Edgar Allan Poe’s “Vampyre”

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Sleeping Beauty by Victor Gabriel Gilbert

This year, for Halloween, Poe’s “The Sleeper” (1841) is dressing up as a vampire. Actually, she doesn’t really need a costume because if we look at her closely, we may observe that she already fulfills the requirements. Let’s face it, the poem begins at midnight, under a full moon, amid foggy ruins, nodding flowers and a drowsy lake, and we find our undead heroine, Irenë, sleeping in an open coffin.

As I pointed out in my earlier analysis (which included a recitation of the poem), an earlier draft of the poem included the word “vampyre” in the verse. In fairness, the word was only used as an adjective, to describe the batwing-like panels of Irenë’s family crypt. But we need not dust-off ancient contents from the vault to appreciate the vampirical elements in the poem because they are there in plain sight.

The words of the poem, taken at face value, tell the story of a dead woman who does not appear to be dead, and who finds herself in a limbo-like place, an open coffin in a room with its windows open to the night. The narrator fondly wishes that she would, well, be dead, in the normal way: “I pray to God that she may lie/Forever with unopened eye,/While the pale sheeted ghosts go by.” That sums up the classic vampire, which was a dead person who sort of acts as if they do not know they are dead, and their loved ones are tasked with dispatching them finally to their rest by performing whatever necessary ritual.

There are also several aspects in the appearance of “The Sleeper” that may offer some clues:

Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress! 
Strange, above all, thy length of tress, 
And this all solemn silentness!
“The Sleeper” has a pale complexion because she is not just a sleeping woman, causally taking a nap in her boudoir: she is dead. Similarly, her attire is likely formal, and not the normal you would expect for a true “sleeper.” The strangest thing, “above all,” is the length of her hair. We know that people who were buried alive were often found with longer hair than they were buried with, if their hair continued to grow after they had been interred.  Similarly, “The Sleeper” may have unnaturally long hair. And her chamber is “solemn” and “silent” because it is not a normal bedroom, but a dead woman’s crypt.
“The Sleeper,” to be sure, is not a Bram Stoker or Anne Rice vampire, who attacks victims to drink their blood, turns into a bat, and must have a stake driven through her heart to be released to her eternal rest.  Poe suggests that Irenë may be released by the good wishes of the narrator, or by mysterious processes outside the scope of the poem. Then, she will finally leave this realm of “pale sheeted ghosts,” and go rest in the “more holy” chamber, and “more melancholy” bed of the family crypt she obliviously played outside of in her childhood.

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