“Dead” can entrance

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 is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” then there is also something terribly poetic about a young man pouring over death, like Hamlet holding the skull of Yorick. There is certainly a tinge of that in Poe’s poem, rendered the more poignant by Poe’s long-running fixation with the topic of death and morbidity.

Despite Poe’s future in horror, at 18 years-old, the young poet was not the Goth we know and love. Accordingly, his 1827 poem lacks the dense macabre ambiance of a ‘graveyard smash’ like “The Sleeper” (1841) or “Ulalume” (1847)—though it certainly foreshadows it. Instead, I like to call “Spirits” Poe’s “Zen” poem.  Its five Roman numeral-capped stanzas function as meditations. They are pensive, sobering, existential, even transcendental in their reach.  Poe places us in the cemetery, and coaches us:

The spirits of the dead who stood

In life before thee are again

In death around thee—and their will

Shall overshadow thee: be still.

But, can an 18 year-old really lead us in a reflection about death?  Yes, if the young man is as haunted and burdened with “dark thoughts of the gray tombstone” as Poe was.  In fact, there is a special irony that can be derived from a haunted youth, which makes Poe’s morbid fascination a source of genuine insight about death. The first great insight is the simple instruction at the end of the stanza quoted above: “be still.” Part of the point in visiting a graveyard (the poem was originally called “Visits of the Dead”) is to find peace. Again, our Zen master instructs:

Be silent in that solitude,

Which is not loneliness

(Is this Poe or Carlos Castaneda??) There is unexpected beauty in this morbid place, and this fits the early Poe M.O., which was concerned with finding enjoyment in places others would have wished to avoid, like the “dim lake” in “The Lake” (also 1827). As he would describe his youthful preferences, “All I loved, I loved alone.” (“Alone,” 1829.) So, part of this is Poe drawing us into his secret garden, the place where he finds Nirvana.

There is also, however, a deeper point to be made, through which Poe begins to lay a bridge between Romance and gothic horror, and he begins by recognizing the sublime beauty of life and also of death, and he expounds insistently that death must be contemplated and not “banished” from our “thoughts.” Instead, young Poe invites us to gaze directly at death and to let its dreadful beauty wash over us without fear.

[Below is Vincent Price reciting the first and last stanzas.]