American Gothic, page 27
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow –
The hours are breathing faint and low –
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.
Ulalume: A Ballad
THE skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crispéd and sere –
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir –
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my soul –
Of cypress, with Psyché, my soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac1 rivers that roll –
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole –
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.2
Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere –
Our memories were treacherous and sere –
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year –
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)
We noted not the dim lake of Auber,
(Though once we had journeyed down here) –
Remember’d not the dank tarn of Auber,
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
And now, as the night was senescent,
And star-dials pointed to morn –
As the star-dials hinted of morn –
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn –
Astarte’s3 bediamonded crescent
Distinct with its duplicate horn.
And I said – “She is warmer than Dian:4
She rolls through an ether of sighs –
She revels in a region of sighs:
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
These cheeks, where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion5
To point us the path to the skies –
To the Lethean6 peace of the skies –
Come up, in despite of the Lion,
To shine on us with her bright eyes –
Come up through the lair of the Lion,
With love in her luminous eyes.”
But Psyché, uplifting her finger,
Said – “Sadly this star I mistrust –
Her pallor I strangely mistrust:
Oh, hasten! – oh, let us not linger!
Oh, fly! – let us fly! – for we must.”
In terror she spoke, letting sink her
Wings till they trailed in the dust –
In agony sobbed letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust –
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.
I replied – “This is nothing but dreaming:
Let us on by this tremulous light –
Let us bathe in this crystalline light!
Its sybilic7 splendor is beaming
With hope and in beauty to-night:
See, it flickers up the sky through the night!
Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,
And be sure it will lead us aright –
We safely may trust to a gleaming
That cannot but guide us aright,
Since it flickers up to heaven through the night.”
Thus I pacified Psyché and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom –
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb –
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said, “What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?”
She replied, “Ulalume – Ulalume –
’Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!”
Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crispéd and sere –
As the leaves that were withering and sere,
And I cried, “It was surely October
On this very night of last year,
That I journeyed – I journeyed down here –
That I brought a dread burden down here –
On this night of all nights in the year
Oh, what demon has tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber,
This misty mid region of Weir –
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.”
Said we then – the two, then – “Ah, can it
Have been that the woodlandish ghouls –
The pitiful, the merciful ghouls –
To bar up our way and to ban it
From the secret that lies in these wolds8 –
From the thing that lies hidden in these wolds –
Have drawn up the spectre of a planet
From the limbo of lunary souls –
This sinfully scintillant planet
From the hell of the planetary souls?”
Annabel Lee
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee; –
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
She was a child and I was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love –
I and my Annabel Lee –
With a love that the wingéd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud by night
Chilling my Annabel Lee;
So that her high-born kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me;
Yes! – that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling
And killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we –
Of many far wiser than we –
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee: –
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride
In her sepulchre there by the sea –
In her tomb by the side of the sea.
Dream-Land
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon,1 named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule2 –
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE – out of TIME.
Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
For the tears that drip all over;
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging, unto skies of fire;
Lakes that endlessly outspread
Their lone waters – lone and dead, –
Their still waters – still and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily.
By the lakes that thus outspread
Their lone waters, lone and dead, –
Their sad waters, sad and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily, –
By the mountains – near the river
Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever, –
By the gray woods, – by the swamp
Where the toad and the newt encamp, –
By the dismal tarns and pools
Where dwell the Ghouls, –
By each spot the most unholy –
In each nook most melancholy, –
There the traveller meets, aghast,
Sheeted Memories of the Past –
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by –
White-robed forms of friends long given,
In agony, to the Earth – and Heaven.
For the heart whose woes are legion
’Tis a peaceful, soothing region –
For the spirit that walks in shadow
O! it is an Eldorado!
But the traveller, travelling through it,
May not – dare not openly view it;
Never its mysteries are exposed
To the weak human eye unclosed;
So wills its King, who hath forbid
The uplifting of the fringed lid;
And thus the sad Soul that here passes
Beholds it but through darkened glasses.
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have wandered home but newly
From this ultimate dim Thule.
Notes
HOP-FROG
I Latin: a rare bird in the world.
2 That is, he preferred broad, earthy humor to intellectual satire.
3 A supporting column which is also a statue of a woman.
THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO
I Fortified wine, drier and lighter than ordinary sherry.
2 Latin: no one provokes me with impunity.
3 Latin: may he rest in peace.
THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF M. VALDEMAR
I Hypnotism was popularized in Europe by the Austrian physician Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), and was called mesmerism or animal magnetism in Poe’s time.
2 At the moment of death.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER
I French: His heart is a suspended lute; touch it, and it resonates.
2 A word Poe invented, which means “born to the purple,” i.e. royal.
* Watson, Dr. Percival, Spallanzani, and especially the Bishop of Landaff. – See “Chemical Essays,” vol. v. [Poe’s note.]
THE RAVEN
I Manner or expression.
2 Pallas Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom.
3 Pluto was god of the underworld in Greek mythology; thus “Plutonian shore” means the underworld or hell.
4 Fabled drink causing forgetfulness.
5 Approximately: Is there relief in heaven?
6 Distant Aidenne (Eden): heaven.
ULALUME: A BALLAD
I Full of scoria, rough fragments of lava.
2 The North Pole.
3 Phoenician goddess of love and fertility, here associated with the planet Venus.
4 Diana, Roman goddess of the moon.
5 The constellation Leo.
6 In Greek mythology, drinking from the waters of the River Lethe, in the underworld, would bring forgetfulness.
7 The Sibyls were women who were regarded as prophets by the Greeks and Romans. “Sybilic” may mean “mysterious” in this context.
8 Moors: open, swampy land.
DREAM-LAND
I A phantom.
2 Ultimate Thule is proverbial for a place beyond all maps.
Herman Melville (1819–1891)
Melville was born to prosperity in New York City, but, following his father’s bankruptcy and death (when Herman was 12), the family slid into genteel poverty. Denied the college education he once expected, Melville went to sea. He later said that a whaling ship was his Harvard and Yale. Most of his early tales of sailing and south sea adventures, based on his own experiences, were commercially successful. Friendship with Hawthorne, and discovery of the older writer’s symbolic style, emboldened him to a series of experiments, beginning with Moby-Dick (1851), which pushed him into new artistic territory but ultimately cost him his audience. In his last decades he was nearly forgotten, publishing occasional verse and working on Billy Budd (1924), the novella that would be discovered and published years after his death.
Melville coined the phrase “the power of blackness” to describe the quality he most admired in Hawthorne’s fiction; of course, Melville was naming his own values as well. With his strong belief in the reality of evil, a sense that reality is slippery and ambiguous, and an oppositional stance toward many conventional American values, the Gothic mode was natural, perhaps inevitable, for Melville. Though not usually described in such terms, Moby-Dick is a Gothic novel, and Ahab, that “grand ungodly godlike man,” one of the greatest of Gothic villain-heroes. Pierre (1852), the novel which followed his whale-and-truth hunting masterpiece, is explicitly in the Gothic mode. The novella Benito Cereno (1856) is a profound Gothic meditation on race in the Americas.
“The Bell-Tower” (1856) pays homage to Hawthorne in many ways, including an Italian setting which recalls such stories as “The Birthmark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Melville’s tale is complex and many-layered. A series of biblical and historical allusions operate: to the Tower of Babel, the story of Sisera and Jael, Esther and Haman, and others. The allusions are linked by common themes of dominance and rebellion. Taken together, Melville implies a criticism of modern western society’s attempt to dominate women, nature, machines, and other peoples: a quality of western civilization that is ultimately self-destructive. There were few Americans of the time who were capable of making this observation, which was true of the Renaissance and of Melville’s era, and which still has validity.
Text: The Piazza Tales (New York: Dix & Edwards, 1856).
The Bell-Tower
“Like negroes, these powers own man sullenly; mindful of their higher master; while serving, plot revenge.”
“The world is apoplectic with the high-living of ambition; and apoplexy has its fall.”
“Seeking to conquer a larger liberty, man but extends the empire of necessity.”
From a Private MS
In the south of Europe, nigh a once-frescoed capital, now with dank mould cankering its bloom, central in a plain, stands what, at a distance, seems the black mossed stump of some immeasurable pine, fallen, in forgotten days, with Anak and the Titan.1
As all along where the pine tree falls, its dissolution leaves a mossy mound – last-flung shadow of the perished trunk; never lengthening, never lessening; unsubject to the fleet falsities of the sun; shade immutable and true gauge which cometh by prostration – so westward from what seems the stump, one steadfast spear of lichened ruin veins the plain.
From that tree-top, what birded chimes of silver throats had rung. A stone pine; a metallic aviary in its crown: the Bell-Tower, built by the great mechanician, the unblest foundling, Bannadonna.
Like Babel’s, its base was laid in a high hour of renovated earth, following the second deluge, when the waters of the Dark Ages had dried up, and once more the green appeared. No wonder that, after so long and deep submersion, the jubilant expectation of the race should, as with Noah’s sons, soar into Shinar2 aspiration.
In firm resolve, no man in Europe at that period went beyond Bannadonna. Enriched through commerce with the Levant,3 the state in which he lived voted to have the noblest Bell-Tower in Italy. His repute assigned him to be architect.
Stone by stone, month by month, the tower rose. Higher, higher; snail-like in pace, but torch or rocket in its pride.
After the masons would depart, the builder, standing alone upon its ever-ascending summit, at close of every day saw that he overtopped still higher walls and trees. He would tarry till a late hour there, wrapped in schemes of other and still loftier piles. Those who of saints’ days thronged the spot – hanging to the rude poles of scaffolding, like sailors on yards, or bees on boughs, unmindful of lime and dust, and falling chips of stone – their homage not the less inspirited him to self-esteem.
At length the holiday of the Tower came. To the sound of viols, the climax-stone slowly rose in air, and, amid the firing of ordinance, was laid by Bannadonna’s hands upon the final course. Then mounting it, he stood erect, alone, with folded arms; gazing upon the white summits of blue inland Alps, and whiter crests of bluer Alps off-shore – sights invisible from the plain. Invisible, too, from thence was that eye he turned below, when, like the cannon booms, came up to him the people’s combustions of applause.
