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The Poe Outro

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In pop music, an “outro” is the concluding segment of a song—the word is made up from the opposite term, an intro , which is the introductory portion: it can be a guitar riff, a distinctive drumbeat, or a combination of similar elements. The introduction to Beethoven’s Fifth (or Symphony No. 5 in C minor) has been called “the most famous four notes in music history” and you can probably hear the ‘ ta-ta-ta-tum ’ in your head as you read this.  (It said “ saxo-mo-phone ,” to Homer Simpson.)   In the world of pop music, the Beatles were prone to writing memorable outros in songs like “Hey Jude” (‘Na, na, na-na, na-na,’ etc.), “Drive My Car” (‘Beep-beep ‘n beep-beep, yeah’) and “Ticket to Ride” (‘My baby don’t care’). All of these outros switched gears from the verse-chorus-verse-chorus pattern that preceded them into a repetitive loop that was intended to fade out as the song ended. That same idea—a repetitive pattern that takes us out of the pattern set up in the main body—was employ
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The Holy Dream

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Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Dream” (1827) echoes the same sentiments as “A Dream Within A Dream” (1849) , written almost a quarter century later. I have written previously that “A Dream Within A Dream” denotes a happy dream (the past) wrapped up in a miserable dream (the present). That poem and the other poem considered here juxtapose a vivid happiness recalled through dreams, against a present-day reality so jaded and faded that it resembles a dream state.   Both poles recur often in Poe’s poetry. The dream past is recalled in poems such as “Dreams” (1827) (“ I have been happy, tho’ in a dream/I have been happy—and I love the theme ”) and “Annabel Lee” (1849) (“ For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams/Of the beautiful Annabel Lee ”). The sleepwalking present is evidenced in “To One in Paradise” (1833) (“ And all my days are trances ”) and “Ulalume” (1847) (“ I replied—'This is nothing but dreaming’ .”) Dreams are a hot topic in Poe’s oeuvre .   In “A Dream,” the poem we
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Living ‘The Dream’ (Poe style)

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All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream. So asserts Edgar Allan Poe in his immortal poem, “A Dream Within A Dream” (1849) . In an earlier post , we explored the allegorical structure of the poem. In this follow-up, I want to drive home the meaning of the phrase “ A dream within a dream ,” because it has a very precise meaning in Poe’s verse. It doesn’t just mean “ a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! ” ( “JFK,” 1991. ) That works well as a secondary meaning, as connotative reading of the phrase, but Poe has something more explicit in mind. Specifically, Poe is saying that all that he pictures in his mind’s eye is a nostalgic vision (“ dream ” #1, which he “ sees ”), which is contained within the trancelike existence of his waking reality (“ dream ” #2, which is his life as it “ seems ”). Those two poles demarcate the boundaries of “ All ” his experience and the same is true, Poe boldly posits, for every one of us. All of our lives are waking trances
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June gloom

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Photo uploaded by user Erisa on Pinterest . June figures in two of Edgar Allan Poe’s poems; in the early piece “A Pæan” (1831) and the later work “The Sleeper” (1841) . Though set a decade apart, both poems deal with the death of a beautiful woman —which Poe famously called “ unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world ”—and, in both pieces, June is used to mark a midway point, a halfway station in the journey of life. In “The Sleeper,” June’s placement in the middle of the calendar is emphasized or heightened by the other temporal references. The poem is set “ at midnight, in the month of June .” Thus, it is not only the middle of the year, but also the middle of the night and, furthermore, the moment straddling the dividing line between one day and the next day. In “A Pæan,” the month is used to characterize the relative youth of the dead heroine: “Thou died’st in thy life’s June.” Poe does this often in other poems—he refers to the human lifespan by reference to t
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Gazing at Poe’s “Evening Star”

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If you gaze up at the sky after sunset, you can admire Poe’s “Evening Star” (Venus, the subject of an 1827 poem) and, just before sunup in the morning you can see the “ cold moon/’Mid planets her slaves ,” as the waning moon will then be accompanied by three bright planets : Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. Last week, while the moon was in its full phase, I took my eight year-old daughter out to our backyard for a poetry reading and astronomy lesson under the jaw-droppingly bright Venus, the “Evening Star” (though we can be agreed it’s not really a “star”). Unusually clear skies in L.A. due to the Coronavirus shutdown will soon be the stuff of legends, but they were enough of a reality still this past week for us to engage in stargazing after sunset, and exploring poetry, too. Poe’s “Evening Star” is easy reading that lets you meditate, lightly, on why the heavens have such an indelible hold on human imagination. As I said to my daughter augustly: “the thinking person likes to look at
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Poe in the time of Coronavirus

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The Phantom of the Opera (1925) When I started this blog and throughout its life, I have resolved to focus exclusively on the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Today, I write about one of his short stories— “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842) —because of its relevancy given the Coronavirus pandemic. But I will also focus on its poetry rather than its value as a short story, and I will contrast the themes it presents with those I have analyzed in Poe’s verse. In times of COVID-19, it is impossible for a Poe buff not to think of The MRD. You have a highly infectious plague ravaging the planet. There is no test, no cure, and no stopping the spread of the contagion. The only recourse to those who wish to survive is to self-quarantine. But this is Poe, so the isolation is not behind hermetically sealed, Ebola-styled plastic enclosures, but—wait for it—in a “castellated abbey”. The quarantine party consists of Prince Prospero and a thousand of his closest friends in the nobility, who turn
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“Dead” can entrance

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Tommy Woodard © 2014 There is a scene in the classic horror movie, “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935) in which the Monster (Boris Karloff) finds Dr. Frankenstein’s fellow mad scientist Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) dining in a burial vault, using a coffin lid as a tabletop. The sequence is a classic Gothic scene because settings such as cemeteries and themes like commingling with the dead are recurring themes inherited from Romanticism. In the movie, Pretorius is an old man, and as a mad scientist, he is a certified odd fellow; but the idea of a young man communing with the dead is an especially stark one. Edgar Allan Poe was just 18 when he composed “Spirits of the Dead” in 1827, but he was certainly not the first poet to explore the subject—not by a long shot!   One thinks, for example, of Thomas Gray’s masterpiece, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) , written a century earlier, when Gray was 26 years old. If Poe was right that “ The death of a beautiful woman
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