The Raven E-Book

Edgar Allan Poe

• Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 253

Beschreibung

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is the poet of the night world, of the inexplicable, the uncanny. His poems do not analyse, they do not explain: 'they exist with the intensity of hallucinations'. In the breathtakingly seductive beauty of To Helen - 'Like those Nicéan barks of yore, / that gently o'er a perfumed sea...', or the claustrophobic horror of The Raven, Poe offers haunting alternative realities, as strange - and strangely familiar - as our dreams and nightmares. Yet Poe was more than a poet of American gothic. He was translated by Baudelaire and Mallarmé, becoming a key figure in French Symbolism; he was an influential critic. This edition contains all Poe's poetry and his three most important essays. With an introduction by the poet C.H. Sisson, it is an indispensable collection of the work of one of the nineteenth century's most compelling and original poets.

Leseprobe

EDGAR ALLAN POE

The Raven

Poems and Essays on Poetry

Edited with an introduction by C.H. SISSON

FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.

FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.

Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.

Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,

Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side

from ‘Thyrsis’

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Introduction

Poems

To Helen

The Raven

The Valley of Unrest

Bridal Ballad

The Sleeper

The Coliseum

Lenore

Catholic Hymn

Israfel

Dreamland

Sonnet: To Zante

The City in the Sea

To One in Paradise

Eulalie

To F----s S. O----d

To F----

Sonnet: Silence

The Conqueror Worm

The Haunted Palace

Scenes from Politian

Poems Written in Youth

Sonnet to Science

Al Aaraaf

Tamerlane

A Dream

Romance

Fairyland

To----

To the River----

The Lake. To----

Song

Later Poems

A Dream within a Dream

The Bells

To Helen

A Valentine

An Enigma

To --------

To my Mother

Eldorado

To ----

To M. L. S ----

For Annie

Ulalume

Annabel Lee

Essays on Poetry

The Poetic Principle

The Rationale of Verse

The Philosophy of Composition

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction

‘Edgar Poe did not share any of those American ideas about progress, perfectability, democratic institutions and the other declared principles dear to the philistines of the two worlds.’ Thus Théophile Gautier who, only two years Poe’s junior, survived him by nearly a quarter of a century. Baudelaire, ten years younger than Gautier, was even more emphatic in advancing the thesis that Poe hardly fitted into his native country. ‘The United States,’ he said, was for him ‘a vast cage, a great counting-house,’ adding that ‘all his life he made sinister efforts to escape the influence of this antipathetic atmosphere.’ Poe was, certainly, an isolated figure, but it would be wrong to attribute that simply to the social and political conditions in the USA in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is arguable that those conditions set him some problems he would not have encountered in western Europe, as they certainly precluded some solutions which would have been available in a more close-knit and less ramshackle society. But Poe’s dissatisfactions with his milieux, and his ‘efforts to escape’, were powered by personal peculiarities which were at once the source of his unquestionable originality and of the difficulties he encountered in exploiting it in a manner which would have both satisfied his vanity and provided him with something more recognisable as public success in his own country.

As things in fact turned out, Poe’s direct influence on American, and indeed on Anglo-Saxon poetry as a whole, was small. F.O. Matthiessen makes the incontrovertible point that, ‘by one of the oddest turns of literary history, Poe has been assimilated into American poetry largely through what was made of him in France.’ And what was made of him in France was crucial to the evolution from Romantic to Symbolist poetry, and so, in turn, to Eliot and Stevens, to mention no others: thus, the French connection is worth some attention from the student of American poetry. Poe’s name was early associated with that of possibly the greatest French poet of the nineteenth century. It may seem odd, from the point of view of the late twentieth century, that it was not the Fleurs du mal, but his translation of Poe’s tales, which first made Charles Baudelaire famous; so at any rate Gautier, who was well placed to know, assures us. Baudelaire – to quote Gautier again – ‘naturalised … this singular genius whose individuality was so rare, so marked, so exceptional and who first scandalised, rather than charmed, America.’ The translations were true to the style and thought of the original, with ‘so faithful and so supple a liberty, that they produced the effect of original works.’ Baudelaire did not venture to translate the poems, except for pieces quoted in tales or essays, but in his introduction to the tales he spoke of them with respect and, one might say, wonder. Gautier had no doubt about the influence of Poe on Baudelaire’s own work.

It was left to Mallarmé, twenty years Baudelaire’s junior, to produce a translation of the poems. Despite his own incomparable technical skill, Mallarmé did not attempt a verse translation, and had he done so he would not have pretended that French verse could reproduce the technical features of the English original. What he does claim for his version is that it tries to render ‘some of the extraordinary sonorous effects of the original music and, here and there perhaps, the feeling itself’. Anyone with an ordinary reading knowledge of French will enjoy putting the two texts side by side.

If public attention in Paris went primarily to the tales, it was the application of Poe’s restlessly analytical mind – so evident in the tales as well as in the writing which is specifically theoretical – to what can only be called poetics, which most profoundly influenced the work of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry. Valéry, whose mind was more consistently analytical even than Poe’s, went so far as to say that Poe was ‘the first to think of giving a pure theoretical basis to literary works’, adding words to the effect that the attempt to cut free altogether from old ideas and to start afresh on entirely analytical bases was his own contribution. With a little of the European, and specifically French, grand manner, he says that ‘this great man would be completely forgotten today, if Baudelaire had not undertaken to introduce him into European literature’. But he also underlines the importance of what Poe did:

in the midst of a people entirely busied about its material development, still indifferent to the past, organising its future and leaving the most complete liberty to experiments of all kinds, one man … was found to consider the things of the mind and, among them literary production, with a clarity, a sagacity and a lucidity which had never yet occurred, to this point, in a head endowed with poetic invention. Never before Poe had the premisses of the subject been examined, reduced to a problem of psychology, and attacked by means of an analysis in which logic and the mechanics of effects were deliberately engaged.

One can hardly, without astonishment, turn from such eulogies, from the summits of literary intellectuality in Paris, to the actual conditions of Poe’s origins and education, or indeed to the course of his public literary life. He was born in Boston in 1809. No great reliance is to be placed on his own statements about his family and upbringing, and it must be said that, at various times of his life, he exhibited a less than average addiction to the truth. The facts seem to be that his parents were both actors – his mother, at least, one of some talent. She died before he was three years old; his father seems to have disappeared shortly before that date. Edgar was the second of three children. After the death of their mother Edgar was looked after – but never adopted – by John and Frances Allan, who lived in Richmond, Virginia. Allan was a tobacco exporter and general merchant, well off, certainly, by any standard to which the Poe family were accustomed. When Edgar was six, the Allan family went to England on an extended business trip. They took the boy with them, and for five years he had an English education, latterly at a school in North London. There he was known by the name of Allan, but, on returning to Richmond, he reverted to that of Poe – possibly a sign that John Allan was distancing himself from him. However that may be, in 1826 he was sent to the University of Virginia. That lasted only a year: he found himself among rich young men and appears to have been determined not to be out-done at card-playing and drinking; he ran up debts which Allan declined to pay. In March, 1827, he left the Allans’ house, in his own words ‘to find a place in the wide world’ where he would not be treated as Allan had treated him. He went off by ship to Boston, where he joined the army, but not before he had arranged for the printing of forty copies of a book of his poems – presumably as a visiting card rather than in the hope of making a fortune. When Frances Allan died in February, 1829, John Allan not only bought Edgar a suit of black clothes but supported his release from the ranks of the army and his re-enlistment as a cadet at West Point. This did not last: Poe deliberately forced the authorities to expel him. Early in 1831 he was in New York, and published a revised and expanded edition of his poems.

The turbulence of Poe’s life makes it wholly understandable that his anchorage with John Allan became insecure – and Poe needed an anchorage. In Baltimore he found one of great steadiness with his aunt, Maria Clemm, a widow with a small child, Virginia, whom Poe married some seven years after their first meeting, by which time she was thirteen; he was twenty-seven. The story of Poe’s life, from the time of his expulsion from West Point, is largely one of trying, with varying degrees of success and unsuccess, to make a living by writing and editing. Julian Symons, in his excellent biography, speaks of his ‘constant struggle for money, the pride and the drinking, the extent to which criticism and fiction were his occupation although poetry was his ideal’. Of the numerous newspapers and magazines with which he was at one time or another connected, none corresponded with his notion of what such a journal should be, and although one can readily believe that he was not the easiest of colleagues, one cannot but have a profound sympathy for his passionate desire, which the years only increased, to have a magazine of his own which would be a proper vehicle for what he had to offer.

There is no question of Poe not being able to publish what he wrote; his prose output, in a writing life of little over twenty years, is remarkable for its variety and its originality. The tales alone would have given him a place among the most innovative writers of the century; the critical writings – of varying quality but all bearing the stamp of a mind of outstanding analytical capacity, if also of a certain impatience and a certain arrogance – included some which had in them the seeds of literary developments certainly unguessed at by their first readers. It was not for lack of elbowing his way that Poe failed to achieve his ambition of controlling a paper of unquestionable literary significance. All this activity did not still his lifelong ambition not merely to be, but to be recognised as being, primarily a poet. At the beginning of his literary career, when sending a proof of his poems to an influential critic – no doubt in the by no means exceptional hope that he was about to be made famous – he wrote:

I am young – not yet twenty – am a poet – if deep worship of all beauty can make me one – and wish to be so in the common meaning of the word. I would give the world to embody half the ideas afloat in my imagination.

Such sentiments are not unusual; the unusual element, in Poe’s case, is that, even at this time, he had actually written poems – notably the first ‘To Helen’ (p.1) – which justified his claims. What all his efforts failed to make clear to his contemporaries was that being a poet entitled him to financial support – a romantic notion which persists among the ignorant young and among some who should know better. Baudelaire himself, in his notes on Poe, asks the question: ‘Is there a diabolical Providence which prepares misfortune from the cradle?’ He goes on to cite other cases – even that of Vauvenargues, whose works are instinct with an experience which only the ordinary world could have given him, and whom Baudelaire pities for being left to ‘grow his sickly leaves in the coarse atmosphere of a barracks’ – following a career which could almost be taken for granted in one of the minor nobility. If the buffetings of Poe’s career as a journalist did not allow him the freedom to which he thought himself entitled, the theory of poetry he developed in this milieu corresponded perfectly with the aspirations he had expressed as a young man ‘not yet twenty’.

These ideas are set out in the essays on poetry contained in this small volume. Baudelaire summarised the drift of them as: ‘the principle of poetry is, strictly and simply, human aspiration towards a higher beauty.’ The language sounds odd, today, but it corresponds almost precisely with Poe’s definition, in ‘The Poetic Principle’ (p.88), of ‘the Poetry of Words as The RhythmicalCreation of Beauty’. The omission of ‘rhythmical’ in Baudelaire’s formulation marks an emphasis which changes its character as the poems of Poe passed from America to the European mainland, from native English-speakers to those to whom English was a foreign language. The rhythms of ordinary conversations, whether in America or England, are markedly different from those of the French, and the way the language falls has resulted, over the centuries, in radically different practices in versification. It would be possible to exaggerate the extent to which this has contributed to the relatively high rating given to Poe’s poetry in France, as compared with English-speaking countries, but a French reader might well be less shocked than an American or an Englishman by what F.O. Matthiessen calls ‘one or two notorious stunts like “The Bells”, which no adult reader can now face without pain’. Such stunts, however, do nothing to invalidate Poe’s poetical doctrine. ‘I hold that a long poem does not exist,’ Poe says, ‘… a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul…But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length.’ So Paradise Lost is to be regarded as poetical only when … we view it merely as a series of minor poems’ – ‘minor’ meaning, in Poe’s terminology, ‘of little length’. This did not prevent him describing his ‘Eureka’, an essay of a hundred pages on the little matter of ‘The Material and Spiritual Universe’, as ‘A Prose Poem’, adding in the preface: ‘it is as a Poem that I wish this work to be judged after I am dead.’

The second pillar of Poe’s theory of poetry is his hostility to ‘the heresy of The Didactic. It has been assumed,’ he says, ‘… that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth… With as deep a reverence for the True as ever inspired the bosom of man,’ he goes on (rather over-boldly, one may think, however little one knows of the confusions of Poe’s life), ‘I would nevertheless limit, in some measure, its modes of inculcation’ – in order, apparently, not to enfeeble them. ‘The demands of Truth are severe.’ He proceeds to chop ‘the world of mind’ into three parts, and to assign Truth to Intellect, Beauty to Taste, and Duty to Moral Sense. This implausible piece of dogmatism survives in Valéry in the guise of a plea that the modern tendency is to separate manners and fields of activity more clearly than ever before, so that each can realise its function more fully and occur ‘in a pure state’. Poetic pleasure is itself ‘absolute poetry’. Well, maybe, and certainly pleasure need not be as impure as it often is, but perhaps ‘the real language of men’ still has a part to play in it.

Valéry’s claim was that Poe was the first to give a pure theoretical basis to literary works might be said to be made good by ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, if one could take that remarkable production wholly seriously, as Valéry probably could. The essay is an analysis of ‘The Raven’, undertaken, according to its author, with the ‘design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition – that the work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.’ The analysis itself is a tour de force of deliberation, of a kind which could not fail to impress Valéry, however incredible it may be to lesser mortals, as an account of how a poem could be written. Poe starts with the consideration of ‘extent’, and finds the proper length to be about one hundred lines. He goes on to the choice of an ‘impression to be given’ by the poem and to such matters as settling what the refrain shall be. Mallarmé tells how Mme Suzan Achard Wirds was assured by Poe that

the story published by him of the method of composition [of ‘The Raven’] had absolutely no authenticity; and that he had not expected that people would think that it had. The idea came to him, suggested by the commentaries and investigations of critics, that the poem could have been composed in that way…it had amused and surprised him to see it so promptly accepted as a declaration made bone fide.

Certainly Poe’s theories about poetry, interesting though they are and influential though they have been, are less to be taken to heart than the poems themselves. Whatever one’s view of the status of la poésiepure – and it is probably best understood as pointing to an essential element in poetry rather than as an exclusive definition – there is a small handful of Poe’s poems which are of a clarity and luminosity which make most of the poetry of the nineteenth century look muddy. These poems demand the kind of attention which his definition of the ‘Poetry of Words’ demands; no less, but, equally certainly, no more. To brood on such questions as the degree of sexual involvement – usually thought to be slight – with whoever among his acquaintance was for the time being serving as his model of the feminine ideal, may be a more or less innocent amusement, but it has nothing to do with reading the poems. ‘The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty’ excludes all notions of truth, all questions of correspondence of word with fact – a high-handed demand to make, not only on any research worker, but on any ordinary reader. Yet it is this exclusion that is called for by the notion of pure poetry of which he was the first and most dramatic exponent.

The early poem which stands first in this volume, as it did in ‘The Raven, and Other Poems’, as revised by Poe himself for the American edition of 1845, begins ‘Helen, thy beauty is to me / Like that Nicean bark of yore…’. It is pure poetry as Poe conceived it. The meaning does not matter, and it should be read simply for the pleasure it can give, however incorrect that advice must seem to the aficionado of explanations. Surrendering oneself to the pleasure is itself a discipline, and the reader who is incapable of it is insensitive to poetry, or at any rate to the essentials of it below the sometimes important accidents which may accompany them. ‘The Valley of Unrest’ can, likewise, raise psychological/biographical questions which may conceivably be worth exploring, but they should not be allowed to interfere with what might be described as the helpless reading of the poem. A certain mysterious charm survives even in the prose of Mallarmé’s translations, so that one cannot dismiss the contents as having no part in the poetic effects, but the sound and fall of the verse, once heard, cannot be separated from them. ‘The Valley of Unrest’ is by no means the strongest of Poe’s exercises with a form of couplet: the masterpieces are undoubtedly ‘The Sleeper’ and ‘The City in the Sea’, yet both these are so slight as at times to verge on absurdity:

Where the people did not dwell;

They had gone unto the wars,

Trusting to the mild-eyed stars

– or even the in their kind stunning lines: ‘Resignedly beneath the sky / The melancholy waters lie.’

In spite of the many explications in which Poe, at one time or another, revelled, it would hardly be in disaccord with the core of his doctrine to say that pure poetry is, as to its essential nature, enjoyable but not explicable, though this leaves plenty of work for critics among the inessential elements which can, in any case, contribute to the real pleasure which poems may give through their accidental features. No use looking, in Poe, for the moral and prophetic force of Milton’s sonnets, the insight and grasp of reality of Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’, or Wordsworth’s sense of the natural world, or indeed for many of the major or minor features which give the works of other poets much of their interest. The critic may seek to discredit ‘The Bells’ or ‘The Raven’ for the crude ingenuity of their structure and rhythms but, in the handful of poems in which there is no touch of grotesqueness, Poe succeeds in ‘the rhythmical creation of beauty’ in a manner which the occasional excesses in a handful of others merely emphasise. The sceptic should perhaps start with the seventy or so lines of the second, later, poem ‘To Helen’ (p.73). There is no distraction by noisy or emphatic elements of rhyme or rhythm, and the poem is not so much to be read as to be breathed: ‘Upon the upturn’d faces of a thousand / Roses that grew in that enchanted garden.’ The same goes for ‘To----’: ‘Not long ago, the writer of these lines, / In the mad pride of intellectuality,’ which at least seems to hesitate on the threshold of ordinary human speech, and may be recommended as an introduction to those who, entangled in the tastes and prejudices of twentieth-century ‘self-expression’, may hanker for at least some touch of the living world.

Those who prefer dark ladies to sonnets – and they are many – may like to root among the accounts of Poe’s last years to sort out the confusions of his relationships – all, it may be assumed, unconsummated, but involving more than one proposal of marriage – with Sarah Whitman, Annie Richmond, and Elmira Shelton. A letter of October, 1848, almost exactly a year before his death, claims that when he spoke to the first of these ladies he ‘loved for the first time’, and it goes on to ask:

Do you not feel in your inmost heart of hearts that the ‘Soul-love’ of which the world speaks so often and so idly is, in this instance at least, but the veriest, the most absolute of realities? Do you not perceive that it is my diviner nature – my spiritual being – which burns and pants to commingle with your own?

The marriage with Sarah Whitman not taking place, there was still time for more or less wild grabs in the direction of Annie Richmond and Elmira Shelton, the latter apparently a childhood sweet-heart. But there is little doubt that the agonies of Poe’s last days were financial as much as amorous, and that he was appalled by his relative lack of success as a writer. It was in Baltimore that he was picked up on the street, unconcious – and if he was drunk, that was certainly not the only thing that was the matter with him. He died four days later, on 7 October, 1849.

A Note on Punctuation

Poe’s punctuation – particularly his fondness for the parenthetical dash and his treatment of quotations – often looks odd to the modern reader. Where this seems integral to the character and texture of his writing, it has been left unaltered; however, there are a number of other places, chiefly in the essays, where the original punctuation might seem confusing or simply incorrect, and here it has been silently brought into line with modern usage. Most of these instances involved the transfer of an intrusive semicolon or full-stop at the end of a quotation from within the quotation-marks to outside them; similarly-placed commas have been moved only if they would otherwise look distractingly wrong.

POEMS

ToHelen

Helen, thy beauty is to me

    Like those Nicéan 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.

Lo! in yon brilliant window niche

   How statue-like I see thee stand,

   The agate lamp within thy hand!

Ah, Psyche, from the regions which

   Are Holy Land!

The Raven

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.

‘’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

From my books surcease of sorrow – sorrow for the lost Lenore –

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 it is, and nothing more.’

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 I 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 an instant stopped or stayed he;

But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door –

Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door –

Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,

By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,

‘Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,’ I said, ‘art sure no craven,

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.’

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,

Though its answer little meaning – little relevancy bore;

For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being

Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door –

Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,

With such name as ‘Nevermore.’

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only

That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.

Nothing further then he uttered – not a feather then he fluttered –

Till I scarcely more than muttered, ‘Other friends have flown before –

On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.’

Then the bird said, ‘Nevermore.’

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,

‘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 –

Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore

Of “Never – nevermore.”’

But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,

Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;

Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking

Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore –

What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore

Meant in croaking ‘Nevermore.’

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing

To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;

This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining

On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,

But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er,

She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer

Swung by angels whose faint foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.

‘Wretch,’ I cried, ‘thy God hath lent thee–by these angels he hath sent thee

Respite – respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!’

Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore.’