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2.3 Israfel
“And the angel Israfel , whose heart-
Strings are a lute, and who has the
Sweetest voice of all God’s creatures,”-
Koran.
In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
“Whose heart-strings are a lute”,
None sing so widely well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell),
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.
Tottering above
In her highest noon,
The enamored moon
Blushes with love,
While, to listen, the red Levin
(With the rapid Pleiades, even,
Which were seven,)
Pauses in Heaven.
And they say (the starry choir
And the other listening things)
That Israfeli’s fire
Is owing to lyre
By which he sits and sings-
Of unusual strings.
But the skies that angel trod,
Where deep thoughts are a duty,
Where Love’s grown-up God,
Where the Houri glances are
Imbued with all the beauty
Which we worship in a star
Therefore, thou art not wrong,
Israfel, who despisest
An unimpassioned song;
To thee the laurels belong,
Best bard, because the wisest!
Merrily live, and long!
The ecstasies above
With thy burning measures suit-
Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,
With the fervor of thy lute-
Well may the stars be mute!
Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours;
Our flowers are merely-flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.
If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky”
Selection 2
This poem, which was the last on Poe wrote, is believed by many critics to be an idealization of his wife, Virginia Clemm, who died in 1847. It was published posthumously in the New York “Tribune” of October 9, 1849. In six stages of alternating four and three stress line, the poem has been called “the culmination of Poe’s lyric style in his recurrent theme of the loss of a beautiful and loved woman”
2.4 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 than was more than love-
I and ma Annabel Lee-
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Covered 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 highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulcher
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 course 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 I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And also, all the night ride, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
In her sepulcher there by the sea-
In her tomb by the side of the sea”.
Now what Edgar Poe wrote about himself in his “The Philosophy of Composition”,
“There is a radical error, I think , in the usual mode of constructing a story. Either history affords a thesis or one is suggested by an incident of the day or, at best, the author sets himself to work in the combination of striking events to form merely the basis of his narrative designing, generally, to fill in with description dialogue, or authorial comment, whatever crevices of fact, or action, may, from page to page, render themselves apparent. I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so readily attainable a source of interest I say to myself, in the first place, of the innumerable effects, or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall, I , on the present occasion, select?” Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly, a vivid effect, I consider whether, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.
The strict subordination of artistic means to poetic conception created the beauty and harmony of Poe’s verses, which made Bodler admire, and Rahmaninov compose music for Poe’s “Bell”, and Valeriy Brussov the translator of Poe’s poems do investigations about the greatest poet of New America, whom he considered to be “A hopeless realist”
Edgar Poe and American short story.
While describing Edgar Poe’s creative activity we can’t help mentioning about the American short story development of the 19th century, as it was the time when the writer created his best short stories, when readers were enjoyed by his highlights.
From the beginning of time, man has been interested in stories. For many thousands of years stories were passed from generation to generation orally, either in words or in song. Usually the stories were religious or national in character.
There were myths, epics, fables, and parables. Some famous examples of story-telling of the Middle Ages are “A thousand and one nights”, Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and Boccachio’s “Decameron”.
Perhaps it can be said that the short story is well suited to American style of life and character. It is brief (If can be read usually in a single sitting). It if concentrated (The characters are few in number and the action is limited).
Dr. J. Berg Esenwein in his book “writing the short story” defines the short story as follows:
“A short story is a brief imaginative narrative, unfolding a single predominating incident and a single chief character; it contains a plot, the details of which are so compressed, and the whole treatment so organized, as to produce a single impression”.
A good shorts story should (1) narrate an account of events in a way that will hold the reader’s interest by its basic truth; and (2) it should present a struggle or conflict faced by a character or characters. The plot is the narrative development of the struggle as it moves through a series of crises to the final outcome. The outcome must be the inevitable result of the traits of the character involved in the struggle or conflict.
The short story is the literary form to which the United States made early contributions. In fact, early in 19th century America, the short story reached a significant point in its development. Three American writers were responsible for this development; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe. It was the latter who defined the literary form in his review of Hawthorne’s “Twice-Told Tales”.
In his review, Poe asserts that everything in a story or tale every incident, every combination of events, every word must aid the author in achieving a preconceived emotional effects. He states that since the ordinary novel cannot be read at one sitting, it is deprived of “ the immense force derivable from totality.” For Poe the advantage of the short prose narrative over the novel was that it maintained unity of interest on the part of the reader, who was less subject to the intervention of “wordily interests” caused by pauses or cessation of reading as in the case of a novel.
“In the brief tale, however, “ Poe states, “the author is enabled to carry out the dullness of his intentions, be it what may, During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control. There are no external or extrinsic influences resulting from weariness or interruption”.
Poe felt that the writer of short stories should conceive his stories with deliberate care in order to achieve “ a certain unique or single effect”, beginning with the initial sentence of the story. According to Poe, the short story writer should not form his thoughts to accommodate his incidents, and thereby destroy the possibility of establishing the pre-conceived single effect, so mush desired.
Poe’s chief work, thus, was done as a critic. But it is for his stories that he remembered today, and for some pf his poems, especially “The Raven”. These were the writings people liked best in his own time. Poe wrote his stories with so much skill, that they seemed real, at least for a few minutes until the reader reached the end of the story and dropped back into the cold reality of his everybody life. Poe himself stated that he wrote horror stories because that was what people wanted to read. He wrote them because he knew they would bring him fame. And they did.
While the enormous popularity of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short stories and poems continued highlight his creative brilliance, Poe’s renown as the master of horror, the bather of the detective story, and the voice of “The Raven” is something of a mixed blessing. Today, Poe is known, read and appreciated on the basis of a comparatively narrow body of work, roughly a dozen tales of half as many poems. For the novice reader, these favored texts offer easy (but still challenging access to Poe’s most exemplary writing, entry into his uniquely terrifying world, and intriguining connections to facets of their author’s tragically disordered life. The total effect of all this is compelling, and Poe himself would certainly approve. He wrote for the masses, using his learned artistry to reach the common people of his day and to then elevate their minds while intensifying their emotional reactions, Poe was not averse to the commercial sensationalism either; he wrote several “hoaxes” as news and later capitalized on his personal notoriety for bookings on the foremost literary stars in the firmament of popular American culture. A century and half after death, Poe is instantly identifiable, stands without rival, and remains immensely enjoyable. In his normal frame of mind, at least, Poe would have been deeply amused by the widespread adulation and fame he has enjoyed in posterity.
The rub is that we may be temped to stop here and neglect the breath and he depth of Poe’s contributions to western Literature. Poe, in fact, wrote nearly seventy short works of fiction. He duly credited with creating the detective story genre and with transforming the Gothic mystery tale of the Romantic period into the modern horror or murder stories centered in the outlying regions of human mind and experience. But he also wrote several comic and satirical pieces, literary parodies, sketches, and experimental stories, including “A Descent into the Maelstone” and his novella “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”. His most famous poems “The Raven”, “Ulalume,” “The Bells”, “The City in the Sea” were enormously influential. These famous verses were behind a powerful wave of enthusiasm for Poe that arose among the leading writers of Europe during his own lifetime, spread there of the around the word, and was sustained through the “discovery” of existential “human condition” themes in his short stories generations later.
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