Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/238

 218 EDGAR ALLAN POE �composition. It was published in 1843 an d incorpo- rated in Ligeia when the latter story was republished in The Broadway Journal of September 27, 1845. The first edition of Ligeia, that of 1838, contained', instead of The Conqueror Worm and the paragraph that precedes it as well as the two paragraphs that fol- low it, these words: "Methinks I again behold the terrible struggles of her lofty, her nearly Idealized na- ture, with the might and the terror and the majesty of the great Shadow. But she perished. The giant will succumbed to a power more stern. And I thought, as I gazed upon the corpse, of the wild pas- sage in Joseph Glanvill. 'The will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor ? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto deafh utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.' " This is not a strong passage, not strong enough for the strategic position that it occupies in the story. Poe determines to remodel it. Instead of representing Ligeia's enemy, death, as a shadow, he will represent it as the worm that dieth not. Both symbols are bibli- cal but the latter is far more concrete and poignant. And poetry is better suited to its vivid and immemo- rial staging than prose. In the meanwhile Poe had read and commended, in June, 1840, a poem by one Spencer Wallace Cone, containing the lines, �Spread o'er his rigid form �The banner of his pride, And let him meet the conqueror worm �With his good sword by his side. �He now builds his substitute poem around the new symbol but builds it as the work of Ligeia, "composed ��� �