Now mark what follows:
"Then I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom.
And conquered her scruples and gloom.
And we passed to the end of a Vista,
But were stopped by the door of a Tomb.
By the door of a Legended Tomb,
And I said: 'What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended Tomb?'
She replied, Ulalume—Ulalume—
Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"
The end of the poem is like the beginning, and who can utter the feelings it excites? That "dark tarn of Auber," those "Ghoul-haunted woodlands of Weir" convey, more thrillingly than a thousand words of description, what we have actually felt, long ago, far off, in that strange country of our forbidden dreams.
What a master he is! And if you ask about his "philosophy of life," let the Conqueror Worm make answer:
"Lo! Tis a Gala-Night
Within the lonesome latter years—"
Is not that an arresting commencement? The word "Gala-Night"—has it not the very malice of the truth of things?
Like Heine, it gave this poet pleasure not only to love the Dead, but to love feeling himself dead. That strange poem about "Annie." with its sickeningly sentimental conclusion, where the poet lies prostrate, drugged with all the drowsy syrops in the world, and celebrates his euthanasia, has a quality of its own. It is the "inverse" of life's "Danse Macabre." It is the way we poor dancers long to sleep. "For to sleep you must slumber in just such a bed!" The old madness is over now; the old thirst quenched. It was quenched in a water that "does not flow so far underground." And luxuriously, peacefully, we can rest at last, with the odour of "puritan pansies" about us, and somewhere, not far off, rosemary and rue!
Edgar Allen Poe's philosophy of Life? It may be summed up in the lines from that little poem, where he leaves her side who has, for a moment, turned his heart from the Tomb. The reader will remember the way it begins: "Take this kiss upon thy brow." And the conclusion is the confusion of the whole matter:
"All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream."
Strangely—in forlorn silence—passes before us, as we close his pages, that procession of "dead, cold Maids." Ligeia follows Ulalume; and Lenore follows Ligeia; and after them Eulalie and Annabel; and the moaning of the sea-tides that wash their feet is the moaning of eternity. I suppose it needs a certain kindred perversion, in the reader, to know the shudder of the loss, more dear than life, of such as these! The more normal memory of man will still continue repeating the liturgical syllables of a very different requiem: