as the most symbolic of Poe’s earliest poems. Confinement in the natural scene promotes fears in the speaker, who fixates on the lake and its “poisonous wave,” closed in with unyielding rock and overshadowing pines redolent of death. The “you” addressed remains vague. Is there a literal dead love, or is the one addressed “dead” to the protagonist solely from unalterable separation? Or does the “other” exist as part of the speaker’s own psyche, and is “you” some repressed but signal emotion that, locked in as it may be, can not be quelled but continues to torment?
    We might take as a paradigm for considering Poe’s verse (and, for that matter, much of his fiction) the title of a poem by twentieth-century poet Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Poe’s creative works—and not only that about his own blackbird, “The Raven”—yield multiple, equally valid interpretations. “The Lake—To—” constitutes sophisticated literary art, particularly from one as young as Poe. Some other selections in the Tamerlane volume are not so artistic, and it may be worth noting that Poe, likely deeming it inferior poetry, never again included in volume form the Tamerlane poem “The Happiest Day, the Happiest Hour.”
    Many misunderstandings concerning Poe’s poems need correcting. Among them is the notion that “The Sleeper” (titled “Irene” when it originally appeared in the 1831 Poems) is grotesque, and that it may betray a necrophiliac strain in Poe himself. The poem has continued as a popular standard selection in anthologies, and it is neither insignificant nor revolting. Rather than betraying any personal emotions or proclivities of its author, “The Sleeper” treats a situation more commonplace in Poe’s era than in our own and is accompanied by the subtle unfolding of a bereaved lover’s psychology. The opening centers on a mourner’s extreme confusion. His being outdoors on a June midnight, his thoughts wandering from the moon down to a grave and water lilies, succeeded by his hallucinatory state becoming less troubled about the “sleeping” lady—this is psychological realism subtly rendered. As mourners typically with solemn dignity, and often by an indirect route, approach a corpse prepared for burial, so this survivor leads us to realize gradually that the lady’s sleep is one of death, and that from the bed, where she has been laid out for burial (ordinary practice in Poe’s time), she will be borne to her grave.
    Funeral services in the deceased’s own home are today no longer customary, but well into the twentieth century home funerals were still common: Witness Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Robert Frost’s poem “Home Burial” (1914), and William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (1930). Poe’s poem suggests the solemnity and stately ceremonies customary in funeral proceedings. The couplets (two-line rhyming units) that constitute the major verse form in the poem convey restraint and order; they are checks on impulses that might otherwise grow frenzied. The occasional triplets (three-line rhyming units) signal rises in the speaker’s emotions, albeit he never lets his imagination riot as it did when the poem began. Overall, the tone and rhythm are of restraint and slow motion, in a movement little by little toward the lady herself; only then do we discover that she is dead. Perhaps the bereaved lover requires such gradual approach to accommodate the finality of his beloved’s death, and so the indirection or obliqueness in his thinking is actually psychologically accurate.
    If he had been “moon-mad,” or lunatic, when the poem began (and he could have