The Raven — Harper & Brothers edition illustrated by Gustave Doré — reading text

eS ra ; pao ey Bie ss rina ™ mn Hie it — «mM Ng De a -PHE+BAVET EY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, Chay. Copyright Do. A Shelf__~ UNITED STATES OF Am THE RAVEN. i THE RAVEN BY ILLUSTRATED EDGAR ALLAN POE By GUSTAVE DORE WITH COMMENT BY EDMUND C. STEDMAN DON {tet 12-1883; } Keren NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 1834. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by HARPER & BROTHERS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. AUl rights reserved, LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS With Names or ENGRAVERS Title-page, designed by Elihu Vedder. . : . . ; Frederich Fuengling * Nevermore.” a 4 . < 5 ; H, Claudius, G. ¥. Buechner. 1. Claudius. “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.” . 5 ; - . RA, Muller. Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.” é : : 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.” . Bs . A. Claudius. Sorrow for the lost Lenore.” , 4 * . 5 ‘ . W. Zimmermann. For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore— Nameless here for evermore. ° 7 a . Frederick Fuengli “OT is some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door— Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door.” : g rf . WW. Zimmermann. —“Here I opened wide the door;— Darkness there, and nothing more.” . . ; Y , 5 j H. Claudius. “Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. 5 ° , ES. King. “Surely? said I, ‘surely that is something at my window lattice; Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore.” : . , Frederick Fuengli: “Open here I flung the shutter.” Johnson. —*A stately Raven of the saintly days of yore. nade he; not a minute stopped or stayed he. Not the least obeisance above my chamber door Perched, and sat, and nothing more.” “Perched upon a bust of Pall “Wandering from the Nightly shore.” . have flown before- “Till I scarcely more than muttered, ‘Other fr On the morrow Ae will leave me,as my hopes have flown before. betook myself to linking ht gloating o’er nevermore |” “‘Wretch, I cried, ‘thy God hath lent thee—by these respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore Respit “On this home by Horror haunted. “‘Tell me truly, I implore— Is there—ds there balm in Gilead ?—tell me—tell me, I implore!” “*Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distai Aidenn, It shall cl ted maiden whom the angels name L “«Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!’ I shrieked, upstarting.” et thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!” “And my soul from out that shadow th lies floating on the floor be liftel—nevermore The secret of the Sphinx. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. ngels he hath sent thee R. Staudentaur. R. G. Tietze. Frederick Fuengling. Frank French. R. Schelling. George Keruell, Victor Bernstrom. R., Staudenbaur. W. Zimmermann. ES. King. W. Zimmermann. Robert Hoskin. R. G. Tietze. R. Staudenbaur. COMMENT ON THE POEM. COMMENT HE 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 Swin- burne's buoyant paraphrase,—and from morn to sunset we are wafted on the violet 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 Evanes- cence, 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 min- strel, 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 atmos- phere.” 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 ON THE POEM. 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 heeted 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 ne 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 leads to Eternity, are halted and delayed. It is | the limbo of “planetary souls,” wherein are all | 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 con- cerned 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 | Burger's “Lenore,” that ghostly and resonant bal- lad, the lure and foil of the translators. Few will deny that Coleridge's wondrous “Rime of the An- cient 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 Zhe 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 Zhe 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 appear- ance, at least, of spontaneity,—in which he yields to his feelings, while dying falls and cadences most musical, most melancholy, come from him una- | COMMENT ON THE POEM. | all or all in all.” And thu: wares.” 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 ac- quaintance 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. he 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. ie 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 in- stinct 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 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 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 coun- terpart, 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 prose- lytes 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 del- icate work some popular touch must be added to capture the general audience of one’s own time. Through the