Endnotes
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The earliest version of “Tamerlane” was included in the suppressed volume of , but differs very considerably from the poem as now published. The present draft, besides innumerable verbal alterations and improvements upon the original, is more carefully punctuated, and, the lines being indented, presents a more pleasing appearance, to the eye at least. ↩
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In climes of mine imagining apart? —Ed. ↩
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Query “fervor”? —Ed. ↩
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It was a saying of this philosopher “that one’s own name should never appear in one’s own book.” ↩
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A star was discovered by Tycho Brahe which appeared suddenly in the heavens attained, in a few days, a brilliancy surpassing that of Jupiter—then as suddenly disappeared, and has never been seen since.
“Al Aaraaf” first appeared, with the sonnet “To Silence” prefixed to it, in , and is, substantially, as originally issued. In the edition for , however, this poem, its author’s longest, was introduced by the following twenty-nine lines, which have been omitted in—all subsequent collections:
Al Aaraaf
Mysterious star!
Thou wert my dream
All a long summer night—
Be now my theme!
By this clear stream,
Of thee will I write;
Meantime from afar
Bathe me in light!Thy world has not the dross of ours,
Yet all the beauty—all the flowers
That list our love or deck our bowers
In dreamy gardens, where do lie
Dreamy maidens all the day;
While the silver winds of Circassy
On violet couches faint away.
Little—oh! little dwells in thee
Like unto what on earth we see:
Beauty’s eye is here the bluest
In the falsest and untruest—
On the sweetest air doth float
The most sad and solemn note—If with thee be broken hearts,
Joy so peacefully departs,
That its echo still doth dwell,
Like the murmur in the shell.
Thou! thy truest type of grief
Is the gently falling leaf—
Thou! thy framing is so holy
Sorrow is not melancholy. -
On Santa Maura—olim Deucadia. ↩
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Sappho. ↩
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This flower is much noticed by Lewenhoeck and Tournefort. The bee, feeding upon its blossom, becomes intoxicated. ↩
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Clytia—The Chrysanthemum Peruvianum, or, to employ a better-known term, the turnsol—which continually turns towards the sun, covers itself, like Peru, the country from which it comes, with dewy clouds which cool and refresh its flowers during the most violent heat of the day. —B. de St. Pierre ↩
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There is cultivated in the king’s garden at Paris, a species of serpentine aloes without prickles, whose large and beautiful flower exhales a strong odor of the vanilla, during the time of its expansion, which is very short. It does not blow till towards the month of July—you then perceive it gradually open its petals—expand them—fade and die. —St. Pierre ↩
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There is found, in the Rhone, a beautiful lily of the Valisnerian kind. Its stem will stretch to the length of three or four feet—thus preserving its head above water in the swellings of the river. ↩
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The Hyacinth. ↩
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It is a fiction of the Indians, that Cupid was first seen floating in one of these down the river Ganges—and that he still loves the cradle of his childhood. ↩
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And golden vials full of odors which are the prayers of the saints. —Rev. St. John ↩
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The Humanitarians held that God was to be understood as having a really human form. —Vide Clarke’s Sermons, vol. 1, page 26, fol. edit.
The drift of Milton’s argument leads him to employ language which would appear, at first sight, to verge upon their doctrine; but it will be seen immediately, that he guards himself against the charge of having adopted one of the most ignorant errors of the dark ages of the church. —Dr. Sumner’s Notes on Milton’s Christian Doctrine
This opinion, in spite of many testimonies to the contrary, could never have been very general. Andeus, a Syrian of Mesopotamia, was condemned for the opinion, as heretical. He lived in the beginning of the fourth century. His disciples were called Anthropmorphites. —Vide Du Pin
Among Milton’s minor poems are these lines:—
Dicite sacrorum præsides nemorum Deæ, etc.
Quis ille primus cujus ex imagine
Natura solers finxit humanum genus?
Eternus, incorruptus, æquævus polo,
Unusque et universus exemplar Dei.And afterwards,
Non cui profundum Cæcitas lumen dedit
Dircæus augur vidit hunc alto sinu, etc. -
Seltsamen Tochter Jovis
—Göethe
Seinem Schosskinde
Der Phantasie. -
Sightless—too small to be seen. —Legge ↩
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I have often noticed a peculiar movement of the fireflies;—they will collect in a body and fly off, from a common centre, into innumerable radii. ↩
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Therasaea, or Therasea, the island mentioned by Seneca, which, in a moment, arose from the sea to the eyes of astonished mariners. ↩
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Some star which, from the ruin’d roof
—Milton.
Of shak’d Olympus, by mischance did fall. -
Voltaire, in speaking of Persepolis, says, “
Je connois bien l’admiration qu’ inspirent ces ruines—mais un palais érigé au pied d’une chaine des rochers steriles—peut-il être un chef d’œuvre des arts!
” ↩ -
“Oh, the wave”—Ula Deguisi is the Turkish appellation; but, on its own shores, it is called Bahar Loth, or Almotanah. There were undoubtedly more than two cities engulfed in the “dead sea.” In the valley of Siddim were five—Adrah, Zeboin, Zoar, Sodom and Gomorrah. Stephen of Byzantium mentions eight, and Strabo thirteeen (engulfed)—but the last is out of all reason.
It is said, (Tacitus, Strabo, Josephus, Daniel of St. Saba, Nau, Maundrell, Troilo, D’Arvieux) that after an excessive drought, the vestiges of columns, walls, etc. are seen above the surface. At any season, such remains may be discovered by looking down into the transparent lake, and at such distances as would argue the existence of many settlements in the space now usurped by the “Asphaltites.” ↩
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Eyraco—Chaldea. ↩
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I have often thought I could distinctly hear the sound of the darkness as it stole over the horizon. ↩
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Fairies use flowers for their charactery. —Merry Wives of Windsor ↩
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In Scripture is this passage—“The sun shall not harm thee by day, nor the moon by night.” It is perhaps not generally known that the moon, in Egypt, has the effect of producing blindness to those who sleep with the face exposed to its rays, to which circumstance the passage evidently alludes. ↩
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The Albatross is said to sleep on the wing. ↩
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I met with this idea in an old English tale, which I am now unable to obtain and quote from memory:—“The verie essence and, as it were, springe heade and origine of all musiche is the verie pleasaunte sounde which the trees of the forest do make when they growe.” ↩
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The wild bee will not sleep in the shade if there be moonlight.
The rhyme in this verse, as in one about sixty lines before, has an appearance of affectation. It is, however, imitated from Sir W. Scott, or rather from Claud Halcro—in whose mouth I admired its effect:
O! were there an island,
Tho’ ever so wild
Where woman might smile, and
No man be beguil’d, etc. -
With the Arabians there is a medium between Heaven and Hell, where men suffer no punishment, but yet do not attain that tranquil and even happiness which they suppose to be characteristic of heavenly enjoyment.
Un no rompido sueno—
—Luis Ponce de Leon.
Un dia puro—allegre—libre
Quiera—
Libre de amor—de zelo—
De odio—de esperanza—de rezelo.Sorrow is not excluded from “Al Aaraaf,” but it is that sorrow which the living love to cherish for the dead, and which, in some minds, resembles the delirium of opium. The passionate excitement of Love and the buoyancy of spirit attendant upon intoxication are its less holy pleasures—the price of which, to those souls who make choice of “Al Aaraaf” as their residence after life, is final death and annihilation. ↩
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There be tears of perfect moan
—Milton.
Wept for thee in Helicon. -
It was entire in 1687—the most elevated spot in Athens. ↩
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Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
—Marlowe.
Than have the white breasts of the queen of love. -
Pennon, for pinion. —Milton ↩
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The poem styled “Romance,” constituted the Preface of the volume, but with the addition of the following lines:
Succeeding years, too wild for song,
Then rolled like tropic storms along,
Where, through the garish lights that fly
Dying along the troubled sky,
Lay bare, through vistas thunder-riven,
The blackness of the general Heaven,
That very blackness yet doth fling
Light on the lightning’s silver wing.For being an idle boy lang syne,
Who read Anacreon and drank wine,
I early found Anacreon rhymes
Were almost passionate sometimes—
And by strange alchemy of brain
His pleasures always turned to pain—
His naïveté to wild desire—
His wit to love—his wine to fire—
And so, being young and dipt in folly,
I fell in love with melancholy,
And used to throw my earthly rest
And quiet all away in jest—
I could not love except where Death
Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath—
Or Hymen, Time, and Destiny,
Were stalking between her and me.
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But now my soul hath too much room—
Gone are the glory and the gloom—
The black hath mellow’d into gray,
And all the fires are fading away.My draught of passion hath been deep—
I revell’d, and I now would sleep—
And after drunkenness of soul
Succeeds the glories of the bowl—
An idle longing night and day
To dream my very life away.But dreams—of those who dream as I,
Aspiringly, are damned, and die:
Yet should I swear I mean alone,
By notes so very shrilly blown,
To break upon Time’s monotone,
While yet my vapid joy and grief
Are tintless of the yellow leaf—
Why not an imp the graybeard hath,
Will shake his shadow in my path—
And e’en the graybeard will o’erlook
Connivingly my dreaming-book. -
And the angel Israfel, whose heartstrings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures.
—Koran. -
“To Helen” first appeared in the volume, as did also “The Valley of Unrest” (as “The Valley Nis”), “Israfel,” and one or two others of the youthful pieces. ↩
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“The Raven” was first published on the , in the New York Evening Mirror—a paper its author was then assistant editor of. It was prefaced by the following words, understood to have been written by N. P. Willis: “We are permitted to copy (in advance of publication) from the second number of the American Review, the following remarkable poem by Edgar Poe. In our opinion, it is the most effective single example of ‘fugitive poetry’ ever published in this country, and unsurpassed in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent sustaining of imaginative lift and ‘pokerishness.’ It is one of those ‘dainties bred in a book’ which we feed on. It will stick to the memory of everybody who reads it.” In the February number of the American Review the poem was published as by “Quarles,” and it was introduced by the following note, evidently suggested if not written by Poe himself.
“The following lines from a correspondent—besides the deep, quaint strain of the sentiment, and the curious introduction of some ludicrous touches amidst the serious and impressive, as was doubtless intended by the author—appears to us one of the most felicitous specimens of unique rhyming which has for some time met our eye. The resources of English rhythm for varieties of melody, measure, and sound, producing corresponding diversities of effect, having been thoroughly studied, much more perceived, by very few poets in the language. While the classic tongues, especially the Greek, possess, by power of accent, several advantages for versification over our own, chiefly through greater abundance of spondaic feet, we have other and very great advantages of sound by the modern usage of rhyme. Alliteration is nearly the only effect of that kind which the ancients had in common with us. It will be seen that much of the melody of ‘The Raven’ arises from alliteration, and the studious use of similar sounds in unusual places. In regard to its measure, it may be noted that if all the verses were like the second, they might properly be placed merely in short lines, producing a not uncommon form; but the presence in all the others of one line—mostly the second in the verse” (stanza?)—“which flows continuously, with only an aspirate pause in the middle, like that before the short line in the Sapphic Adonic, while the fifth has at the middle pause no similarity of sound with any part besides, gives the versification an entirely different effect. We could wish the capacities of our noble language in prosody were better understood.”
—Ed. Am. Rev. -
“To F⸺” (Frances Sargeant Osgood) appeared in the Broadway Journal for . These lines are but slightly varied from those inscribed “To Mary,” in the Southern Literary Messenger for , and subsequently republished, with the two stanzas transposed, in Graham’s Magazine for , as “To One Departed.” ↩
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“A Valentine,” one of three poems addressed to Mrs. Osgood, appears to have been written early in .
To discover the names in this poem read the first letter of the first line in connection with the second letter of the second line, the third letter of the third line, the fourth of the fourth and so on to the end. ↩
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This poem was first published in Colton’s American Review for , as “To ⸻ ⸻. Ulalume: A Ballad.” Being reprinted immediately in the Home Journal, it was copied into various publications with the name of the editor, N. P. Willis, appended, and was ascribed to him. When first published, it contained the following additional stanza which Poe subsequently, at the suggestion of Mrs. Whitman, wisely suppressed:
Said we then—we two, then—“Ah, can it
Have been that the woodlandish ghouls—
The pitiful, the merciful ghouls—
To bar up our path and to ban it
From the secret that lies in these wolds—
Had drawn up the spectre of a planet
From the limbo of lunary souls—
This sinfully scintillant planet
From the Hell of the planetary souls?” -
The bibliographical history of “The Bells” is curious. The subject, and some lines of the original version, having been suggested by the poet’s friend, Mrs. Shew, Poe, when he wrote out the first draft of the poem, headed it, “The Bells, By Mrs. M. A. Shew.” This draft, now the editor’s property, consists of only seventeen lines, and read thus:
I
The bells!—ah, the bells!
The little silver bells!
How fairy-like a melody there floats
From their throats—
From their merry little throats—
From the silver, tinkling throats
Of the bells, bells, bells—
Of the bells!II
The bells!—ah, the bells!
The heavy iron bells!
How horrible a monody there floats
From their throats—
From their deep-toned throats—
From their melancholy throats!
How I shudder at the notes
Of the bells, bells, bells—
Of the bells!In the autumn of Poe added another line to this poem, and sent it to the editor of the Union Magazine. It was not published. So, in the following February, the poet forwarded to the same periodical a much enlarged and altered transcript. Three months having elapsed without publication, another revision of the poem, similar to the current version, was sent, and in was published in the Union Magazine. ↩
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Although “Eldorado” was published during Poe’s lifetime, in , in the Flag of Our Union, it does not appear to have ever received the author’s finishing touches. ↩
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“An Enigma,” addressed to Mrs. Sarah Anna Lewis (“Stella”), was sent to that lady in a letter, in , and the following March appeared in Sartain’s Union Magazine.
To discover the names in this poem read the first letter of the first line in connection with the second letter of the second line, the third letter of the third line, the fourth of the fourth and so on to the end. ↩
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“To Helen” (Mrs. S. Helen Whitman) was not published until , although written several months earlier. It first appeared in the Union Magazine, and with the omission, contrary to the knowledge or desire of Poe, of the line, “Oh, God! oh, Heaven—how my heart beats in coupling those two words.” ↩
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“Annabel Lee” was written early in , and is evidently an expression of the poet’s undying love for his deceased bride, although at least one of his lady admirers deemed it a response to her admiration. Poe sent a copy of the ballad to the Union Magazine, in which publication it appeared in January, 1850, three months after the author’s death. While suffering from “hope deferred” as to its fate, Poe presented a copy of “Annabel Lee” to the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, who published it in the number of his periodical, a month after Poe’s death. In the meantime the poet’s own copy, left among his papers, passed into the hands of the person engaged to edit his works, and he quoted the poem in an obituary of Poe, in the New York Tribune, before anyone else had an opportunity of publishing it. ↩
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“For Annie” was first published in the Flag of Our Union, in the spring of . Poe, annoyed at some misprints in this issue, shortly afterwards caused a corrected copy to be inserted in the Home Journal. ↩
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The sonnet, “To My Mother” (Maria Clemm), was sent for publication to the short-lived Flag of Our Union, early in , but does not appear to have been issued until after its author’s death, when it appeared in the Leaflets of Memory for .
The poem was addressed to the poet’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm —Ed. ↩
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“To F⸺s S. O⸺d,” a portion of the poet’s triune tribute to Mrs. Osgood, was published in the Broadway Journal for . The earliest version of these lines appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger for , as “Lines Written in an Album,” and was addressed to Eliza White, the proprietor’s daughter. Slightly revised, the poem reappeared in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine for , as “To ⸻.” ↩