Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Rhett
The Lovers’ Chronicle
Dear Muse,
© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved
you remember
when you were at that cafe
drinkin’ coffee and you said
you wished i was there
i was
i am always with you
as you are with me
……
right there
at the surface
a voice,
a reminder,
or a memory
well, you know me
i will not stop
till i have
the right verse
to understand this
not sure
but could be
the beginnin’
is there
some somethin’
missin’
© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved
i god, where to begin
the pain, the hunger
the despair
the nightmares
the dreams
© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved
| Edgar Allan Poe | |
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1849 “Annie” daguerreotype of Poe
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Today is the anniversary of the death of Edgar Allan Poe (Boston, Massachusetts; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849 Baltimore, Maryland); writer, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. In my opinion, he was a central figure of Romanticism in the United States, and he was one of the country’s earliest practitioners of the short story. Poe is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
Poe was born in Boston, the second child of two actors. His father abandoned the family in 1810, and his mother died the following year. Thus orphaned, the child was taken in by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Virginia. They never formally adopted him, but Poe was with them well into young adulthood. Tension developed later as John Allan and Edgar repeatedly clashed over debts, including those incurred by gambling, and the cost of his secondary education. Poe attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. Poe quarreled with Allan over the funds for his education and enlisted in the Army in 1827 under an assumed name. It was at this time that his publishing career began with the anonymous collection of poems Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to “a Bostonian”. With the death of Frances Allan in 1829, Poe and Allan reached a temporary rapprochement. However, Poe later failed as an officer cadet at West Point, declaring a firm wish to be a poet and writer.
Poe switched his focus to prose and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move among several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In Richmond in 1836, he married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin. In January 1845, Poe published his poem “The Raven” to instant success. His wife died of tuberculosis two years after its publication. For years, he had been planning to produce his own journal The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), though he died before it could be produced. Poe died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849, at age 40; the cause of his death is unknown and has been variously attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other agents.
Poe and his works influenced literature in the United States and around the world. Poe and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of his homes are dedicated museums today. The Mystery Writers of America present an annual award known as the Edgar Award for distinguished work in the mystery genre.
One evening in January 1842, Virginia showed the first signs of consumption, now known as tuberculosis, while singing and playing the piano. Poe described it as breaking a blood vessel in her throat. She only partially recovered. Poe began to drink more heavily under the stress of Virginia’s illness. Poe moved to a cottage in Fordham, New York, in what is now the Bronx. That home is known today as the “Poe Cottage” on the southeast corner of the Grand Concourse and Kingsbridge Road, where he befriended the Jesuits at St. John’s College nearby (now Fordham University). Virginia died there on January 30, 1847. Biographers and critics often suggest that Poe’s frequent theme of the “death of a beautiful woman” stems from the repeated loss of women throughout his life, including his wife.
Poe was increasingly unstable after his wife’s death. He attempted to court poet Sarah Helen Whitman who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement failed, purportedly because of Poe’s drinking and erratic behavior. Poe then returned to Richmond and resumed a relationship with his childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster.
Death
Newspapers at the time reported Poe’s death as “congestion of the brain” or “cerebral inflammation”, common euphemisms for deaths from disreputable causes such as alcoholism. The actual cause of death remains a mystery. Speculation has included delirium tremens, heart disease, epilepsy, syphilis, meningeal inflammation, cholera, and rabies. One theory dating from 1872 suggests that cooping was the cause of Poe’s death, a form of electoral fraud in which citizens were forced to vote for a particular candidate, sometimes leading to violence and even murder.
Verse
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.
- “Eldorado”, st. 1 (1849).
- “Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,”
The shade replied, —
“If you seek for Eldorado!”- “Eldorado”, st. 4.
- You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.- “A Dream Within a Dream” (1849).
- O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?- “A Dream Within A Dream” (1849).
- Thank Heaven! the crisis —
The danger is past,
And the lingering illness
Is over at last —
And the fever called “Living”
Is conquered at last.- “For Annie”, st. 1 (1849).
- Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells.- “The Bells”, st. 1 (1849).
- Hear the mellow wedding bells
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!- “The Bells”, st. 2 (1849).
The City in the Sea (1831)
- Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.- St. 1.
- So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.- St. 2.
- And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.- St. 5.
The Raven (1844)
- Once 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.- Stanza 1.
- Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.- Stanza 2.
- Sorrow for the lost Lenore —
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore —
Nameless here for evermore.- Stanza 2.
- And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me — filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before.- Stanza 3.
- Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.- Stanza 5.
- Perched upon a bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door,—
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.- Stanza 7.
- “Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore —
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”- Stanza 8.
- “Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore.- Stanza 11.
-
- Stanza 15.
- “Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! — quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”- Stanza 17.
- And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door.- Stanza 18.
- And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted — nevermore!- Stanza 18.
Ulalume (1847)
- The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere —
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year.- St. 1.
- Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul —
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.- St. 2.
- Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom.- St. 8.
Annabel Lee (1849)
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden 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.
-
- St. 1.
- I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love —
I and my Annabel Lee —
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.- St. 2.
- But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those 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- St. 5.
- In her sepulcher there by the sea —
In her tomb by the sounding sea.- St. 6.
A dark unfathom’d tide
Of interminable pride —
A mystery, and a dream,
Should my early life seem.
- “Imitation”, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827).
- O, human love! thou spirit given,
On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!- “Tamerlane”, l. 177 (1827).
- The happiest day — the happiest hour
My sear’d and blighted heart hath known,
The highest hope of pride and power,
I feel hath flown.- “The Happiest Day”, st. 1 (1827).
- Sound loves to revel in a summer night.
- Al Aaraaf (1829).
- Years of love have been forgot
In the hatred of a minute.- To M——— (1829), reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
- From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
My passions from a common spring —
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow — I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone —
And all I lov’d — I lov’d alone —- “Alone”, l. 1-8 (written 1829, published 1875).
- And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.- “Alone”, l. 20-22.
- Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?- “Sonnet. To Science”, l. 12-14 (1829).
- Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.- “To Helen”, st. 1-2 (1831).
- Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours;
Our flowers are merely—flowers.- “Israfel”, st. 7 (1831).
- 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.- “Israfel”, st. 8 (1831).
- Come! let the burial rite be read — the funeral song be sung! —
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young —
A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.- “Lenore”, st. 1 (1831).
- Vastness! and Age! and Memories of Eld!
Silence! and Desolation! and dim Night!
I feel ye now — I feel ye in your strength.- “The Coliseum”, st. 2 (1833).
- Thou wast that all to me, love,
For which my soul did pine —
A green isle in the sea, love,
A fountain and a shrine,
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,
And all the flowers were mine.- “To One in Paradise”, st. 1 (1834).
- And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy grey eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams —
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.- “To One In Paradise”, st. 4; variants of this verse read “where thy dark eye glances”.
- In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace —
Radiant palace — reared its head.- “The Haunted Palace” (1839), st. 1.
- This—all this—was in the olden
Time long ago.- “The Haunted Palace” (1839), st. 2.
- While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh — but smile no more.- “The Haunted Palace” (1839), st. 5.
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man”,
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
- “The Conqueror Worm” (1843), st. 5.
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule —
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE — out of TIME.
- “Dreamland”, st. 1 (1845).
Thou wouldst be loved? — then let thy heart
From its present pathway part not!
Being everything which now thou art,
Be nothing which thou art not.
So with the world thy gentle ways,
Thy grace, thy more than beauty,
Shall be an endless theme of praise,
And love — a simple duty.
- “To Frances S. Osgood” (1845).
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