And bore her away from me.
On the other hand, Poe’s theatricalism, though it explains some of the faults of his poetry, leaves unexplained the fact that he has cast a greater spell on succeeding poets than has even so great a theatrical genius as Byron. Poe is one of those poets who are sources of poetry. He discovered—though not without forerunners such as Coleridge—a new borderland for the imagination, where death and despair had a new strangeness. He seems to have reached it, not through mere fancy, as his imitators do, but through experience. When he was a youth he worshipped Mrs. Helen Stannard, the mother of one of his friends. She went mad and died, and for some time after her death Poe used to haunt her tomb by night, and “when the autumnal rains fell and the winds wailed mournfully over the graves, he lingered longest, and came away most regretfully.” J. H. Ingram and other writers have found in these “solitary churchyard vigils” the clue to “much that seems strange and abnormal in the poet’s after life.” Love overshadowed by death, beauty overshadowed by death, remained the recurrent theme of his verse. It is the theme of his supreme poem, “Annabel Lee,” with its haunting close:
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Poe was a poet for whom life was darkened by experience and illuminated only by visions. In the beginning, romance
loves to nod and sing
With drowsy head and painted wing,
Among the green leaves as they shake
Far down within some shadowy lake.
In time, however, this born day-dreamer can find no comfort in day-dreaming: