NPPF: Canto Three: More Poe

Jasper Fidget jasper at hatguild.org
Mon Aug 4 15:30:31 CDT 2003


Poe's "Alone" (1830) has some similarities to Shade's poem, especially
Cantos One and Three, and includes both a fountain and a mountain:

>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 loved, I loved alone.
Then-in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life-was drawn
>From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
>From the torrent, or the fountain,
>From the red cliff of the mountain,
>From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
>From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
>From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

http://eserver.org/books/poe/alone.html

###

Poe's "To One in Paradise" (1834) has a fountain and a Dim Gulf:

Thou wast all that 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.

Ah, dream too bright to last!
Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise
But to be overcast!
A voice from out the Future cries,
"On! on!"-but o'er the Past
(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
Mute, motionless, aghast!

For, alas! alas! me
The light of Life is o'er!
"No more-no more-no more-"
(Such language holds the solemn sea
To the sands upon the shore)
Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree
Or the stricken eagle soar!

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. 

http://eserver.org/books/poe/to_one_in_paradise.html

This poem is included in Poe's story "The Assignation" (1834), which
concerns in part a drowned child with a beautiful mother:

"A child, slipping from the arms of its own mother, had fallen from an upper
window of the lofty structure into the deep and dim canal. The quiet waters
had closed placidly over their victim; and, although my own gondola was the
only one in sight, many a stout swimmer, already in the stream, was seeking
in vain upon the surface, the treasure which was to be found, alas! only
within the abyss.  Upon the broad black marble flagstones at the entrance of
the palace, and a few steps above the water, stood a figure which none who
then saw can have ever since forgotten. It was the Marchesa Aphrodite --the
adoration of all Venice --the gayest of the gay --the most lovely where all
were beautiful --but still the young wife of the old and intriguing Mentoni,
and the mother of that fair child, her first and only one, who now deep
beneath the murky water, was thinking in bitterness of heart upon her sweet
caresses, and exhausting its little life in struggles to call upon her
name."

http://eserver.org/books/poe/assignation.html

"'The Visionary' (Godey's Lady's Book, January 1834; revised as 'The
Assignation,' Broadway Journal , 7 June 1845) was Poe's first story to
appear in a national monthly with a wide circulation. As one of the Folio
Club tales it had been assigned to 'Mr. Convolvulus Gondola, a young
gentleman who had travelled a good deal.' Due, in part, to its inflated
bathos, it has been regarded as a lampoon of Byronic passion or as a parody
of Thomas More. Neither of those views reckons with Poe's preference for the
visionary hero, the classical, Hellenic heroine, the conventional villain,
the symbolic rescue, the arabesque apartment, the love poem written in
London, the painting of the Marchesa Aphrodite, or the final suicide pact.
W. H. Auden's comment on Poe's style as 'operatic' suggests that these stock
elements, coupled with the overwrought diction, may, within the narrator's
maturing perception, comprise a psychodrama of the self's quest for origins,
for identity, and for unity. So considered, it has been read as a paradigm
of Poe's own search for a lost unity of the primal self." (Carlson,
_Dictionary of Literary Biography_ Volume 74, 1988)

Jasper




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