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

industry of Poe's successive biog- raphers, the hit made by 7#e 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 COMMENT famous as the room where Rouget de I'Isle com- posed 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 the 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 de before the curtain dropped on a life that for him 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 Zhe 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 mag- azine-text appear in 7he 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 of the volume just mentioned, as given in the London issue of 1846. The “stand- ard” Griswold collection of the poct’s works abounds with errors. These have been repeated by later editors, who also have made new errors of their own. But the text of Zhe 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 y e faint foot-falls,” in the fourteenth stanza. Our present text, therefore, while substan- ON THE POEM. 11 tially that of 1845, is somewhat modified by the poet's later reading, and is, I think, the most cor- rect and effective version of this single poem. The most radical change from the earliest version ap- peared, however, in the volume of 1845; the eleventh anza originally having contained these lines, faulty in rhyme and otherwise a blemish on the poem (CR ht from some unhappy master, whom unmercifl Disaster Followed fast and followed faster—so, when Hope he would adjure, Stern Despair returned, dared adjure— That sad answer, ‘Nevermore! nstead of the sweet Hope he It would be well if other, and famous, poets could be as sure of making their changes always improve- ments. Poe constantly rehandled his scanty show of verse, and usually bettered it. Zhe 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 mak- ing a poem. When a refrain or 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 7he 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 re- cently 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 con- tains a few lines somewhat suggestive of the open- ing and close of 7#e Raven. As to the rhythm of our poem, a comparison of dates indicates that this was influenced by the ythm 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 ON 12 COMMENT 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 mo- tive 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. Brown- ing, 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 Albert Pike, the half-Greek, half-frontiersman, poet of Arkansas, had printed in “The New Mirror,” for which Poe then was writ- ing, 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, ingly upon the unswept floor; The garish sun shines flaun 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!” sure, a similarity of Here we have a prolonged m refrain, and the introduction of a bird whose song enharices 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”: raven, too, * * * might have been made, more than we now see it, a portion of the conception of the fan tastic Barnaby. * * * Its character might have performed, t, much the same part as does, in respect to the air.” in regard to that of the idi the accompanime Nevertheless, after pointing out these germs and resemblances, the value of this poem still is found in its originality. The progressive mus scenic detail and contrasted light and shad all, the spiritual passion of the nocturn, make it the work of an informing genius. As for the gruesome POEM. THE bird, he is unlike all other ravens of his clan, from the “twa corbies” and “three ravens” of the bal- ladists 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 mem- ory of Lenore is all that is left him, and with the surcease of his sorrow even that would be put aside The Raven also may be taken as a representa- tive poem of its author, for its exemplification of all his notions of what a poem should be. These are found in his essays on “ The Poetic Principle,” “The Rationale of Verse,” and “The Philosophy of Com- position.” Poe declared that “in Music, perhaps, the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles —the creation of supernal Beauty Verse cannot be better designated than as an inferior or less capable music”; but again, verse which is really the “Poetry of Words” is “The Rhythmical Crea- tion of Beauty,"—this and nothing more. The fone of the highest Beauty is one of Sadness. The most melancholy of topics is Death. This must be allied to Beauty. “The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.” These last expressions are quoted from Poe's whimsical analysis of this very poem, but they indicate precisely the general range of his verse. The climax of “The Bells” is the muffled monotone of ghouls, who glory in weighing down the human heart. “Lenore,” Zhe Raven, “ The Sleeper,” “To One in Paradise,” and ‘“Ulalume” form a tenebrose symphony,—and “Annabel Lee,” written last of all, shows that one theme pos- sessed him to the end. Again, these are all noth- ing if not musical, and some are touched with that quality of the Fantastic which awakes the sense of we, and adds a new fear to agony itself. Through all is dimly outlined, beneath a shadowy pall, the poet’s ideal love,—so often half-portrayed elsewhere, —the entombed wife of Usher, the Lady Ligeia, in COMMENT ON THE POEM. 13 truth the counterpart of his own ure. I suppose that an artist's love for one “in the form” never can wholly rival his devotion to some ideal. The woman near him must exercise her spells, be all by turns and nothing long, charm him with infinite va- riety, or be content to forego a share of his alle- giance. He must be lured by the Unattainable, and this is ever just beyond him in his passion for creative art. Poe, like Hawthorne, came in with the decline of the Romantic school, and none delighted more than he to laugh at its calamity. Yet his heart was with the romancers and their Oriental or Gothic effects. His invention, so rich in the prose tales, seemed to desert him when he wrote verse; and his judgment told him that long romantic poems de- pend more upon incident than inspiration,—and that, to utter the poetry of romance, lyrics would suffice. Hence his theory, clearly fitted to his own limita- tions, that ‘‘a ‘long poem’ is a flat contradiction in terms.” The components of 7#e Raven are few and simple: a man, a bird, and the phantasmal memory of a woman. But the piece affords a fine display of romantic material. What have we? The mid- night; the shadowy chamber with its tomes of for- gotten lore; the