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

student,—a modern Hieronymus ; the raven’s tap on the casement; the wintry night and dying fire; the silken wind-swept hangings; the dreams and vague mistrust of the echoing dark- ness; the black, uncanny bird upon the pallid bust; the accessories of violet velvet and the gloating lamp. All this stage effect of situation, light, color, sound, is purely romantic, and even melodramatic, but of a poetic quality that melodrama rarely ex- hibits, and thoroughly reflective of the poet's “eternal passion, eternal pain.” The rhythmical structure of Zhe Raven was sure to make an impression. Rhyme, alliteration, the burden, the stanzaic form, were devised with singular adroitness. Doubtless the poet was struck with the aptness of Miss Barrett's musical trochaics, in “eights,” and especially by the arrangement adopted near the close of “Lady Geraldine”: Eyes, he said, ‘now throbbing through me! Are ye eyes that did undo me? Shining eyes, like antique jewels set in P: Underneath that calm white forehead, are ye ever burning torrid O’er the desolate sand-desert of my heart and life undone?’” ian statue-stone ! His artistic introduction of a third rhyme in both the second and fourth lines, and the addition of a fifth line and a final refrain, made the stanza of Zhe Raven. The persistent alliteration seems to come without effort, and often the rhymes within lines are seductive; while the refrain or burden dominates the whole work, Here also he had profited by M Barrett's study of ballads and romaunts in her own and other tongues. A “refrain” is the lure where- with a poet or a musician holds the wandering ear, —the recurrent longing of Nature for the initial strain. I have always admired the beautiful refrains of the English songstress—“The Nightingales, the Nightingales,” “ Margret, Margret,” “ My Heart and I,” “Toll slowly,” “The River floweth on, “Pan, Pan is dead,” etc. She also employed what I term the Repetend, in the use of which Poe has excelled all poets since Coleridge thus revived it “O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware.” Poe created the fifth line of his stanza for the magic of the repetend. He relied upon it to the uttermost in a few later poems,—* Lenore,” “Annabel Lee,” “Ulalume,” and “For Annie.” It gained a wild and melancholy music, I have thought, from the “sweet influences,” of the Afric burdens and repetends that were sung to him in childhood, attuning with their native melody the voice of our Southern poet. “The Philosophy of Composition,” his analysis of Zhe Raven, is a technical dissection of its method and structure. Neither his avowal of cold-blooded artifice, nor his subsequent avowal to friends that an exposure of this artifice was only another of his in- tellectual hoaxes, need be wholly credited. If he had designed the complete work in advance, he scarcely would have made so harsh a prelude of rattle-pan rhymes to the delicious melody of the second stanza,—not even upon his theory of the fantastic. Of course an artist, having perfected a work, sees, like the first Artist, that it is good, and sees why it is good. A subsequent analysis, coupled with a disavowal of any sacred fire, readily enough may be made. My belief is that the first concep- tion and rough draft of this poem came as inspi tion always comes; that its author then saw how it might be perfected, giving it the final toucl described in his chapter on Composition, and that the latter, therefore, is neither wholly false nor wholly true. The harm of such analysis is that it tempts a novice to fancy that artificial processes can super- sede imagination. The impulse of genius is to guard the secrets of its creative hour. Glimpses obtained of the toil, the baffled experiments, which precede a triumph, as in the sketch-work of Hawthorne re- cently brought to light, afford priceless instruction ist. But one and encouragement to the sincere art gaze of | ndaules who voluntarily expo all comers should recall the fate of King Ca The world still thinks of Poe as a “luckless man of genius.” I recently heard him mentioned as “one whom everybody seems chartered to misrepre- sent, decry or slander.” But it seems to me that his ill-luck ended with his pitiable death, and that since then his defence has been persistent, and his fame of as steadfast growth as a suffering and gifted ithor could pray for in his hopeful hour. Gris- wold’s decrial and slander turned the current in his favor. Critics and biographers have come forward with successive refutations, with tributes to his character, with new editions of his works. His own letters and the minute incidents of his career are before wu: the record, good and bad, is widely known. No appellor has received more tender and forgiving judgment. His mishaps in life belonged to his region and period, perchance still more to his own infirmity of will. Doubtless his environment was not one to guard a fine-grained, ill-balanced nature from perils without and within. His strong- est will, to be lord of himself, gained for him “that heritage of woe.” He confessed himself the bird’ unhappy master, the stricken sufferer of this poem. But his was a full share of that dramatic temper which exults in the presage of its own doom. There is a delight in playing one’s high part: we are all gladiators, crying 4ve /mperator! To quote Burke's matter of fact: “In grief the pleasure is still upper- most, and the affliction we suffer has no resemblance to absolute pain, which is always odious, and which we endeavor to shake off as soon as possible.” Poe went farther, and was an artist even in the tragedy of his career. If, according to his own belief, sad- ness and the vanishing of beauty are the highest poetic themes, and poetic feeling the keenest earthly pleasure, then the sorrow and darkness of his broken life were not without their frequent compensation. In the following pages, we have a fresh example of an artist's genius characterizing his interpretation of a famous poem. Gustave Doré, the last work of whose pencil before us, was not the painter, or even the draughtsman, for realists demanding truth of tone, figure, and perfection. Such matters concerned him less than to make shape and dis- tance, light and shade, assist his purpose,—which was to excite the soul, the imagination, of the looker on. This he did by arousing our sense of awe, through marvellous and often lime conceptions of things unutterable and full of gloom or glory. It is well said that if his works were not great paint- ings, as pictures they are great indeed. Asa “liter- ary artist,” and such he was, his force was in direct ratio with the dramatic invention of his author, with the brave audacities of the spirit that kindled his 14 COMMENT ON THE POEM. own. Hence his success with Rabelais, with “Le JuifErrant,” “Les Contes Drolatiques,” and “Don Quixote,” and hence, conversely, his failure to ex press the beauty of Tennyson's Idyls, of “Il Paradiso,” of the Hebrew pastorals, and other texts requiring exaltation, or sweetness and repose. He was a born master of the grotesque, and by a special insight could portray the spectres of a haunted brain. We see objects as his personages saw them, and with the very eyes of the Wandering Jew, the bewildered Don, or the goldsmith's daughter whose fancy so magnifies the King in the shop on the Pont-au- Change. It v in the nature of things that he should be attracted to each masterpiece of verse or prose that I have termed unique. The lower king- doms were called into his service; his rocks, trees and mountains, the sky itself, are animate with mo- tive and diablerie. Had he lived to illustrate Shakes- peare, we should have seen a remarkable treatment of Caliban, the Witches, the storm in “Lear”; but doubtless should have questioned his ideals of Imogen or Miranda. Beauty pure and simple, and the perfect excellence thereof, he rarely seemed to comprehend. Yet there is beauty in his designs for the “An- cient Mariner,” unreal as they are, and a consecu- tiveness rare in a series by Doré. The Rime afforded him a prolonged story, with many shift- ings of the scene. In Zhe Raven sound and color preserve their monotone and we have no change of place or occasion. What is the result? Doré proffers a series of variations upon the theme as he conceived it, “the enigma of death and the hal lucination of an inconsolable soul.” In some of these drawings his faults are evident; others reveal his powerful originality, and the best qualities in which, as a draughtsman, he stood alone. Plainly there was something in common between the working moods of Poe and Doré. This would appear more learly had the latter tried his hand upon the “ Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.” Both resorted often to the elf-land of fantasy and romance. In melodramatic feats they both, through their command of the supernatural, avoided the danger-line between the ideal and the absurd. Poe was the truer wor- shipper of the Beautiful; his love for it was a con- secrating passion, and herein he parts company with his illustrator. Poet or artist, Death at last trans- figures all: within the shadow of his sable harbinger, Vedder's symbolic crayon aptly sets them face to face, but enfolds them with the mantle of immortal wisdom and power. An American woman has wrought the image of a star-eyed Genius with the final torch, the exquisite semblance of one whose vision beholds, but whose lips may not utter, the mysteries of a land beyond “the door of a legended tomb. Epmunp C. STEDMAN THE POEM. THE RAVEN. NCE upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door— Only this, and nothing more. Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow ;—vainly I had sought to borrow se of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore From my books surce: For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore— Nameless here for evermore. And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating “Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door— Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door ;— This .t is, and nothing more. THE RAVEN. Presently my soul grew stronger ; hesitating then no longer, “Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore ; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door ;— Darkness there, and nothing more. Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before ; But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore!” This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!” Merely this and nothing more. Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again J heard a tapping, somewhat louder than before. “Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice; Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore— Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;— ‘Tis the wind and nothing more!” Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore. Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he But, with mien