Page:The Raven (1884).pdf/13

12 sympathy with her lyrical method. The lines from her love-poem,

found an echo in these:

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 kit 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 "he Widowed Heart" I select from Mr. Pike's revision the following stanza, of which the main features correspond with the original version

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 sir 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 shark,—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 other ravens of his clan, from the "twa corbies" and "three ravens" of the baladists 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,

Poes 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. In 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 Ligelia, in