WHAT TROUBLED POE'S RAVEN
COULD Poe walk again to-morrow, heavy with dyspeptic sorrow,
While the darkness seemed to borrow darkness from the night before,
From the hollow gloom abysmal, floating downward, grimly dismal,
Like a pagan curse baptismal from the bust above the door,
He would hear the Raven croaking from the dusk above the door,
"Never, never, nevermore!"
And, too angry to be civil, "Raven," Poe would cry "or devil,
Tell me why you will persist in haunting Death's Plutonian shore?"
Then would croak the Raven gladly, "I will tell you why so sadly,
I so mournfully and madly, haunt you, taunt you, o'er and o'er,
Why eternally I haunt you, daunt you, taunt you, o'er and o'er—
Only this, and nothing more.
"Forty-eight long years I've pondered, forty-eight long years I've wondered,
How a poet ever blundered into a mistake so sore.
How could lamp-light from your table ever in the world be able,
From below, to throw my sable shadow 'streaming on the floor,'
When I perched up here on Pallas, high above your chamber-door?
Tell me that—if nothing more!"
Then, like some wan, weeping willow, Poe would bend above his pillow,
Seeking surcease in the billow where mad recollections drown,
And in tearful tones replying, he would groan "There's no denying
Either I was blindly lying, or the world was upside down—
Say, by Joe!—it was just midnight—so the world was upside down—
Aye, the world was upside down!"
John Bennett.