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THE RAVEN

By

EDGAR ALLAN POE

        ILLUSTRATED

By GUSTAVE DORÉ


Title Image

WITH COMMENT BY EDMUND C. STEDMAN

NEW YORK

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
1884

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

All rights reserved.

Transcriber’s Notes

In the List of Illustrations I restored a missing single quote after Lenore! as shown below:

“‘Wretch,’ I cried, ‘thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!'”

The List of Illustrations uses ‘visitor’ where the poem and the actual illustration use ‘visiter’.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[5]

With Names of Engravers

Title-page, designed by Elihu Vedder.Frederick Juengling.
“Nevermore.”H. Claudius, G.J. Buechner.
ANANKE.H. Claudius.
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.”
R.A. Muller.
“Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.”
R.G. Tietze.
“Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore.”
H. Claudius.
“Sorrow for the lost Lenore.”W. Zimmermann.
“For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.”
Frederick Juengling.
“”T is some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door—
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door.'”
W. Zimmermann.
—”Here I opened wide the door;—Darkness there, and nothing more.”H. Claudius.
“Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”F.S. King.
“‘Surely,’ said I, ‘surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore.'”
Frederick Juengling.
“Open here I flung the shutter.”T. Johnson.
[6]
—”A stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he.”R. Staudenbaur.
“Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.”
R.G. Tietze.
“Wandering from the Nightly shore.”Frederick Juengling.
“Till I scarcely more than muttered, ‘Other friends have flown before—
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.'”
Frank French.
“Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy.”
R. Schelling.
“But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o’er
She shall press, ah, nevermore!”
George Kruell.
“‘Wretch,’ I cried, ‘thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!'”
Victor Bernstrom.
“On this home by Horror haunted.”R. Staudenbaur.
“‘Tell me truly, I implore—Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!'”W. Zimmermann.
“‘Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore.'”
F.S. King.
“‘Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!’ I shrieked, upstarting.”W. Zimmermann.
“‘Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!'”Robert Hoskin.
“And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!”
R.G. Tietze.
The secret of the Sphinx.R. Staudenbaur.

[7]

[8]

[9]

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 passion, 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 Space, 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 pass 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[10]
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
Bürger’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 constituents 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 passages 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 wreathéd 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 analysis. 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 misdoubt, 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 analytic 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[11]
famous as the room where Rouget de l’Isle composed
the Marseillaise. 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 fashionable
arbiters, reprinted it with a eulogy that instantly
made it town-talk. All doubt of its authorship
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 illustrated 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 Mitchell, 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 manuscript copies,
was still farther revised by him; in fact, he printed
it in Richmond, just before his death, with the
poetic substitution 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:

“Caught from some unhappy master, whom unmerciful Disaster

Followed fast and followed faster—so, when Hope he would adjure,

Stern Despair returned, instead of the sweet Hope he dared adjure—

That sad answer, ‘Nevermore!'”

It would be well if other, and famous, poets could
be as sure of making their changes always improvements.
Poe constantly rehandled his scanty show
of verse, and usually bettered it. The Raven was
the first of the few poems which he nearly brought
to completion before printing. It may be that those
who care for poetry lost little by his death. Fluent
in prose, he never wrote verse for the sake of making
a poem. When a refrain of image haunted him,
the lyric that resulted was the inspiration, as he
himself said, of a passion, not of a purpose. This
was at intervals so rare as almost to justify the
Fairfield theory that each was the product of a
nervous crisis.

What, then, gave the poet his clue to The
Raven
? From what misty foundation did it rise
slowly to a music slowly breathed? As usual, more
than one thing went to the building of so notable
a poem. Considering the longer sermons often
preached on brief and less suggestive texts, I hope
not to be blamed for this discussion of a single
lyric,—especially one which an artist like Doré has
made the subject of prodigal illustration. Until recently
I had supposed that this piece, and a few
which its author composed after its appearance, were
exceptional in not having grown from germs in his
boyish verse. But Mr. Fearing Gill has shown me
some unpublished stanzas by Poe, written in his
eighteenth year, and entitled, “The Demon of the
Fire.” The manuscript appears to be in the poet’s
early handwriting, and its genuineness is vouched for
by the family in whose possession it has remained
for half a century. Besides the plainest germs of
“The Bells” and “The Haunted Palace” it contains
a few lines somewhat suggestive of the opening
and close of The Raven. As to the rhythm of
our poem, a comparison of dates indicates that this
was influenced by the rhythm of “Lady Geraldine’s
Courtship.” Poe was one of the first to honor Miss
Barrett’s genius; he inscribed his collected poems
to her as “the noblest of her sex,” and was in[12]
sympathy with her lyrical method. The lines from
her love-poem,

“With a murmurous stir uncertain, in the air, the purple curtain

Swelleth in and swelleth out around her motionless pale brows,”

found an echo in these:

“And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before.”

Here Poe assumed a privilege for which he roughly
censured Longfellow, and which no one ever sought
on his own premises without swift detection and
chastisement. In melody and stanzaic form, we shall
see that the two poems are not unlike, but in motive
they are totally distinct. The generous poetess
felt nothing but the true originality of the poet.
“This vivid writing!” she exclaimed,—”this power
which is felt!… Our great poet, Mr. Browning,
author of ‘Paracelsus,’ &c., is enthusiastic in
his admiration of the rhythm.” Mr. Ingram, after
referring to “Lady Geraldine,” cleverly points out
another source from which Poe may have caught
an impulse. In 1843, Albert Pike, the half-Greek,
half-frontiersman, poet of Arkansas, had printed in
“The New Mirror,” for which Poe then was writing,
some verses entitled “Isadore,” but since revised
by the author and called “The Widowed Heart.”
I select from Mr. Pike’s revision the following
stanza, of which the main features correspond with
the original version:

“Restless I pace our lonely rooms, I play our songs no more,

The garish sun shines flauntingly upon the unswept floor;

The mocking-bird still sits and sings, O melancholy strain!

For my heart is like an autumn-cloud that overflows with rain;

Thou art lost to me forever, Isadore!”

Here we have a prolonged measure, a similarity of
refrain, and the introduction of a bird whose song
enhances sorrow. There are other trails which may
be followed by the curious; notably, a passage
which Mr. Ingram selects from Poe’s final review
of “Barnaby Rudge”:

“The raven, too, * * * might have been made, more
than we now see it, a portion of the conception of the fantastic
Barnaby. * * * Its character might have performed,
in regard to that of the idiot, much the same part as does,
in music, the accompaniment in respect to the air.”

Nevertheless, after pointing out these germs
and resemblances, the value of this poem still is
found in its originality. The progressive music, the
scenic detail and contrasted light and shade,—above
all, the spiritual passion of the nocturn, make it the
work of an informing genius. As for the gruesome
bird, he is unlike all the other ravens of his clan, from
the “twa corbies” and “three ravens” of the balladists
to Barnaby’s rumpled “Grip.” Here is no
semblance of the cawing rook that haunts ancestral
turrets and treads the field of heraldry; no boding
phantom of which Tickell sang that, when,

“shrieking at her window thrice,

The raven flap’d his wing,

Too well the love-lorn maiden knew

The solemn boding sound.”

Poe’s raven is a distinct conception; the incarnation
of a mourner’s agony and hopelessness; a sable
embodied Memory, the abiding chronicler of doom, a
type of the Irreparable. Escaped across the Styx, from
“the Night’s Plutonian shore,” he seems the imaged
soul of the questioner himself,—of him who can not,
will not, quaff the kind nepenthe, because the memory
of Lenore is all that is left him, and with the
surcease of his sorrow even that would be put aside.

The Raven also may be taken as a representative
poem of its author, for its exemplification of all
his notions of what a poem should be. These are
found in his essays on “The Poetic Principle,” “The
Rationale of Verse,” and “The Philosophy of Composition.”
Poe declared that “in Music, perhaps,
the soul most nearly attains the great end for which,
when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles—the
creation of supernal Beauty…. Verse
cannot be better designated than as an inferior or
less capable music”; but again, verse which is really
the “Poetry of Words” is “The Rhythmical Creation
of Beauty,”—this and nothing more. The tone
of the highest Beauty is one of Sadness. The most
melancholy of topics is Death. This must be allied
to Beauty. “The death, then, of a beautiful woman
is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the
world,—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips
best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved
lover.” These last expressions are quoted from
Poe’s whimsical analysis of this very poem, but
they indicate precisely the general range of his
verse. The climax of “The Bells” is the muffled
monotone of ghouls, who glory in weighing down
the human heart. “Lenore,” The Raven, “The
Sleeper,” “To One in Paradise,” and “Ulalume”
form a tenebrose symphony,—and “Annabel Lee,”
written last of all, shows that one theme possessed
him to the end. Again, these are all nothing
if not musical, and some are touched with that
quality of the Fantastic which awakes the sense of
awe, and adds a new fear to agony itself. Through
all is dimly outlined, beneath a shadowy pall, the
poet’s ideal love,—so often half-portrayed elsewhere,—the
entombed wife of Usher, the Lady Ligeia, in[13]
truth the counterpart of his own nature. I suppose
that an artist’s love for one “in the form” never
can wholly rival his devotion to some ideal. The
woman near him must exercise her spells, be all by
turns and nothing long, charm him with infinite variety,
or be content to forego a share of his allegiance.
He must be lured by the Unattainable,
and this is ever just beyond him in his passion for
creative art.

Poe, like Hawthorne, came in with the decline
of the Romantic school, and none delighted more
than he to laugh at its calamity. Yet his heart was
with the romancers and their Oriental or Gothic
effects. His invention, so rich in the prose tales,
seemed to desert him when he wrote verse; and his
judgment told him that long romantic poems depend
more upon incident than inspiration,—and that,
to utter the poetry of romance, lyrics would suffice.
Hence his theory, clearly fitted to his own limitations,
that “a ‘long poem’ is a flat contradiction in
terms.” The components of The Raven are few and
simple: a man, a bird, and the phantasmal memory
at a woman. But the piece affords a fine display
of romantic material. What have we? The midnight;
the shadowy chamber with its tomes of forgotten
lore; the student,—a modern Hieronymus;
the raven’s tap on the casement; the wintry night
and dying fire; the silken wind-swept hangings;
the dreams and vague mistrust of the echoing darkness;
the black, uncanny bird upon the pallid bust;
the accessories of violet velvet and the gloating
lamp. All this stage effect of situation, light, color,
sound, is purely romantic, and even melodramatic,
but of a poetic quality that melodrama rarely exhibits,
and thoroughly reflective of the poet’s “eternal
passion, eternal pain.”

The rhythmical structure of The Raven was
sure to make an impression. Rhyme, alliteration,
the burden, the stanzaic form, were devised with
singular adroitness. Doubtless the poet was struck
with the aptness of Miss Barrett’s musical trochaics,
in “eights,” and especially by the arrangement
adopted near the close of “Lady Geraldine”:

“‘Eyes,’ he said, ‘now throbbing through me! Are ye eyes that did undo me?

Shining eyes, like antique jewels set in Parian statue-stone!

Underneath that calm white forehead, are ye ever burning torrid

O’er the desolate sand-desert of my heart and life undone?'”

His artistic introduction of a third rhyme in both
the second and fourth lines, and the addition of a
fifth line and a final refrain, made the stanza of The
Raven
. The persistent alliteration seems to come
without effort, and often the rhymes within lines
are seductive; while the refrain or burden dominates
the whole work. Here also he had profited by Miss
Barrett’s study of ballads and romaunts in her own
and other tongues. A “refrain” is the lure wherewith
a poet or a musician holds the wandering ear,—the
recurrent longing of Nature for the initial
strain. I have always admired the beautiful refrains
of the English songstress,—”The Nightingales,
the Nightingales,” “Margret, Margret,” “My Heart
and I,” “Toll slowly,” “The River floweth on,”
“Pan, Pan is dead,” etc. She also employed what
I term the Repetend, in the use of which Poe has
excelled all poets since Coleridge thus revived it:

“O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,

And I blessed them unaware:

Sure my kind saint took pity on me,

And I blessed them unaware.”

Poe created the fifth line of his stanza for the magic
of the repetend. He relied upon it to the uttermost
in a few later poems,—”Lenore,” “Annabel Lee,”
“Ulalume,” and “For Annie.” It gained a wild and
melancholy music, I have thought, from the “sweet
influences,” of the Afric burdens and repetends that
were sung to him in childhood, attuning with their
native melody the voice of our Southern poet.

“The Philosophy of Composition,” his analysis
of The Raven, is a technical dissection of its method
and structure. Neither his avowal of cold-blooded
artifice, nor his subsequent avowal to friends that an
exposure of this artifice was only another of his intellectual
hoaxes, need be wholly credited. If he
had designed the complete work in advance, he
scarcely would have made so harsh a prelude of
rattle-pan rhymes to the delicious melody of the
second stanza,—not even upon his theory of the
fantastic. Of course an artist, having perfected a
work, sees, like the first Artist, that it is good, and
sees why it is good. A subsequent analysis, coupled
with a disavowal of any sacred fire, readily enough
may be made. My belief is that the first conception
and rough draft of this poem came as inspiration
always comes; that its author then saw how
it might be perfected, giving it the final touches
described in his chapter on Composition, and that
the latter, therefore, is neither wholly false nor wholly
true. The harm of such analysis is that it tempts
a novice to fancy that artificial processes can supersede
imagination. The impulse of genius is to guard
the secrets of its creative hour. Glimpses obtained
of the toil, the baffled experiments, which precede a
triumph, as in the sketch-work of Hawthorne recently
brought to light, afford priceless instruction
and encouragement to the sincere artist. But one[14]
who voluntarily exposes his Muse to the gaze of
all comers should recall the fate of King Candaules.

The world still thinks of Poe as a “luckless
man of genius.” I recently heard him mentioned as
“one whom everybody seems chartered to misrepresent,
decry or slander.” But it seems to me that
his ill-luck ended with his pitiable death, and that
since then his defence has been persistent, and his
fame of as steadfast growth as a suffering and gifted
author could pray for in his hopeful hour. Griswold’s
decrial and slander turned the current in his
favor. Critics and biographers have come forward
with successive refutations, with tributes to his
character, with new editions of his works. His own
letters and the minute incidents of his career are
before us; the record, good and bad, is widely
known. No appellor has received more tender and
forgiving judgement. His mishaps in life belonged
to his region and period, perchance still more to his
own infirmity of will. Doubtless his environment
was not one to guard a fine-grained, ill-balanced
nature from perils without and within. His strongest
will, to be lord of himself, gained for him “that
heritage of woe.” He confessed himself the bird’s
unhappy master, the stricken sufferer of this poem.
But his was a full share of that dramatic temper
which exults in the presage of its own doom. There
is a delight in playing one’s high part: we are all
gladiators, crying Ave Imperator! To quote Burke’s
matter of fact: “In grief the pleasure is still uppermost,
and the affliction we suffer has no resemblance
to absolute pain, which is always odious, and which
we endeavor to shake off as soon as possible.” Poe
went farther, and was an artist even in the tragedy
of his career. If, according to his own belief, sadness
and the vanishing of beauty are the highest
poetic themes, and poetic feeling the keenest earthly
pleasure, then the sorrow and darkness of his broken
life were not without their frequent compensation.

In the following pages, we have a fresh example
of an artist’s genius characterizing his interpretation
of a famous poem. Gustave Doré, the last work
of whose pencil is before us, was not the painter,
or even the draughtsman, for realists demanding
truth of tone, figure, and perfection. Such matters
concerned him less than to make shape and distance,
light and shade, assist his purpose,—which
was to excite the soul, the imagination, of the looker
on. This he did by arousing our sense of awe,
through marvellous and often sublime conceptions
of things unutterable and full of gloom or glory. It
is well said that if his works were not great paintings,
as pictures they are great indeed. As a “literary
artist,” and such he was, his force was in direct
ratio with the dramatic invention of his author, with
the brave audacities of the spirit that kindled his
own. Hence his success with Rabelais, with “Le
Juif-Errant,” “Les Contes Drolatiques,” and “Don
Quixote,” and hence, conversely, his failure to express
the beauty of Tennyson’s Idyls, of “Il Paradiso,”
of the Hebrew pastorals, and other texts requiring
exaltation, or sweetness and repose. He was a born
master of the grotesque, and by a special insight
could portray the spectres of a haunted brain. We
see objects as his personages saw them, and with the
very eyes of the Wandering Jew, the bewildered
Don, or the goldsmith’s daughter whose fancy so
magnifies the King in the shop on the Pont-au-Change.
It was in the nature of things that he
should be attracted to each masterpiece of verse or
prose that I have termed unique. The lower kingdoms
were called into his service; his rocks, trees
and mountains, the sky itself, are animate with motive
and diablerie. Had he lived to illustrate Shakespeare,
we should have seen a remarkable treatment
of Caliban, the Witches, the storm in “Lear”; but
doubtless should have questioned his ideals of Imogen
or Miranda. Beauty pure and simple, and the perfect
excellence thereof, he rarely seemed to comprehend.

Yet there is beauty in his designs for the “Ancient
Mariner,” unreal as they are, and a consecutiveness
rare in a series by Doré. The Rime
afforded him a prolonged story, with many shiftings
of the scene. In The Raven sound and color
preserve their monotone and we have no change
of place or occasion. What is the result? Doré
proffers a series of variations upon the theme as
he conceived it, “the enigma of death and the hallucination
of an inconsolable soul.” In some of these
drawings his faults are evident; others reveal his
powerful originality, and the best qualities in which,
as a draughtsman, he stood alone. Plainly there
was something in common between the working
moods of Poe and Doré. This would appear more
clearly had the latter tried his hand upon the “Tales
of the Grotesque and Arabesque.” Both resorted
often to the elf-land of fantasy and romance. In
melodramatic feats they both, through their command
of the supernatural, avoided the danger-line between
the ideal and the absurd. Poe was the truer worshipper
of the Beautiful; his love for it was a consecrating
passion, and herein he parts company with
his illustrator. Poet or artist, Death at last transfigures
all: within the shadow of his sable harbinger,
Vedder’s symbolic crayon aptly sets them face to
face, but enfolds them with the mantle of immortal
wisdom and power. An American woman has wrought
the image of a star-eyed Genius with the final torch,
the exquisite semblance of one whose vision beholds,
but whose lips may not utter, the mysteries of a land
beyond “the door of a legended tomb.”

Edmund C. Stedman.


[15]

THE POEM.


[16]

[17]

Illustration 1

[18]

[19]

THE RAVEN.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“‘T is some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—

Only this, and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Eagerly I wished the morrow:—vainly I had sought to borrow

From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—

For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—

Nameless here for evermore.
And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;

So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating

“‘T is some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door

Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door;—

This it is, and nothing more.”
[20]
Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,

“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;

But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,

And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,

That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door;—

Darkness there, and nothing more.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;

But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,

And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore!”

This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”

Merely this and nothing more.
Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,

Soon again I heard a tapping, somewhat louder than before.

“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice;

Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore—

Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;—

‘T is the wind and nothing more!”
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,

In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.

Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;

But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door—

Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—

Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
[21]
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,

By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,

“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,

Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore,—

Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,

Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore;

For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being

Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door—

Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,

With such name as “Nevermore.”
But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only

That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.

Nothing further then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered—

Till I scarcely more than muttered, “Other friends have flown before—

On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.”

Then the bird said, “Nevermore.”
Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,

“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store,

Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster

Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore—

Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore

Of ‘Never—nevermore.'”
[22]
But the Raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,

Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;

Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking

Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—

What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore

Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”
This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing

To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;

This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining

On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamplight gloated o’er,

But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o’er

She shall press, ah, nevermore!
Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer

Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.

“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee

Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!”

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!—

Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,

Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—

On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore—

Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
[23]
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil—prophet still, if bird or devil!

By that Heaven that bends above, us—by that God we both adore—

Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—

“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!

Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!

Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,

And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted—nevermore!

[24]

[25]

Illustration 2

[26]

[27]

Illustration 3
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.”

[28]

[29]

Illustration 4

[30]

[31]

“Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.”

[32]

[33]

Illustration 5

[34]

[35]

“Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore.”

[36]

[37]

Illustration 6

[38]

[39]

“Sorrow for the lost Lenore.”

[40]

[41]

Illustration 7

[42]

[43]

“For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.”

[44]

[45]

Illustration 8

[46]

[47]

“‘T is some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door—
Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door.”

[48]

[49]

Illustration 9

[50]

[51]

“Here I opened wide the door;—
Darkness there, and nothing more.”

[52]

[53]

Illustration 10

[54]

[55]

“Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”

[56]

[57]

Illustration 11

[58]

[59]

“‘Surely,’ said I, ‘surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore.'”

[60]

[61]

Illustration 12

[62]

[63]

“Open here I flung the shutter.”

[64]

[65]

Illustration 13

[66]

[67]

. . . . . . . . “A stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he.”

[68]

[69]

Illustration 14

[70]

[71]

“Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.”

[72]

[73]

Illustration 15

[74]

[75]

“Wandering from the Nightly shore.”

[76]

[77]

Illustration 16

[78]

[79]

“Till I scarcely more than muttered, ‘Other friends have flown before—
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.'”

[80]

[81]

Illustration 17

[82]

[83]

“Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy.”

[84]

[85]

Illustration 18

[86]

[87]

“But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o’er
She shall press, ah, nevermore!”

[88]

[89]

Illustration 19

[90]

[91]

“‘Wretch,’ I cried, ‘thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!'”

[92]

[93]

Illustration 20

[94]

[95]

“On this home by Horror haunted.”

[96]

[97]

Illustration 21

[98]

[99]

. . . . . . . . . “Tell me truly, I implore—
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”

[100]

[101]

Illustration 22

[102]

[103]

“Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”

[104]

[105]

Illustration 23

[106]

[107]

“‘Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!’ I shrieked, upstarting.”

[108]

[109]

Illustration 24

[110]

[111]

“‘Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!'”

[112]

[113]

Illustration 25

[114]

[115]

“And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!”

[116]

[117]

Illustration 26

[118]

[119]

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