Chapter 1

Produced by Jason Isbell, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.

Transcriber's Notes:

In the List of Illustrations I restored a missing single quote after "Lenore!": "'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'.

* * * * *

THE RAVEN

BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

ILLUSTRATED BY GUSTAVE DORÉ

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._

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 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._

--"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._

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 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 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 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.