THE ROMANTIIZATION OF THE DEAD FEMALE BODY IN VICTORIAN

 The romantilization of the dead female body in victorian

The appearance of an important biography of Poe in France and the preparation of still another in America, the publication of his most widely-read poem with illustrations by Doré, and the prospective unveiling of a memorial tablet to his honor,

seem to furnish a fit occasion for inviting attention to a striking but hitherto unnoted characteristic of his poetry.

In fact, with the exception of a comparatively few closeted minds, the attention of the world has thus far been riveted upon the overwhelming sorrows of Poe's lot,

the mysterious inequalities of his moods, and the phenominal aspects of his career, rather than devoted to the critical examination of his works.

The retributive swing of the human mind, also, naturally bore it first to the rescue of his name and character both from the innumerable legends that grew up around them during his lifetime, and from the blunders and the malignity that overwhelmed them immediately after his death.

Thus, criticism, especially in America, has not yet spent its powers upon his literary remains, and thus it seems possible that a brief examination of his poems may serve to exhibit them in a novel and interesting light.

There are poets who claim all hours and all seasons for their own; but an almost constitutional concomitant of the poetry of Poe is night.

Of the more than forty pieces that comprise his poetical works a fifth are wholly night scenes, and in the composition of three-fourths the shadow of night fell athwart his mind and supplied it with its favorite imagery.

The remaining poems, with the exception of three, do not contain the element of time at all. Two of these mentioned as exceptions were written in his youth, before he had elaborated his views of the “Poetic Principle,” or his imagination had assumed its final cast.

Thus, among his later poems that contain the element of time, there is only one—“The Haunted Palace”—that may be called a day-scene; and when it is remembered that this poem is designed to describe the overthrow and ruin of a beautiful mind,

so that all the imagery introduced throughout merely expresses the contrast between reason and madness, even it will scarcely be regarded as a solitary exception.

Leaving it out of consideration, therefore, we may say that all his most beautiful poems, having any relation to time, belong wholly to the night, and from it draw their elements of power and pathos.

These, by general consent, are “The Raven”—the night of dying embers and ghostly shadows, of mournful memories and broken hopes; “Lenore”—the night of the bell-tolling for the saintly soul that floats on the Stygian river;

“Helen”—the night of the full-orbed moon and silvery, silken veil of light, of the upturned faces of a thousand roses, of beauty, clad in white, reclining upon a bed of violets; “Ulalume”—the night of sober,

ashen skies and crisp, sere leaves in the lonesome October, of dim lakes and ghoul-haunted woodland; “The Bells”—the night of the icy air through which the stars that oversprinkle all the heavens seem to twinkle with crystalline delight;

“Annabel Lee”—the night of the wind blowing out of a cloud, chilling and killing his beautiful bride in the Kingdom by the Sea; “The Conqueror Worm”—the gala knight in his lonesome latter years with its angel throng bedight in veils and drowned in tears; and “The Sleeper”—the night of the mystic moon,

exhaling from her golden rim an opiate vapor that drips upon the mountain top and steals drowsily and musically into the Universal Valley—the night of nodding rosemary and lolling water-lily—of fog-wrapped ruin and slumber-steeped lake.