Eating Poe: Part One, Richmond and an Author’s Forward

Classic Gothic Ghost Stories, Edgar Allan Poe, Haunted Tours and Attractions, Haunted Towns and Cities, The South

Poe stands for every fucked up soul who wandered a graveyard on a dark and lonely night. For every person who has grieved to the point of madness, and who can draw a line between dread and fear with a sharp point pen. Poe is the beacon of darkness, the one who first reached the black inside all our souls, and birthed it screaming into the light.

When it comes to name recognition and horror authors, there’s Poe and there’s everyone else. Because it’s not just that he helped define the canon, his popularity today dwarfs what it was in his lifetime. There aren’t a lot of horror authors whose popularity continues to grow that long after they’ve shuffled off the mortal coil. A lot of former greats are still popular. But none on the level of Poe.

For all that, I’d wager that the vast majority of people who recognize the name, can rattle off a few movies they’ve seen, but haven’t actually read any of his work. In addition they’ll tell you he had a troubled life, trouble with women dying, and was an alcoholic. Likely an opium addict as well. And they’d recognize his photo.

I’d like to think that he’d get that smirk of a smile if he knew this. But knowing what I know of him, he’d likely be inflamed by the inaccuracies of the biography, and raving mad with anger that more people aren’t reading him. And ask for an advance on his royalties.

I was living in New York. I had to go to Charleston, South Carolina. Baltimore is along the way, scenes from his early years as well as his mysterious finale. It shared a common trait with Charleston … a Poe themed restaurant. Good things come in threes. New York City was an hour train ride away. It was here he fought for recognition, lost his wife and quite likely his mind for a bit … and another restaurant with a Poe connection.

That made three. This was an expedition, if not a quest. Fate. Three of the formative settings in Poe’s life. Three restaurants. A good series comes in threes.

In that I turned out to be wrong. There were four. So in addition to this forward dear reader, you get an afterward as well.

+ + +

I split a semester in high school between Poe and Twain, so I wasn’t coming into his life or work totally blind, or dependent on Vincent Price movies. Poe set out to create great literature. Much of it is. He helped to define science fiction, which was then in its infancy. He invented an entirely new genre – detective fiction, and raised the bar on horror writing. No, Poe didn’t write horror, he wrote life. Twisted, horrible life, but there’s almost always the question … is it supernatural, or is the narrator simply mad.

For to Poe, true horror was madness. It doesn’t matter if came from opium, alcohol or illness, physical or mental. It was an ever present fear, along with the longing for the women he lost in his life. It’s likely the latter that kept his own madness simmering.

Poe was the original doomed rock star. The Raven made him famous, but didn’t pay the bills. He wrote for a living, the first American author who really tried that. In addition to the stories and poems he’s known for, journalism, obituaries, and literary criticism paid the bills, if only just barely.

He was a vicious critic. Writing was a craft and discipline, as much as an art. He pandered to the audience, his personal life tore him apart, and left him a bit scandalous. He was the original Jim Morrison, coming back from the dead to grow more popular than in life, both of their graves now a pilgrimage.

And nobody did dark like Poe. It’s hard to find a hopeful message from his body of work. You could make the case that he didn’t give up, he was hopeful to the end, still searching for love. If that glimmer of hope can warm the cockles of your heart even a bit, bear in mind a few weeks later he was laying face down in a gutter dying.

Poe wrote the white man’s blues. Pain through the eyes of privilege squandered, He had an amazing sense of rhythm. When he wrote scenes set in the mind, he built a cathedral of the psyche, so you could feel what the narrator felt. You feel your pulse rise with his. It wasn’t an accident. Poe was a master.

+ + +

Memorial to Elizabeth Arnold Poe. St. John’s Episcopal Church Graveyard, Richmond, Virginia

Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins was born in Britain, her mother an actress. Her father died in 1789, and in 1795 Eliza and her mother sailed for Boston. She first went on stage at the age of nine to acclaimed reviews. She stuck to the stage, she married at fifteen and was a widow by seventeen. In Norfolk, Virginia in 1806, she met David Poe, Jr., originally from Baltimore. He was destined to be a lawyer till he was swept off his feet by Eliza and abandoned that pursuit to become an actor.

For a while they continued to travel and perform, before settling in Boston. There they had a son, William in 1807, then Edgar in 1809.

Eliza was well received wherever she performed, was quite versatile, handling both drama and comedy, as well as song and dance. David didn’t fare as well, as one reviewer of the time stated that “the lady was young and pretty, and evinced talent both as a singer and actress; the gentleman was literally nothing.”

With the birth of Edgar, the couple found themselves in dire financial straits. They pulled up and moved to New York City, Eliza was pregnant again in 1810, and by July of that year David Poe had disappeared from history.

Rosalie was born in December, and Eliza’s life was almost unbearably difficult. She stayed on through the season before going south to Richmond, joining up with a lesser theater troupe. Overworked, desperate to feed three young children, Eliza took on an exhausting schedule. While performing in Richmond, Virginia in 1811, she began to show signs of consumption, and by December of that year, she was dead. It is said that Poe had to spend the night alone with his mother’s corpse while caring for his baby sister on the night she died. It’s also believed that David Poe died shortly after Eliza, though official history is silent on the matter.

In a letter to Beverly Tucker, an acquaintance of his mother, Poe wrote “In speaking of my mother you have touched a string to which my heart fully responds. To have known her is to be the object of great interest in my eyes. I myself never knew her – and never knew the affection of a father. Both died… within a few weeks of each other. I have many occasional dealings with Adversity – but the want of parental affection has been the heaviest of my trials.”

Dock Street Theatre was one of the stages Poe’s mother worked during her lifetime. c. 1809. Charleston, South Carolina

The people of Richmond appeared to open their hearts to this tragic tale, showing a great interest in the well being of her children. On her death the kids were split up, with William going off to live with David’s parents, and Edgar and Rosalie going to different homes in Richmond.

Edgar found a home with the Allans. Frances Allan had helped care for Eliza during her illness, and it’s said that she took a particular interest in the young Edgar. Her husband, a fairly successful merchant who traded in everything from tobacco to slaves seemed to dote on Edgar at first, though he really didn’t want to take him in.

In an attempt to expand his business he took the family to Britain, where they stayed about six years. Edgar went off to school for a while in Scotland, the birthplace of John Allan, before returning and studying in various boarding schools around London. One of the schools was the Manor House School, which was administered by the Rev. John Bransby, who in Poe’s later work William Wilson, is mentioned by name. The school itself also becomes a setting in the story.

While they were gone things happened in the world which would have an influence on his chosen profession. 1816 was the year without a summer, where winter held on all year. More important to the field of horror which Poe was to delve into, Mary Shelley wrote and published Frankenstein, as part of a competition thought up on a bizarre night in the company of her husband, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. Also present that night was Byron’s doctor, John Polidori who a year after the publication of Frankenstein published The Vampyr, a book which would greatly influence Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Poe was at the time at least, a rather robust young man. He studied dance while in Britain, and at one point swam six miles upstream in the James River against a heavy tide. In 1824, General Lafayette visited Richmond and was welcomed by the Richmond Junior Volunteers, outside the house which later became the Poe Museum in Richmond.

The Allans never adopted Poe, which certainly bothered the young boy. It’s said that when he was in trouble later on, Allan would threaten to cut him loose. It’s true he often berated the young Edgar as time went on.

Allan was a notorious philanderer, and sired more than one illegitimate child. That he wasn’t overly fond of his wife, who remained childless is evident from his letters. He bemoaned her complaining, her lack of an even tempter, though by all accounts Allan was an asshole. Frances was also by accounts, as Allan portrayed her. As time wore on, Edgar remained devoted to her though, while his relationship with John Allan grew more and more strained.

When Poe was fourteen, he developed what some have called a crush on a friend of his, Mrs. Jane Stith Stanard. She was in her thirties and when Poe would become angry or upset at home, he sought solace in her, and she didn’t turn him away. Unfortunately for Poe, like many of the women in his life she was also sickly, and in 1824 she lost her mind, and shortly thereafter her life. Afterward her son and Poe would keep vigil at night by her graveside.

Later he composed the poem, To Helen in her honor. She hated her name and so Poe had called her Helen. Writing in a letter, Poe explained that he wrote the poem of his “passionate boyhood, to the first, purely ideal love of my soul — to the Helen Stanard of whom I told you”

When Poe was sixteen, he fell in love with the girl next door, Sarah Elmira Royster. She fell for him as well, and the two became secretly engaged. Whether it was a formal engagement or not, Poe certainly saw it as such. When he went away to school, her father intercepted Poe’s letters to her and destroyed them. Believing that Poe had forgotten their vows, she went on with her life and married another. By the time Poe found out, it was too late. She was to become one of his earliest muses however, inspiring quite possibly a number of his doomed female loves in his tales and poems, but certainly the lost Lenore of the Raven. This also is believed to be about Royster:

TO — —

I saw thee on the bridal day;

When a burning blush came o’er thee,

Tho’ Happiness around thee lay,

The world all love before thee.

And, in thine eye, the kindling light

Of young passion free

Was all on earth, my chain’d sight

Of Loveliness might see.

That blush, I ween, was maiden shame:

As such it well may pass:

Tho’ its glow hath rais’d a fiercer flame

In the breast of him, alas!

Who saw the [[thee]] on that bridal day,

When that deep blush would come o’er thee, —

Tho’ Happiness around thee lay;

The world all Love before thee.

Bust of Poe surrounded by materials taken from the Southern Literary Messenger building, where he worked early in his career. Museum of Edgar Allan Poe, The Old Stone House, c. 1740, Richmond, Virginia

In 1826 Poe went away to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Allan, having inherited a vast fortune, for some unknown reason provided Poe with less than enough money to pay for school, books and living expenses. It might have been possible for Poe to have made his way, had he been frugal and perhaps taken some initiative. Instead Poe took up gambling, which was forbidden on the campus. Whether the money problems flowed from that, or whether as he said, he turned to gambling to make up the shortfall in his expenses, the end result was bad. Poe was no better at gambling than he would prove to be at finances.

He also started drinking, something that classmates attested to the fact that he was equally awful at. Poe had a tendency to not drink much, but drink incredibly fast. One of his classmates, Thomas Goode Tucker, long after Poe’s death wrote that “he would seize a full glass, without water or sugar, and send it home at a single gulp. This frequently used him up; but if not, he rarely returned to the charge.” By most accounts however, Poe was usually sober.

Poe did well in his classes, but he was forced to turn to Allan for more money, to pay his gambling debts. Instead, Allan pulled Poe from college after one semester. The relationship soon turned disastrously bad, and Poe fled the house.

He wrote to Allan, saying “After my treatment on yesterday and what passed between us this morning, I can hardly think you will be surprised at the contents of this letter. My determination is at length taken — to leave your house and endeavor to find some place in this wide world, where I will be treated — not as you have treated me.”

Poe went on in classic Poe fashion, to demand money to make his way north, where he would never be seen again by Allan. It wasn’t the last time he made this promise, or threat, which I’m sure Poe hoped it would be seen as. He ended it with a P.S., “It depends upon yourself if hereafter you see or hear from me.”

+ + +

The Old Stone House was certainly familiar to Poe, though he had no real connection to the building. Today it houses the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia.

Richmond proved to be fairly easy to get around in. It was a spur of the moment decision actually. I knew about the Poe Museum, but I was running late and there was no restaurant. It fell out of the boundaries of the assignment. But I wanted to visit Eliza Poe. I knew this trip would end at Edgar Allan Poe’s grave, so I thought that a fitting way to start the trip.

The Old Stone House, home to the Poe Museum was easy to find and there was even on street parking less than a block away. The Old Stone House turns out to be an old stone house, the oldest house in Richmond. There’s no evidence that Poe went inside that I know of, though he was outside it on at least one occasion. And was certainly familiar with it as it wasn’t that far from the house where he was brought up.

You go in through the gift shop, so they also get you coming out. A young man and woman were working inside, slightly gothic but nothing extreme. The gift shop ranged from the tacky to the scholarly. It tries to be fun, as Poe is after all, a bona fide cultural icon. But the mission of the museum is a bit dry, and mere camp can’t reconcile the two.

The focus of the Poe Museum is on his years in Richmond, though his entire life is well covered. It contains one of the most comprehensive collection of letters, manuscripts, first editions and personal belonging. Relics from his life and career are on display as well,

Poe’s childhood bed is there, as is several pieces of furniture from the Allan household, and that of his sister. A silk vest once belonging to Poe is on display, as is his walking stick and a lock of his hair.

Thou wast that all to me, love,

For which my soul did pine—

A green isle in the sea, love,

A fountain and a shrine,

All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,

And all the flowers were mine.

From To One in Paradise

The memorial garden to Poe in the Poe Museum, Richmond. The ivy is from his mother’s grave, and plants scattered about are from places he knew, writers he admired or stories and poems he wrote.

A garden memorializing Poe is based on his vision of paradise, from his poem, To One In Paradise. It’s populated with plants mentioned in his work, ivy taken from his mother’s grave in Richmond, John Allan’s garden and from the home of Sir Walter Scott. It’s paved with bricks from the Southern Literary Messenger, a Richmond publication where Poe got his start in journalism and writing, along with other features from the building.

Noted visitors have included Vincent Price, Gertrude Stein, H.P. Lovecraft, Henry Miller, and Salvador Dalí.

It was an interesting visit, time well spent. But I left there still not feeling like I knew the man any better than when I walked in the door. I bought a fake raven and a couple boxes of Poe matches, and slipped away.

St. John’s Church, where Patrick Henry said “give me liberty or give me death,” and Poe’s mother is buried. Richmond, Virginia

A few blocks from the Poe Museum is St. John’s Church, most famous for Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty, or give me death!” speech. Somewhere here lies what’s left of Elizabeth Arnold Poe, Edgars mother. There’s a monument to her, sadly not so much to her life, but to her famous child. I had the place to myself, and it reeks with history. It’s easy to imagine Poe wandering here at night, and I wonder if he knew where his mother was buried? Or perhaps he wandered aimlessly, trying to feel her presence? We know of Poe’s attraction to the grave, from Annabel Lee we tend to think that if he could, he’d crawl down into the earth to be with his mother.

But that’s one of the dangers of Poe. He often wrote in the first person, so it seemed like him talking. The truth is, we’ll never really get inside the mind of the man. It was never his intention to let us inside. Poe explored thoughts never before brought to light … “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”

Perhaps that’s how he tried to exorcise his demons. He failed in that, his demons never stopped coming at him. He found fame, but never fortune, never lasting happiness. And perhaps it’s that elixir of sorrow that haunts us to this day. It’s not understanding the darkness that attracts us to it. It’s the mystery of it, and Poe never has lost his sense of mystery.

So I wandered back to the car and headed on to Charleston, to meet up with Poe once more.

Read Eating Poe Part II: Debunking a Poe myth in Charleston, SC, in search of Poe as soldier

St. John’s Episcopal Church Graveyard, Richmond, Virginia

Eating Poe: A look at the life of Edgar Allan Poe and a culinary literary travelogue

Part One: Poe In Richmond
Part Two: Poe in Charleston and Poe’s Tavern
Part Three: Poe in New York and Il Buco Restaurant
Part Four: Poe in Baltimore and the Annabel Lee Tavern and Horse You Came In On Saloon

Real ghost stories and the places that inspired them

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Eating Poe, Part II: Edgar Allan Poe’s time on Sullivan’s Island and debunking a Charleston myth

Charleston, Classic Gothic Ghost Stories, Edgar Allan Poe, historic and haunted travel-destinations, People of History

I wake up before dawn and heard the ocean outside. The dunes separate the beach house from the sea itself, but not the smell of the ocean, nor the pounding of the surf, a dull thud, without the crackle and sizzle of the foam. The sky is beginning to lighten, I get dressed and grab my camera.

It’s a safe bet that Edgar Allan Poe walked this stretch of beach. Less than a mile from Fort Moultrie where he was stationed in the army, there wasn’t a lot to do on the island. Poe did his share of walking, was a naturally curious soul and had an affinity with the ocean. I’m sure he stood on this very spot, but it’s been too long. Poe’s footprints were washed off this beach long before his death even.

I’ve come looking for the man, but all I’ll find here is legend and myth.

Towards Fort Moultrie, Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina

To the east, the sun is just starting to top the horizon. I’m more relaxed here on the beach than I was in the bed, and I realize it’s the surf. The incessant pounding. Later poets, intent on adopting Poe as southerner, a Charlestonian in particular, would claim the sound as the source of the haunting refrain of The Bells.

Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the pean of the bells —
Of the bells :
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells —
Of the bells, bells, bells —
To the sobbing of the bells ;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells —
Of the bells, bells, bells —
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells —
Bells, bells, bells —
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

I can buy that. But like almost everything about Poe and Charleston, it’s only a guess. The notoriously quick to put pen to paper Poe seldom wrote directly about his time at Fort Moultrie, Sullivan’s Island and Charleston.

But listening to these waves, I had doubts about that. It’s not a pounding surf like you find in other places along the east coast. Steady but smaller waves. Less like bells, more like chimes.

Dunes at Sunrise. Sullivan’s Island, Charleston, South Carolina

I wondered how Poe took to the sea? He grew up in Richmond, on the James River, about 40 miles from the ocean. He crossed the ocean as a child, to England, and of course back again. When his step father, John Allan wrote home to his wife, Poe told him to tell her that he was very brave on the crossing. I find that touching, and very un-Poe like. But it’s another piece in the mosaic, Poe the orphan, wanting to impress the woman he wished could be a mother to him, and the man who utterly refused to be a father.

If nothing else, Poe’s time in the army was a reintroduction to the sea. For most of the next two years, the ocean would be a constant companion.

It’s November 18, 1827 and Poe is off on another adventure. He left Richmond in April of that year after about a year of college and a highly bitter falling out with his foster parent, John Allan over finances. He landed in Boston and tried for a few weeks to survive on his own, but that only lasted about a month before he signed up for the army. Only 18 years old, he lied and said he was 21. If you’re gonna lie, lie big. He also signed up under the name of Edgar A. Perry, likely to make as clean a break with the past as possible,

His first base was Fort Independence in the Boston Harbor. From there he could see the town of his birth, but he would have no memory of the place, nor his parents. It seems an odd choice for Poe, a chance to start over perhaps, to join the life he lost when his mother died when he was but three.

In October they received orders to ship out to the south, and Private Perry boarded the Waltham on Halloween.

Fort Moultrie is a blend of old and new, with a portion of the fort still dating from Poe’s time there.

Poe arrived on Sullivan’s Island eighteen days later, ten miles from Charleston, across the harbor from Fort Sumpter, which would have a more infamous story to tell some years later.

In South Carolina, Poe received a pay raise to $10 a month. He only stayed on Sullivan’s Island just over a year, before heading north to Fortress Monroe, Virginia. There he would receive the highest rank for a non-commissioned officer, Regimental Sergeant Major.

He had risen quickly, only taking nineteen months to reach his position, which was put down by his fellow soldiers as a result of “highly worthy confidence.” It must have felt like quite an accomplishment, but also a terrifying reality sunk in. This was as high as he could rise in the army. If he wanted more, he needed school, West Point.

“I have been in the American army as long as suits my ends or my inclination, and it is now time that I should leave it… The period of Enlistment is five years — the prime of my life would be wasted…” Poe wrote to John Allan, desperate to escape his enlistment early. Allan finally capitulated and agreed Poe, after Poe obtained an appointment to West Point. But it was perhaps the last act of kindness Allan ever showed his foster son.

Full Moon Over the Atlantic, Sullivan’s Island, Charleston, South Carolina

It struck me that Poe, for most of his life, lived in the shadow of the ocean … here, Boston, New York, Baltimore. Even Philadelphia lies close enough to pick up ocean breezes. When we think of Poe, the ocean doesn’t usually spring to mind. But it played a big part in his life. I’m sure it wasn’t the beach, maybe not even the ocean itself that attracted him. Poe lived in cities for most of his life. His horror, his mystery was in the streets, the homes. These cities on the sea brought ships, people, life and energy. An escape.

But for the next eighteen months, Poe found himself out on a long, narrow island, the city lights visible from the shore, while he watched, indentured to the army, but at last free from his step father, who had disappointed him so much. He was on his own, earning a wage and pondering his future. He dabbled in poetry, one assumes he read as much as he could. The library on Sullivan’s Island is named after him, but of course it dates from well past his stay there. Streets are named after him on the island as well, but for all the attention Poe gets here, very little is known about this period of his life.

Southern Architecture: Sullivan’s Island, Charleston, South Carolina

Nature, and commerce abhors a vacuum. Poe has always been popular. In the century after his death, he was a literary figure, and as such, writers of many regions tried to claim him as their own, and the south, perhaps most appropriately was no exception.

I don’t know Poe’s thoughts on what region he belonged to, My guess would be Europe. His first book of poetry, published anonymously during 1827, Tamerlane and Other Poems, by A Bostonian would belie the idea that Poe thought of himself as a southerner. Perhaps his experience in the south growing up had soured him on that thought. Perhaps calling himself a Bostonian was just a way to put the past behind him, At any rate, the book didn’t even cause a ripple.

Then in the early twentieth century, a collection of writers, a bevy of poets with ties to Charleston began to theorize on Poe’s connection to the city with a number of poems interpreting his time there. These weren’t based on facts, or even substantially on rumors, but on intuition and how they felt about Charleston, and in particular, Sullivan’s Island. They pored over his work looking for connections.

The Gold Bug is the obvious example, though written about 16 years after Poe’s time on the island. It is of the minority where Poe sets his work in an identifiable location. It must be said though, that Poe took artistic license with the landscape, which is natural considering he was working from memory.

What was more interesting to Poe than Sullivan’s Island at the time of the writing of The Gold Bug, was his interest in cryptology, going so far as to challenge his readers in the magazine he was working for to send him cyphers to decode. He got so many he finally had to issue a plea for people to stop.

He was quite good at solving them, but not because of any advanced skills he might possess, for he had little more than a basic understanding of the subject. Instead, he had faith in the idea that his readers had even less knowledge of it, which turned out to be true.

In Hervey Allen’s Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe, a biography based as much on interpretation as fact, he wrote that Poe was greatly influenced by Charlestown and Sullivan’s Island, that much of his later material “for The Gold-Bug, The Oblong Box, The Man that Was Used Up, The Balloon Hoax, and bits of the melancholy scenery, and sea and light effects which, from the time of his sojourn in Carolina, haunt so much of his poetry.”

Standing on the beach at Sullivan’s Island, wandering the streets, walking the old town of Charleston, one can’t help but think this area has been bitten by a bug of a singular nature. Is it so singular that Poe couldn’t have found these bits of inspiration elsewhere? Of course not. The ocean was a constant in Poe’s life, from the time he was a boy. There’s no way to see into Poe’s mind based on cherry picked scraps of his writing. Poe the poet seemed to explore his heart, rather than in his prose which was often tailored towards the audience. The sea in Poe’s poetry is simply too vast to be tied to any strand of beach.

Southern poets went to extremes to fill in the gaps in Poe’s time in Charleston.

The Charleston home of Dr. Edmund Ravenel

In 1839, eleven years after Poe left Sullivan’s Island, there came to be published The Conchologist’s First Book, with the author listed as Edgar Allan Poe. It was at best a translation from a version by Thomas Wyatt, an Englishman. In fact, Poe was given the job of editing, writing a preface and introduction and some translation. The idea was to take the larger book, written in French, and shorten it for an American audience of school children.

At that it was successful, the only book under Poe’s name to get a second printing in his lifetime. Poe’s name was in fact the reason he was given the job, because copyright issues made it problematic to use the original author’s name. Poe’s reputation at the time was as a journalist, so it gave some weight to the project.

Charges of plagiarism erupted, charges Poe vehemently denied. “I wrote it in conjunction with Professor Thomas Wyatt, and Professor McMultrie… my name being put to the work, as best known and most likely to aid its circulation. I wrote the Preface and Introduction, and translated from Cuvier, the accounts of the animals, etc. All School-books are necessarily made in a similar way.”

It brought Poe some desperately needed income, but also enemies in the publishing world, from the plagiarism charge and the skirting of copyright laws. These resulted in Poe having difficulty for a time finding a publisher for his own work.

There was during Poe’s period in South Carolina, living on Sullivan’s Island in the summers, a noted Charleston Conchologist and medical doctor, Dr. Edmund Ravenel.

It’s from this connection with Conchology that people have presumed that Poe must have known the esteemed Dr. Ravenel. But so far, no direct evidence has ever emerged that the two met. It’s been stated that Poe based his description of the protagonist of The Gold Bug on Ravenel, who likely did range up and down the island looking for shells. And it’s reasonable to assume that Poe might have met him.

But that’s where reason ends. When defending himself against the plagiarism charges, he never mentioned a connection to explain his knowledge of the subject, and a name like Ravenel’s would have gone a long way towards establishing credibility.

These early twentieth century poets however, trying to establish a link between Poe and Charleston didn’t let facts get in the way of their mission. In his biography, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, Arthur Hobson Quinn added credence to the story of Poe and Ravenel’s association. In reality, all Quinn wrote was it seemed probably that Poe talked with Ravenel, and that he had plenty of opportunity to do so. But over time, Quinn’s theory became fact in people’s minds.

From that grew the legend that Poe had fallen in love with Ravenel’s daughter, Anna. The story went that she was already engaged at fourteen to a member of an aristocratic Charleston family. When Ravenel discovered the affair, he arranged to have Poe shipped off, and indeed Poe did leave just after a year on Sullivan’s Island. But he left with his whole brigade.

It’s said that after he left, Anna was struck by a fever, and died before Poe could get back to her. In the legend, Ravenel purchased six plots in the Unitarian Church Graveyard in Charleston, where Poe and Anna were supposed to have met. There he buried her in an unmarked grave, so Poe couldn’t know which one she was buried in.

And that, according to Charleston myth which to most people today is history, is the source for Poe’s final poem, Annabel Lee.

A spurious legend has grown up that the poem Annabel Lee has it’s origins in a failed relationship of Poe’s. It’s also said that her body was buried in the Unitarian Churchyard in Charleston. Both are unfounded, but the churchyard is a lovely place to visit.

Unfortunately, it appears to be poppycock. Ravenel was married twice and had eight children, none of them named Anna. In fact, his first child was born in 1826, just a year before Poe arrived on Sullivan’s Island. The family plot, rather than the Unitarian Church, is to be found in the Somerton Plantation Cemetery, inland from Charleston. There is no Anna buried there either.

There are also unconfirmed tales that Poe visited the theaters that his parents had performed in. The King Charles Inn in Charleston makes the claim that its predecessor, the Pavilion Hotel was where Poe holed up for a time, writing the Gold Bug and drinking in the bar. They should know better as that story wasn’t written till almost 20 years after Poe left Sullivan’s Island.

So why does Charleston lay such claim to Poe? That’s simple. The movies. When Poe made his way to the big screen, people saw there was money in his name and reputation, and since there are no facts, the legend has to do. Legends are more colorful than history anyway. In the past, urban legends were usually confined to word of mouth, and in the present, the internet. But even a casual search for this legend online, shows that there are many commercial interests in Charleston promoting these tales.

This was something Poe himself learned in his lifetime. The Raven was a huge success, but he made only $12 for its publication. A never ending stream of opportunities to read the poem ensued, “He would turn down the lamps till the room was almost dark, then standing in the center of the apartment he would recite … in the most melodious of voices … So marvelous was his power as a reader that the auditors would be afraid to draw breath lest the enchanted spell be broken.” It made Poe a household name, and yet Poe wrote in his correspondences, “I have made no money. I am as poor now as ever I was in my life—except in hope, which is by no means bankable“.

Starting in 1961, Roger Corman began making low budget adaptations of Poe’s work. Adaptation can be a generous term when describing these films. Though surprisingly well done, none really told Poe’s tales. Instead they were geared towards the sensational. Poe’s rich dialogue was supplanted by screenwriter’s drivel out of necessity, because few of the tales really lent themselves to a feature length film.

I mean you can read The Raven in less than ten minutes, and the plot consists of a man talking to a bird.

The almost constant presence of Vincent Price in them however, led an air of literary respectability, because words dripped like honey from Price’s tongue.

To be honest, that’s where I heard of Poe. When you learn a story from a film, rather than the original book, it’s always hard to go back to the source material. And why not? Films are made to be sensational, to make every second count. Dialogue requires thought, and these films weren’t designed to provoke deep thought.

The trend continues still. 2012’s The Raven, another well done film featured John Cusack, who I actually like, playing Edgar Allan Poe in a mishmash of Poe plot lines and sheer fantasy. Poe, the harshest critic of his age would have eviscerated all involved. Rightly so.

Poe wouldn’t have been familiar with the newer parts of Fort Moultrie, which was extensively damaged and buried under sand during the Civil War.

Poe went from literary icon after his death, to pop culture icon. The name conjures a feeling. The feeling differs according to your own individual likes and tastes. To the masses he’s the Jim Morrison of his day – dark, mysterious, experimental and dangerous. The melancholy, the tragic losses in his life, his struggle for fame in the face of constant poverty, the sexual innuendo in marrying his 13 year old first cousin, rumors of alcoholism and drug abuse and his mysterious and wretched death, all draw the curious, the seekers of the morbid. After Poe’s death, the floodgates of sensationalism opened and Poe’s star took on a whole new trajectory.

You can’t miss the Poe references on Sullivan’s Island. What it needed to become a bonafide tourist destination was the keystone. Fort Moultrie isn’t it. Much of what you see there isn’t even from Poe’s time. It’s impossible to stand there today and feel what Poe must have felt. I realized this walking the grounds of the fort, looking out into Charleston Harbor towards Fort Sumpter, watching the ships come in.

A ship on the horizon, the great tankers of today would dwarf the great ships of Poe’s time. But the feel must be about the same, that sense of awe. But I knew it wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t going to hear Poe’s voice at Fort Moultrie.

So I said “screw it” and went for a burger and a beer at Poe’s Tavern.

The boozy beating heart of the commercial Poe experience in Charleston. With pretty good burgers, cold beer and a low country vibe that makes the journey worth it.

Poe’s Tavern is that keystone to the Charleston Poe experience. It’s not dedicated to the historical Poe, nor the literary Poe even. It’s a healthy dose of Poe the pop culture icon. And it must be doing well, as they’ve opened two more locations in Atlantic Beach, Florida and Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, neither of which Poe had any association with.

The original Sullivan’s Island location is a fairly non-descrip piece of low country architecture, open porch, tin roof, with stylish Poe graphics and typography decorating the place. Inside it’s open and airy, except for the throng of people lining up at the bar, at least in the summer months. The walls are covered with Poe art, Poe quotes, Poe testimonials. I saw a letter from Stephen King while I was there, and I have to admire him for what he’s done. He’s achieved the success Poe desired and never found, the mass appeal, the seemingly idyllic lifestyle. But what has eluded King, what he’s bemoaned on occasion is not being seen as a serious writer. That was a charge lobbed at Poe as well after the sensational success of his poem The Raven. A household name, but he couldn’t afford to support his household. He had his allies though, and that number swelled after his death, with writer after writer, including King offering accolades.

The menu at Poe’s Tavern features burgers and fries, fish tacos, Mexican food and salads. The burgers are the most colorful things on the menu, named after Poe Tales. The Black Cat goes a bit far into Poe exploitation I think … grilled onions, a half pound burger, ground in house. It’s decorated with applewood bacon, pimento cheese and Edgar’s Drunken Chili. I know, he’s been dead a long time. But come on. It really makes a person wonder if those using his name for profit really don’t care about Poe as a man.

But Poe isn’t Jesus, this isn’t the clearing of the temple, and I had a Pit and the Pendulum burger on the way, along with a very cold Samuel Adams. Samuel Adams is my go to beer when I don’t know what I want. I once did a blind test taste of all my favorite beers, and repeated the test on multiple occasions. The surprising winner was Samuel Adams.

When I go to a place like this, I like to keep to the same menu items, so I can be fair in my comparisons for these little tales. Typically in a seaside joint it’s fish and chips. With burgers, it’s bacon and cheddar cheese.

The burger didn’t disappoint. You might think you can’t go wrong with a burger, but you can, and some are certainly better than others. With no toppings aside from the bacon and cheese, you should be able to taste the meat. But there wasn’t a lot of flavor to it, or the cheese and bacon were so robust they covered it up. I can’t imagine how slathering chili on top of that would allow any taste of the burger at all to come through.

Still, it was impressive, certainly worth the ten bucks I paid for it. I’ve had more expensive in train stations, with half the flavor and twice the grease.

I didn’t stick around, though it’s the kind of joint I could easily spend a drunken afternoon, or night, or both in. I wanted to be up early, on the beach at sunrise, to look for the small man with the intense eyes from Fort Moultrie, walking the beach and dreaming. I didn’t find him there, just a shadow on the beach, fluttering in and out of sight in the ever changing light of a Sullivan’s Island sunrise.

The Tide Out on The Beach. Sullivan’s Island, Charleston, South Carolina

Eating Poe: A look at the life of Edgar Allan Poe and a culinary literary travelogue

Shop for Poe in the Wytchery!

The Quarterly, Eating Poe in print, art prints of locations important in Poe’s life and Poe themed greeting cards

Shopping For Poe

Eating Poe: Part Three, Poe’s life New York City, where he found fame, tragedy and madness, and I search Il Buco for The Cask of Amontillado

Edgar Allan Poe, Journal

It’s a tantalizing legend, that the building that now houses Il Buco in New York City was the macabre inspiration in Poe’s life for the setting of The Cask of Amontillado. The places Poe touched in Manhattan and the Bronx can still be found, though in most cases the surroundings are unrecognizable from his day. So with the promise of rustic Italian dining along the way, I wandered the streets of Manhattan to find the poet’s footprints.

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I pull into a parking space on a deserted street just off Poe Park in the Bronx. There are no signs restricting parking, lines drawn for parking spaces on the street. A lady comes rushing up, telling me I can’t park there, I’ll surely be ticketed. “Don’t park there, don’t park there!”

I’ve lived in the New York metro area long enough to know that it’s not good to argue with a screaming native. Plus I figured she knew the neighborhood. She told me to park down the street, next to St. James Park, I found a parking place there, surprisingly enough, and set off towards the little house just across the Grand Concourse, the most important site in Poe’s New York City,

Poe’s life changed with a second move to New York City in 1844. His star was on the rise, as a writer, an editor and a critic, but it was fame without fortune. Then his fame skyrocketed.

The Raven was an earworm for its day, sticking in the head like a pop song would now. Albeit The Raven supped on darker worms than most pop songs.

It’s not a long poem, but it crams a lot of words into into its length. It’s the story of a man in solitude, in the dark of night, the bleak of winter, searching books of magic and the occult for an answer to find his Lenore. A Raven flitters in and taunts him with his one word answer to his quest … nevermore. The author goes from curiosity at this interloper, to irritation, to fear and finally madness. It’s not the terror of the bird that does the narrator in, but the loss of his love. That was story Poe knew well, and almost a year to the day later would know even better. Once again, Poe’s life was to mirror his art.

On January 29, 1845 The Raven was published in the New York Evening Mirror. Poe probably wrote it the summer before, and it seemed to go through a few different versions before he was finally satisfied with it. In its introduction in The Evening Mirror, it was written that The Raven was “unsurpassed in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent, sustaining of imaginative lift … It will stick to the memory of everybody who reads it.”

It was an instant hit and reprinted in periodicals all over the country, and no doubt it changed Poe’s life. A book of his short stories was rushed to press, his first book to be published in half a decade. A book of his poems, the first in fourteen years came shortly afterwards. The reaction from fellow writers varied. Yeats and Emerson hated it, though Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to Poe that “Your ‘Raven’ has produced a sensation, a fit o’ horror, here in England. Some of my friends are taken by the fear of it and some by the music. I hear of persons haunted by ‘Nevermore’.”

It was a critical success and suddenly Poe was a household name and a celebrity of national, and to an extent world renown. The poem was so popular it even inspired parody.

He was suddenly in demand for lectures and recitals of The Raven, which was one of the few lucrative benefits of his newfound fame. One person who witnessed Poe reciting The Raven described it, “He would turn down the lamps till the room was almost dark, then standing in the center of the apartment he would recite … in the most melodious of voices … So marvelous was his power as a reader that the auditors would be afraid to draw breath lest the enchanted spell be broken.”

He was only paid $9 for the first run of the poem, not enough to help the crushing weight of the troubles in Poe’s life. In fact, it was turned down by another newspaper, but the editor took pity on Poe’s plight and gave him $15 out of charity, six dollars more than he was paid for the poem’s publication.

But it’s a mistake to say that Poe only received $9 for The Raven. The financial rewards were paltry for certain, but it did bump him up a level, brought him some financial reward and sealed his reputation that continues to grow to this day. Poe himself wrote “I have made no money. I am as poor now as ever I was in my life—except in hope, which is by no means bankable“.

The author's house in NYC, a sad place in Poe's life — Poe’s life in New York City centered around this little house in the Bronx. At the time this part of Fordham was in the country, though now it’s surrounded by the city. It was here his wife, Virginia died and Poe descended into madness.

A visit to Poe’s Bronx house in Fordham

It was in 1846 that Poe left the metropolis for Fordham in the Bronx. Virginia, his wife wasn’t doing well, her tuberculosis getting worse. His aunt Clem, Virginia’s mother moved with them to help care for her when Poe was traveling or looking for work.

This was countryside when Poe lived here. A stream flowed through the area, heavily wooded, not far from what is now Fordham University, but at the time was St. John’s College where he would visit the library and talk to the professors. It was almost idyllic, till his young wife, Virginia, and Poe’s life took a turn for the worse,

At some point it became apparent she wasn’t going to recover, and Poe’s spirit broke. By all accounts he turned to drink. The success of The Raven had brought him fame, notoriety, friends and enemies alike, but little money. The family was suffering from poverty, Virginia was dying and Poe grew increasingly desperate.

Today his idyllic farm is in the middle of the Bronx. The city finally reached his haven and surrounded it, But it remains a city block of green, with the little farmhouse where Virginia Poe died intact.

I crossed the Grand Concourse and made my way across Poe Park to the Poe House. It was undergoing restoration and so was closed, but I was fine with that. It’s small enough you can see most of the rooms through the windows, and I appreciated the solitude. There’s a certain voyeuristic thrill about looking at a life through a window, and it fit well with this mission, to look for the fingerprints of Poe’s life in the place of his greatest horror.

I’d seen the photos enough to recognize the rooms, the bed where Virginia lay dying, the house freezing, her on her deathbed with Edgar’s coat and the cat Caterina on top of her for warmth. Edgar would sit at her side, crying so fiercely his aunt would beg him to leave the room.

I didn’t need a tour guide, the empty room slowly filled with the vapors of the poet and his family and the tragedy of watching yet another of the women in Poe’s life, the one most important to him, taken from him by death, a year and a day after the publication of The Raven. I finally turned and walked away from the tragic scene and made my way back to St. James Park and my car.

In the Bronx, away from the financially forced gentrification of Manhattan, I noticed from the people I shared the sidewalk with that this is truly the melting pot of America. I had a seat on a park bench, watching the crowds go by and pondered. Manhattan has people from the outlying area there to work, but the natives now tend to be rather well off. The Bronx had every nationality imaginable every ethic group, from all levels of society, many in full costume, walking the sidewalks of their home. It was more laid back than I expected. These weren’t tourists, but people whose lives are lived here.

It seemed strange to sit there and look out on all that life, when behind lay Poe’s house, essentially a tribute to a death and the wicked period of mourning which came after, where Edgar Allan Poe well and truly lost his mind.

I made my way back to the car and I found a parking ticket under the windshield wipers. I looked at the ticket which simply read illegal parking and a $100 fine. I read the signs once more which listed when and where you could park. I saw nothing I did wrong. There was a car parked in front of me, a car parked behind me, neither of them had tickets.

Bumfuzzled, bewildered and a bit pissed off, I got in the car and decided since I was moving from New York quite soon, the ticket cold go unpaid. I still get notices from the some non descript agency in the greater New York metro area, now asking for $250, which I respond to with a simple one word answer … nevermore.

47 Bond Street, an important place in Poe's life in NYC — 47 Bond Street has seen its share of history. Poe likely spent a good amount of time here visiting his friend and Virginia Poe’s nurse, Marie Louise Shew. Later it was owned by P.T. Barnum, was a brothel for a while and now houses Il Buco restaurant.

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Running down the legend of Il Buco and The Cask of Amontillado

It was a week later, the weekend before I was to leave New York for good, following in the footsteps of Poe himself. After Virginia’s death he certainly went off the rails. It didn’t take a lot to get Poe drunk, but it’s certain he was exceeding that limit almost constantly. His Aunt Clem worried about him, as did his friends, confidants and admirers.

General Winfield Scott, a noble name from America’s past and one of the people who helped Poe get into West Point gave $5 to a collection taken up at the Union Club in New York City, after Virginia’s death. He said that Poe had been “belied” and had “noble and generous traits which belonged to a gentleman of the old and better school, and that true‐hearted Americans ought to take care of her poets as well as her soldiers.”

It was with a short list of Poe related sites on Manhattan that I got off the train from Long Island at Penn Station and stepped out into the April morning. Most of those sites would go unvisited, as they had so little to do with him as to be a waste of leg to seek them out.

Poe’s reputation for drinking has been blown far out of portion, the fallacy of opium addiction added to the mix and other debaucheries thrown in as well. Poe’s life started becoming a caricature almost from the time of his death. But there is little doubt that on occasion did take advantage of the excitement that New York City had to offer, including drink and the attentions of his female friends. It’s possible that Poe was already thinking of the future and life after the death of his wife, even before that death which led him to befriend women who tended to be a part of wealthy families. At one point he found himself at the other end of punches thrown by the defenders of one of these ladies, who thought Poe had besmirched her reputation.

In the eight years I lived on Long Island, a quick train ride into Manhattan, I hadn’t exactly experienced much in the way of debauchery on that small island. So I reckoned as I would soon be leaving it, in addition to tackling and photographing Poe locations, I should at least get twisted myself, the kind of night where you find yourself walking down the sidewalk using parking meters as walking sticks.

My usual habit, unless I had need to do otherwise consisted of getting out at Penn Station and heading down Manhattan, having a nice sit in Battery Park overlooking the Statue of Liberty in the Upper Bay then making my way back up the island.

This time I took a short excursion into the Bowery. The first time I came to city, back in 1979 we found ourselves lost, late at night and in the Bowery. I remember seeing a men in a long, battered trench coats with newspapers for shoes, the sewers belched steam into the night. This was the old Bowery. The Bowery today has been cleaned up quite a bit.

There’s a prevailing rumor about the building which houses Il Buco Italian restaurant in the Bowery. It’s classy, a beautifully restored interior, outside sidewalk dining and then there’s the basement, now given over to parties and overflow from the main dining area. It’s lined with wine bottles and rumor’s about Poe’s life.

The story had it that it was in this basement, that Poe found his inspiration for the setting of A Cask of Amontillado, the tale of revenge where the narrator entombs his nemesis in the walls of a wine cellar, alive.

The rumor has it that in Poe’s day, this building was a tavern, a hangout for famous artist, writers and poets, and that the author was a frequent patron. One night he finds himself in the basement with all those casks and inspiration strikes.

The truth doesn’t match the story.

The dates are plausible, though some believe that he wrote A Cask of Amontillado when Poe’s life was in Philadelphia, prior to moving to New York City.

But in looking at the inspiration behind the story, the most plausible theory has Poe writing it in response to caricature of himself written by Thomas Dunn English, then a write and later a congressmen. English portrayed Poe as a drunkard, liar, and an abusive lover. They had been friends, but it was the affair mentioned above that led to Poe’s thrashing that caused the falling out. English believed the letters of the lady in question, a writer by the name of Elizabeth F. Ellet, contained content which was a very private in nature and shouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. So she wanted them back. There’s confusion over exactly what happened next, her brother was sent to retrieve them and was told they had already been returned, Poe went to English to borrow a pistol to defend himself against said brother, but English refused and backed the other side. It ended with English pummeling Edgar, his ring slicing up Poe’s face, though Poe claimed to have gotten the better hand in the brawl. Not many people believed him, and it was another low point in Poe’s life.

It’s thought, and with good reason that Poe wrote A Cask of Amontillado in response to English’s novel on the subject of revenge, 1844, or, The Power of the S.F. In Poe’s story, the protagonist and antagonist find their roles reversed, and the victim in English’s novel finds his counterpart in Poe’s short story as the one extracting revenge.

The basement of Il Buco, thought to be the setting of The Cask of Amontillado — The basement of Il Buco restaurant in New York City. According to legend, the author used it as the setting for The Cask of Amontillado, though there is no evidence to back this legend of Poe’s life.

It is quite likely that Poe had been in the building at 47 Bond Street in the Bowery that now houses the Il Buco restaurant. Il Buco is a perpetually trendy New York City dining spot, specializing in Mediterranean cuisine. It’s upscale, which in NYC means as much of an emphasis on preparation, ambiance and reputation as there is on the food itself. Which in a way is a metaphor for Manhattan today. As it was on my way down to Battery Park, and the most oft tale told about Poe in New York City, I figured it had to be where I ate.

Learning to make reservations in advance

I unfortunately didn’t plan this trip far in advance. In other words I got the idea when I woke up that morning, so I didn’t have time to make reservations. It was late in the afternoon when I arrived and they were already full. It was turning chilly, the cafe seating outside was empty, and the fellow at the door said I could eat there if I chose. I needed this review for these stories, so there was little choice. And besides, I was sure they had the necessary libations to warm me up if need arose.

Need arose. I opted with a red wine recommended by the waiter along with an appetizer, Salumi, which is of course a salami platter. At $18 I thought it would likely make for supper as well, as it came with a selection of breads and cheese. It was however, as the menu said, a selection, and for someone used to cutting salami off the roll with a pocket knife, it was certainly more high falutin’ than I’m used to. By the time it arrived I was on my second or third glass of wine, and decided my future could lie in restaurant reviews and so I should order a main dish.

I settled on the slow cooked pork.

I’m not saying New York City diners aren’t used to simple cuisine, which is what Il Buco lists as it’s underlying philosophy. But they did feel the need to list in the description that the pork came with a thin layer of fat on the edge, to add moisture to the meat. Where I come from, slow cooked pork is a staple, though usually slow cooked over a wood or charcoal fire. We’re used to a bit of fat, but unless it’s fried, we don’t eat it. I didn’t know if I was supposed to or not, but I left it, embarrassingly on the plate.

Rustic decor outdoors at Il Buco — Part of the outdoor seating at Il Buco

It was tasty, the portions were about right, and between dinner and the wine, I had certainly kept the chill at bay. A couple wandering in, also without reservations saw me sitting there and decided they would sit outside as well and wait for a table. They hurriedly finished their drinks and set off looking for a restaurant with a table available indoors.

By this time by buzz was instated, and I decided it was time to move on. But first I had to sneak inside for some photos, including that famous basement, which may or may not have been the inspiration for Poe’s story.

The place is gorgeous inside, no doubt about that. Copper pots hang from the patterned tin ceiling, the tables and chairs are rustic, with much of the main dining room consisting of communal tables, for those who like to eat as part of a crowd, even if they don’t know the crowd. I’m not into that, as I find too often the main topic of conversation I hear whilst eavesdropping is the food. I’m there to eat, drink perhaps, look into the eyes of my loved one, I don’t need to talk about, nor hear about what I’m fucking eating.

So no, perhaps a career as a food writer isn’t in my future.

I made my way to the basement, which was arranged for a private party and smiled to myself at the chosen decor, which was dominated by wine bottles from floor to ceiling, lining the brick walls. It’s charming, downright romantic, and far removed from the horror filled wine cellar of A Cask of Amontillado. But yeah, it’s possible in it’s primitive 19th century state, that it could have inspired that tale’s setting. That part of the legend could be true.

But what exactly was 47 Bond St in Manhattan’s Bowery, when Edgar Allan Poe lived in the metropolis?

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Looking for places from Poe's life in NYC — The Northern Dispensary, seen while looking for places from Poe’s life, and where legend has it he was treated for a head cold.

What was the role of Marie Louise Shew in Poe’s life, angel or devil?

One of Poe’s admirer’s in New York City was Marie Louise Shew. When Poe would stay on Manhattan, with Virginia dying in the Bronx, he would visit Mary Louise, a widow, at her home, the same building which now houses Il Buco, where she lived with her brother-in-law and future husband, Joel Shew. Often Poe would arrive drunk, bereaved over the hopelessness of his situation and the sorrow of his sick wife. Mary Louise would offer comfort and a place to sleep it off.

Eventually she became Virginia’s nurse, and cared for her during the final bouts of her illness, providing a stabilizing influence in Poe’s life.. Accounts vary on exactly how involved she was in her role as nurse, but there is reason to believe she cared for Virginia with love and compassion. Edgar certainly thought well of her, enough to pen the following poem:

To Marie Louise (Shew)

Of all who hail thy presence as the morning –
Of all to whom thine absence is the night –
The blotting utterly from out high heaven
The sacred sun – of all who, weeping, bless thee
Hourly for hope – for life – ah, above all,
For the resurrection of deep buried faith
In truth, in virtue, in humanity –
Of all who, on despair’s unhallowed bed
Lying down to die, have suddenly arisen
At thy soft-murmured words, “Let there be light!”
At thy soft-murmured words that were fulfilled
In the seraphic glancing of thine eyes –
Of all who owe thee most, whose gratitude
Nearest resembles worship, – oh, remember
The truest, the most fervently devoted,
And think that these weak lines are written by him –
By him who, as he pens them, thrills to think
His spirit is communing with an angel’s.

Unfortunately, most of the details of this time come from Marie Louise herself, in correspondences with Poe’s biographer, John Henry Ingram, who had set out to reclaim’s Poe’s reputation after it had being maligned by another, more diabolical biographer, Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Even Ingram remarked that by the time he was in communication with Marie Louise, well after Poe’s death, that she was more than a bit balmy. It’s often thought she was in no small part trying to portray herself as the angel Poe desperately needed during this time, as well as following Virginia’s death.

It’s also possible he wanted Marie Louise in Poe’s life on a more amorous footing, as she was at the time a widow. But she ended up with her brother in law and Poe seemed to lose interest in her after that.

At Virginia’s death, Marie Louise Shew provided the linens in which Virginia was buried, as well as mourning clothes for Edgar, and paid for the coffin.

While her letters provide no clues about A Cask of Amontillado, she did lay claim to providing the inspiration for one of his most famous poems, The Bells. According to Marie Louise, Poe paid her a visit, complaining of being too tired to write, or even think of a subject. She picked up a pen and began to mimic the poet by providing the title and then wrote “The Bells, the little silver Bells.” Poe completed the stanza, she suggested the next verse’s first line, he completed that stanza, copied out the finished poem, listed her as author and went to bed and slept for twelve hours. If her story is to be believed, Poe evidently thought her work was good enough to attach his name to.

But as noted, there’s not a lot you can take of her letters later in life as gospel. She also claimed Poe had lesions of the brain and she had been informed by his doctor that he didn’t have long to live. That turned out to be true, but there is no evidence that the rest of the story was.

That’s typically where Marie Louise’s story ends. But there was more.

Marie Louis Shew after her exit from Poe’s life

Her marriage to Joel Shew didn’t last long. The house was ran as a kind of boarding house, as well as the site of Shew’s famous water treatments. It was a form of new age medicine well before new age was new. Marie Louise was involved as well, and her writing on the subject can still be read. That most people at the time and certainly later thought the whole concept was a fraud, could cast doubts on the sincerity of her character.

She and Shew was a part of the Transcendental movement, which Marie Louise was a devotee of. At the extremes of Transcendentalism you find such things as free love popping up, and there is evidence that Mrs. Shrew was a part of that as well, which is surprising as Poe saw the movement as one of the evils of the world in his day. She ended up divorcing Shew and marrying one of their boarders, Rolad Stebbins Houghton with whom she had a child while still living with Joel Shew. Though it’s also possible the father of that child was yet another boarder of theirs.

The child grew up to be a bit of handful, went west for a time and came back to New York City to escape his reputation if not the law, as he was known or accused of adultery, mule thievery, swindling, and “open and notorious lewdness.” With him he brought a woman, his partner in crime and love interest who was pregnant at the time and married to another man.

Marie Louise took care of her during the pregnancy, but she died unexpectedly in child birth. In a letter the woman had written, she spoke of Marie Louise Shew wanting to perform an abortion on her, and other fears she had about her lover’s mother. It turned out that Marie Louise had pushed to have the woman buried before a death certificate has been issued, and the doctor who wrote it admittedly had never provided treatment to the woman. When the letters were delivered to the authorities after her death, Marie Louise was arrested and charged with murder. She escaped conviction and execution when the woman’s death was surprisingly put down to natural causes.

Later, 47 Bond Street was owned by P.T. Barnum, the circus promoter. He ran it as a boarding house, but when a murder took place there and it was discovered to be a brothel, Barnum claimed to have no knowledge of it.

So even without no real ties to A Cask of Amontillado, the home of Il Buco restaurant has real and deep connections to Poe’s life, as well as its own macabre and tawdry history.

The White Horse Tavern, a favorite drinking spot for many of New York City’s authors. It was standing in Poe’s lifetime, but later Dylan Thomas lapsed into a coma on this sidewalk after drinking too much at the bar.

Let’s get hammered like Poe, shall we?

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After dinner I made my way down to Battery Park, then started back up to Penn Station.

Traces of Poe’s life on Manhattan are few and have relatively little to do with the author’s life. One place frequently pointed to is the Northern Dispensary, a curiously shaped, three sided building tucked into the fork of Wavery Place, Grove and Christopher’s streets in Greenwich village. At the time they were known for treating the poor, and when Poe lived in New York City on a previous occasion, he was believed to have been treated there for a head cold.

As I said, there isn’t a lot of depth to these stories, but it’s interesting to walk up to a door which Poe himself might have walked up to as well, and so I dutifully sought it out, where it stands now, empty except for the last occupant’s furnishings of dusty dental equipment.

While poking around Greenwich Village I stopped into the White Horse Tavern, built in 1880 and once known as a poet’s watering hole. Dylan Thomas, out to beat his own record, downed eighteen shots of presumably Irish whiskey, stumbled outside and collapsed on the sidewalk. He was taken to his apartment in the nearby Chelsea Hotel, immortalized by Leonard Cohen as the site of a blow job by Janis Joplin, and where Syd killed Nancy, amongst countless other New York City artist stories. It was there that Thomas fell into a coma the next morning, and never recovered. Other writers and poets associated with the White Horse Tavern included

Norman Mailer, Anais Nin, James Laughlin, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac from the beat generation, and countless more.

While I was there in this acclaimed historical drinking ground I was struck by the truth of New York City.

A city lays claim to its fame by the names of those who live and work there. New York City has an enviable past, and there were times that they could lay claim to those two titles which you so often hear bandied about by its current residents, the center of the world and the greatest city on Earth.

But in reality, though there are countless famous names living in the city, their names aren’t particularly attached to it. John Lennon for instance, is immortalized in Central Park, but the act he’s most known for relating to New York City is being murdered there.

When Lou Reed died, perhaps New York lost the last of its world famous poets. Granted, there are countless poets still living in New York City, some of some renown even. But they aren’t really part of a scene whose importance echoes around the world.

Broadway is mainly known for revival shows, the same basic show you see traveling to any city in the United States, and one of the most popular shows is an adaptation of a fucking cartoon for fuck’s sake. That makes it hard to lay claim to the most important city for the theatre in the world, or if it is, it shows a sad state of affairs for that particular art form.

The last real music scene to emerge from New York City was likely punk and and to some extent, New Wave. But CBGBs is gone now, and hadn’t been the center of America’s musical universe for ages. Its museums are stocked with the famous art of the past, but the art of the present doesn’t resound with the public the way The Raven did.

New Yorkers still make the claims that applied fifty or even a hundred years ago, or any time in between. But New York has become a stereotype, and it’s voice is the loud, abrasive bravado filled voice so often caricatured, a caricature which so many of its residents embrace. I once was intimidated by that loud, fast talking voice myself. But after almost eight years on those islands, I learned that the volume and speed is to quite often hide the fact that there is no substance behind it, that it belies the same lack of knowledge, the same close mindedness you find throughout the world.

It’s an aggressive, me above all others way of belief that makes it hard for mere mortals to survive now on Manhattan.

Are there exceptions? Absolutely. But then again, if you come looking for me you find me in the Bible belt, where I’m an exception to the norm as well. New York is now, sadly enough, no different than any other major U.S. city. Just a lot bigger than most, and so contains a lot more back stories which have already reached their end and fallen into the realm of legend.

And so I found myself back at Penn Station, my journey at an end. Or so I thought.

Making friends at Ruby Tuesday’s, in Penn Station

A black man, quite a few years my junior stopped me as I reached the entrance. He asked if I had a rolling paper … I guess there’s something about me that makes a person think I might be carrying one. I wasn’t, and told him so. He made me a deal, that if I would buy him a pack, he’d give me something to go with it.

I was in town for debauchery after all, so I took him up on his offer. He sweetened the deal, toss in a six pack and he’d really make it worth my while. I took him up on that as well. And so fifteen minutes later I found myself accompanying this gentleman on a walk around beautiful midtown Manhattan, sharing a joint and a surprisingly interesting conversation. He left me with a small packet to take back to the midwest with me when I left, to soften the pangs of leaving a dream behind.

It had been a dream. I longed to live on the east coast my whole life. I managed it longer than I imagined I would, and lived through it. I had arrived in New York with almost no cash and very little room on my credit cards. I ended up leaving with slightly more room on the cards, almost $200 in cash and a bag of change which added up to even more than that. So I turned a profit, albeit a small one.

Most important I got experience, I became a photographer, a writer and learned the skills I’d need to start my own business and stop working for assholes, who were only in it for the buck.

I made it into Penn Station and found I’d just missed my train, so I had an hour to kill.

Penn Station is known around the midwest for a chain of delis of the same name, capitalizing on the famous train station’s reputation. I laugh when I hear that. In reality, the real Penn Station is a lousy place to eat. It’s the first place I had a $20 cheeseburger, $10 fries and $10 beer. The cheeseburger was greasy, even by cheeseburger standards, the fries were soggy and the beer warm. Yet midwesterners flock to the name.

I opted for Ruby Tuesday’s, another chain but one with a bar. There I found an unlikely cadre of companions, a couple of fellows older than myself, and four young people. They turned the older fellows on to Jager Bombs, shots of Jaegermeister mixed with Red Bull. I opted for my Red Bull on the side, We took turns buying rounds, and soon I had missed the next train. By the time I boarded the train after that, I had done what almost a decade in that area had never done. I became a New Yorker.

Two days later I started my way back to the midwest and a new life. I’d lived within a short walk of the ocean for years now, and it struck me that the cities in Poe’s life were almost always on the ocean. We don’t equate Poe much with the sea, but he never ventured far from its shores.

After his wife Virginia died, and his aunt Clemm went back to the cottage in Fordham where they’d lived for the last of their boxes, she looked for the cat, Caterina. The cat had like Edgar, had went somewhat mad following Virginia’s death. In one of her letters, Mary Louise Shew, who called the cat possessed, recounted this along with the news that Aunt Clem had found the cat dead. It was a portend of the darkness in Poe’s life which even then, had yet to reach it’s climax.

Eating Poe: A look at the life of Edgar Allan Poe and a culinary literary travelogue

Shop for Poe in the Wytchery!

The Quarterly, Eating Poe in print, art prints of locations important in Poe’s life and Poe themed greeting cards

Shopping For Poe

Eating Poe: Poe in Baltimore, his last act on the mortal stage, living and dying in the shadow of the sea

Edgar Allan Poe, Journal

And so we find Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore.

Those who look to unravel the mystery of how Poe died here are chasing windmills or chasing a buck. There’s a good reason we’ll never know the truth about Poe in Baltimore on his fateful last visit.

It’s none of our business. Dying is a private affair. I never came across much of his writing detailing the death of his mother, or the other women in his life, including his wife Virginia. He wrote about how it feels, but the details he doesn’t feel the need to divulge. In so doing, his pain becomes universal.

More important, Poe, in Baltimore becomes a legend. A mystery that can never be solved. In death this helps propel him to the fame that he only brushed up against in life. He died in poverty, but now those who sell his name find it’s worth millions.

Poor Poe, in Baltimore he lies, gritting his teeth no doubt at the hand fate dealt him.

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Inside the Annabel Lee Tavern in Baltimore

Poe in Baltimore: The Annabel Lee Tavern

I had read about Baltimore, it’s a dangerous place now, as it was in Poe’s time. It consistently ranks in the top 10 most violent cities in America.

It was already dark when I got into town, the Holiday Inn sat up on a hill, the only time I’ve seen one of those looking ominous. I checked in, ditched my bags and headed off in search of the Annabel Lee Tavern, the last of the Poe related eateries on my list. It’s in the Canton area of Baltimore, named by an Irishman who made a fortune trading with the Chinese and gave the name to his plantation, which bordered the outer harbor of Baltimore. It’s a growing area of the city, free from much of the poverty and crime that plagues Baltimore. I found a parking spot and was almost immediately swept up in a crowd of young men beginning their Saturday night, taking advantage of the neighborhood’s bars.

It feels like a neighborhood, like you’re where people live, as opposed to a place where people eat, drink and shop. Maybe that was the source of my unease, feeling like an outsider. But I found the Annabel Lee Tavern and slipped inside and immediately felt at home, as Poe in Baltimore must have felt. It’s a shotgun style bar, one long room with a few tables beyond the bar. It feels like stepping back in time, and it feels like a neighborhood bar. As such, it felt more appropriate than either of the Poe themed restaurants I’d been in before. This wasn’t run by a company or corporation, but was a person’s dream.

The owner chatted with me a bit, and I pointed out that nearly every patron in the place was a woman. I asked if this was by design. He said, yes women attract men. There’s a college nearby with lots of literature majors, who tend to be female he said. He knew from them he’d have a steady supply of customers. As it’s still in business nearly a decade after I visited, he appeared to be right. It also gives the place more of a gentle feel. There was a TV over the bar, but it wasn’t even turned on. In America bars have TVs tuned to sports. Here there was Billy Holiday coming over the speakers.

The menu was simpler fare than Il Buco in New York City, the only Poe themed restaurant that actually had Poe walking through the front door. It was simpler, but higher quality than Poe’s Tavern on Sullivan’s Island in Charleston, South Carolina. I had the same thing I had there, a bacon cheddar cheeseburger and fries. But at Annabel Lee’s Tavern the cheeseburger was grass fed, the cheese artisan and locally sourced, and the fries cooked in duck fat. I’d never had duck fat fried fries before, and I’m not really a fan. But the cheeseburger was perfect, a staple food served in a way that stood out and made it something more.

The Annabel Lee Tavern is a shotgun style building, more like a neighborhood bar, the type Poe would have been familiar with.

And the beer was cold too, a blessing on a hot June evening. It had been a long drive, and I wished for a moment this was my neighborhood, for I felt at home. Baltimore is close enough to being southern that it has a bit of both worlds. The place where I come from shares a latitude and that same feeling, that same heat and smell that old wood puts off as it’s slowly baked, year after year.

But I didn’t want to experience driving across Baltimore half drunk, so made my way back to the Holiday Inn and had a rare, early night.

+ + +

Poe in Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum

Sunday morning and I park across from the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum in Baltimore. Poe lived here from 1833 to 1835. Already living there was his Aunt Clem and her daughter Virginia, then ten years old who in three years would be Poe’s wife. He had just left West Point, another failure and was looking for a new start when he moved in, at the age of twenty three. Of his time here we know very little. It wasn’t the golden age of Poe’s career, just another place to get his bearings and start anew. It’s believed he wrote a few stories and poems in this house. This time he started down the path towards being a full time writer, one of the first Americans to do so.

Being a Sunday morning it was closed. The museum often struggles with funding. It’s infuriating when you think of it, that a professional football team in Baltimore can co-opt his name, but can’t provide full funding for the only Poe museum in Baltimore. The neighborhood is indeed rough. I had wanted to visit the night before, but the owner of Annabel Lee Tavern advised me against it. As often is the case, the only people I saw on this morning were those dressed up and on their way to church.

There’s a scene in the TV series The Wire where a white tourist asks a gang member where the Poe House was. He replied, in a play on accents, “Look around, take your pick!” He’s right, it’s a grim neighborhood in a grim town.

But in the end, it was just a building, clinging to the past in a dreadful present. I walked up the steps to the door as Poe must have done so many times, but I still couldn’t feel the man.

+ + +

Washington Medical College, where Poe was taken after being found on the streets and where he died a few days later.

Poe in Baltimore: At his death his personal mystery begins to grow

A bit later, I found myself standing outside Washington Medical College. my next stop to find Poe in Baltimore. Today it’s an apartment building, but behind one of those windows, that on October 7, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe died. It was an inglorious end, him raving and calling out for someone named Reynolds. According to legend at least, his last words were “Lord help my poor soul.”

All we know is he was found wallowing in the gutter, apparently drunk, feverish and wearing another man’s clothes. The cause of death listed was vague, purposefully so it would appear. All the records regarding his death are long lost.

We know he had a great sense of foreboding, but that’s not particularly unusual for Poe. He expected things to go bad and they usually did, even without his help. He also played to his worst impulses, which didn’t help matters. The idea he was addicted to opium seem far fetched, the product of a disgruntled writer whom Poe had slighted, but the story has held on doggedly. But it didn’t take much to get Poe drunk. One tall glass could do it, two could tip him over the edge. Poe was no Dylan Thomas, he didn’t die after drinking all night, that much is certain. He would have been comatose.

It was standing outside the hospital, looking up at those windows that I decided I wouldn’t peer into the theories around his death too deeply. Death should be private, witnessed only by those who are there to help, not to feed an appetite for the gruesome, even if in Poe’s stories, he provided meat for those same people who loved to peer into the dark.

Poe never gave up hope. He rekindled a relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster, just over a year after his wife’s death, and after he had been rejected by another woman. That she loved him seems apparent, that she wanted to be there for him as well. That she was wary of him by reputation and experience is undoubted. When he proposed marriage she gave him a choice, an outright no, or time for her to consider it. In the end, it’s believed she decided to go ahead and be his wife, even though it meant losing three fourths of her late husband’s estate. Before Poe left for Baltimore, he paid her a final visit in her Richmond home. She wrote “He came up to my house on the evening of 26 Sept. to take leave of me. He was very sad, and complained of being quite sick… I felt so wretched about him all of that night, that I went up early the next morning to enquire after him, when, much to my regret, he had left in the boat for Baltimore.”

Two weeks later he was dead.

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Poe's original grave — Poe was originally buried in an unmarked grave, followed by a simple sandstone marker bearing the inscription 80. There he lay for twenty five years.

Poe in Baltimore: Almost forgotten, and then a remembrance

Today you find the remains of Poe in Baltimore, interred in the burial ground of Westminster Hall. His original resting place was a lot less grand than the marble monument we see today.

Resting place … it’s a euphemism that I feel Poe would have spat at. We don’t rest in the grave, we decompose. The face we love, the lips we kissed, the hands we held, the body we devoured is slowly eaten by worms.

The location of his original grave is still marked, by a tombstone with a raven carved on it, not the only Poe in Baltimore, nor the only Poe in this cemetery, as his grandfather and brother lie here as well. The burial ground is quiet, compact and for America, ancient. The trees and the hulk of Westminster Hall cast shade to temper the June heat. It was here that for years an unnamed admirer brought Poe three roses and a bottle of cognac on his birthday, under the cover of darkness. But it’s possible, that had as much to do with soliciting support for the church and churchyard as it did out of respect for Poe himself. Poe is a valuable draw in many ways, and suits many purposes. The original toaster has long ago stopped his pilgrimage and it’s now done in a more theatrical, and tourism friendly style.

In 1875, Poe’s bones were exhumed and buried in the monument now found in the front of the churchyard, more befitting his stature as one of the greats of American, or world literature. He was a pop star before pop stars were commodities, but even then a tragic death sold books. The cemetery where Virginia was buried was relocated, and unclaimed bodies were disposed of. When a Poe biographer, William Gill rushed to save her bones, they were literally on the shovel about to be thrown in with the other unclaimed bodies, and would have been lost forever. She was reburied on one side of Edgar in a small bronze casket, his Aunt Clemm on the other, the family reunited in death. If his poem Spirit of the Dead contains the truth, he still worries about them both and still mourns Virginia’s death, even in the grave. For Poe believed death didn’t set us free. It just trapped us in the grave along with our fears that plagued us during our lives.

Poe's Grave in Baltimore — Twenty five years after his death, Poe was exhumed and laid to rest here, along with his wife Virginia and his beloved Aunt Clem.

Poe’s grave is the spot of pilgrimage for those looking for Poe in Baltimore, and traditional to leave a penny, a remnant of the original fund raising effort for the memorial. But it’s not the most enduring monument to Edgar Allan Poe.

That honor belongs to all of us. The fact that nearly 200 years after his death, when most writers of his generation are forgotten in all but name, Poe’s dark star continues to rise higher and higher. The movies that bore his name in the sixties had little resemblance to the stories that inspired them. But as time goes on, the public’s perception of Poe grows slowly more nuanced. The projects which bear his name now circle ever closer to the truth about the man. It’s quite likely that people who know his work now actually know more about the writer than those who followed his work while he was alive.

We might have reached a point where Poe would have actually been happy with his income and most important, his reputation. For despite being a known curmudgeon, one gets the sense from reading Poe’s letters and criticisms that he really did care what people thought of him, truly wanted to be thought of as an artist of the highest calibre.

Poe has managed not only that in death, but a pop culture status unknown to most writers of his generation. The man, and his work has truly proven to be immortal.

+ + +

The Horse You Came In On Saloon in Baltimore and Poe — The Horse You Came In On Saloon in Baltimore, which according to legend, was the last place Poe took a drink.

Poe in Baltimore: The Horse You Rode In On Tavern

It’s just after noon and I’m in Fell’s Point, another pilgrim’s point for Poe in Baltimore which butts up against the harbor. Out there lies Fort McHenry. This is the setting that inspired The Star Spangled Banner. I’m walking down the cobblestone street, a million miles away from the feel of the neighborhood where the Poe House and Museum lies, more trendy, with more bars and restaurants per square foot than anywhere else in Baltimore.

This was a maritime neighborhood back in the day, and it still carries that feel. You can hear seagulls and you suddenly remember after being in the center of Baltimore, that the city is an ocean town.

The Horse You Rode In On Saloon claims to be the oldest continuously operating tavern in the United States, having opened in 1775, obviously though under a different name. The current name comes from about fifty years ago, when a new owner was looking for something that would capture visitor’s attention. Anyone who knows the curse would recognize the name certainly. But it also referred to the fact that the fellow made the money for the down payment off a lucky horse at the track.

This is oddly out of synch, for Poe in Baltimore finally ran out of luck entirely.

With bar stools shaped like saddles, and horse puns and signs scattered throughout, the tavern does an admirable job of capturing the feel of the past, albeit an old west one oddly placed on the eastern seaboard. You can even purchase a bottle of Jack Daniel’s which is kept for you behind the bar, so when you come in they have your bottle waiting for you, just like in the movies.

It’s known as the last stop of Poe in Baltimore, where it is believed he spent his last night drinking in the city, before wandering out to the street and into that mysterious realm that spat him out on the other side, just this side of death. And though there’s no evidence Poe ever set foot in the place, they certainly play up the ghost named Edgar who occasionally swings the chandeliers and other ghostly acts which you find in many a haunted pub. Bartenders even set out a full shot glass on the bar at closing for the ghost. A dubious distinction for a man who came to Baltimore trying to avoid drink, and who might have met his end because of it.

I had the place pretty much to myself, chatted up a friendly lady bartender who persuaded me to have a pizza before I left town. Now this was a surprise, for it was only the night before I’d heard about The Horse and decided to stop in before leaving Poe in Baltimore. I was after all on a culinary quest as well as scholarly.

The pizza was surprisingly good, piled high with toppings, a thick layer of cheese on top, rich sauce … I mean what the fuck can you say about pizza? It’s either good or it’s not, you like or you don’t, and every town has a few places where the pizza has a somewhat local flavor. One thing I learned on this particular quest is that I’m not cut out to write restaurant reviews. When I’m traveling and in the thick of things, if I have a companion who is complaining of hunger I usually give them a stick of gum.

But I had the place to myself, there was no music playing and it was oddly silent when the bartender went to the back. So I closed my eyes and fell back in time, letting the room fill with people around me, the noise level rising and became aware of a diminutive man to my right, standing at the bar, taking a tentative drink from his glass, looking as afraid of it as a hiker who encounters a rattlesnake coiled up on the trail. Our eyes met and perhaps he saw in me that same fear of drink that he shared, and that same inability to turn away from it completely. I know the struggles Edgar went through with alcohol, as I’ve fought with them myself, albeit a bit more successfully. That first sip from the glass we both know can end there, or it can lead us down strange, tortured paths which empty out god only knows where.

I had several hours of driving ahead of me in the hot sun, New York City my finally destination, a town he knew well, where he found his greatest success and his greatest tragedy. We shared a sad smile, raised our glasses in a subtle toast and drained it. It was then I realized I was only staring at myself in the mirror behind the bar.

The back entrance to The Horse You Came In On Saloon.

Some time later when I stumbled outside I realized the scent of restaurants were wafting downstream from me, and I was instead filled with the scent of the sea. I walked down the street a few paces and sat down on the curb, my feet in the cobblestone gutter. Somewhere around here, in one of these gutters once lay Edgar Allan Poe, writhing in misery, dying. He was lucky to be identified, because if not he might have just become another unknown casualty on the streets, buried in a pauper’s grave rather than under a find bit of masonry which draws the curious to find Poe in Baltimore.

The world might never have known what became of Edgar Allan Poe, and he might have ended up merely a footnote in American literature.

As it was, he spent four days dying more or less alone, slowly slipping from life into legend, his own final act playing out like one of his own stories, mysterious and not leaving the reader with any sense of hope.

I started this quest looking for a man long dead, known throughout the world by many, but well known by few. It’s hard finding the playful side of Edgar Allan Poe. He was surprisingly athletic, a strong swimmer, curiously successful for a time in the military, was apparently a sweet little boy. And he loved collecting sea shells.

That was when it hit home, that thought along with the smell of the harbor and a seagull snatching up a bit of trash from the street in front of me.

Poe lived his life in the shadow of the sea. Boston, Richmond, Charleston, New York City, Baltimore … Poe seldom strayed far from being able to breathe air colored by the ocean. He didn’t take the train from Richmond to Baltimore on his last journey, he took a boat. One of his proudest moments as a child, which he wanted his foster mother to know, was how brave he was on the ocean crossing from Richmond to Britain.

Annabel Lee lie in a sepulcher by the sea … the last poem he would write centered around the death of his love and the ocean. His only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, recounts terror at sea. There are the relentless waves in A Dream Within A Dream which sucks the sands of life from between your fingers. In The City In The Sea, it is illuminated by a light from out of the melancholy waters. And when the ruler of that city, Death, gives way to allow Satan to rise up from the ocean, rising from a thousand thrones, that grand city slips under the waves.

Today, most of us see the ocean as a destination, a place to spend a holiday. For Poe, and certainly for Poe in Baltimore, it was an integrated part of his life. He was familiar with all aspects of it, and it comes up again and again, nearly as often as death and loss in his work. It’s the setting that ties so much of his work together.

And so I finally got up and made my way from this kingdom by the sea, to my own further north, leaving Poe in Baltimore where he was to stay for years, till I finally got around to writing this. And there he remains, lying by the side of his darling, his life and his bride, in their sepulchre there by the sea — in their tomb by the sounding sea.

Eating Poe: A look at the life of Edgar Allan Poe and a culinary literary travelogue

Shop for Poe in the Wytchery!

The Quarterly, Eating Poe in print, art prints of locations important in Poe’s life and Poe themed greeting cards

Shopping For Poe

The Secret of the Raven: At the end of Poe’s life, one finds the unexpected … hope

Classic Gothic Ghost Stories, Edgar Allan Poe, Journal

*Poe and The Raven’s lost Lenore? One of the last photos of Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton, about the same time.*

I spent much of the past eighteen months living with Edgar Allan Poe. I can’t say I knew the man when I first started. I had some travel experiences with him, basic biographical sketches and of course, his tales and poems. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted to get into his skin.

I needed his voice for that, and there are descriptions … pleasant, musical is a term often bandied about, sometimes dramatic, somewhat southern – rhyming sister with vista, haunted with enchanted, soft spoken or rather low spoken and somewhat restrained. We were recording an album of Poe’s poetry, sung rather than spoken which requires dissecting his words, finding the rhythm, the phrasing and the melody. How successful I was at that is anyone’s guess, but it felt right.

His letters, notes – these are invaluable for getting inside his head. His poetry, prose, his journalism is intended for a mass audience, even if it feels as though he’s writing for the reader alone. It’s with an eye for craftsmanship. His letters are more off the cuff, closer to his thoughts, not always so developed.

To read his letters is often to believe that the end is near, and you have to wonder whether Poe really felt that, or was just being melodramatic. The result was often painting himself into a corner, which usually proved disastrous.

I was reading two Poe biographies simultaneously, as well as recording Poe poems set to music when my father died and my relationship imploded. When she left, her daughter left as well, so it was much like losing a child. It echoed Poe’s own losses of family and love and I tried to soldier on in the work, but I finally had to push Poe aside for a while. He’s not known for happy endings, and he was a bad influence on my mood.

I’m not an alcoholic but I’ve got enough experience in the role that I can put in a passable performance.

Poe couldn’t hold his liquor. It not only wiped him out while drunk, but the hangovers appeared to be exquisite. You can’t put your life together that way, and you can’t use alcohol to take your mind away from your problems. They follow you, and even if you can drink them away for a short time, once the booze is gone they’re still there, more menacing than ever.

That said, when you’ve been dealt an insurmountable loss, you’re due a good bender. But I learned from his mistakes … when you’re in your cups, don’t be stupid.

In the eighteen months since those fateful days, I’ve lost another half dozen or so friends. I’m at the age where people my age start dying young, and too many of my other friends are at the age where dying is the natural thing to do. Poe didn’t romanticize death, he drew it in stark terms. To Poe, the horror isn’t in death, it’s in the ones that survive the deceased.

It feels romantic at times, to just let everything go to hell, to watch the ground rushing up to meet you. But there’s enough life left in me to jump back before impact. Poe kept telling me it was too soon – keep falling a while.

“I went through precisely the same scene. Again in about a year afterward. Then again — again — again & even once again at varying intervals. Each time I felt all the agonies of her death — and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly & clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drank, God only knows how often or how much … it was the horrible never-ending oscillation between hope & despair which I could not longer have endured without the total loss of reason. In the death of what was my life, then, I receive a new but — oh God! how melancholy an existence.”

If you want to get inside the head of Edgar Allan Poe, here’s what you do. Study him, read his words, particularly his own thoughts in his letters and notes.

Read what goes on inside the narrator’s head in his stories and poems. Then wait for life to give you the missing ingredient, to find yourself in those same situations he faced, see the same options before you, and start walking down the same roads he did. I understand that oscillation between hope and despair having dealt with two dying parents over the last few years, just as he did. I found it just as maddening.

Poe cultivated his image very carefully. Like many poets of the age, he took Byron’s bare bones – the doomed tragic figure and put his own skin on it. As I studied Poe and suffered hammering losses, I found myself assuming that same role. His clothes seemed to fit me.

In Annabel Lee, we’re left with the feeling that though mad from his loss, the narrator is a romantic figure, choosing to love her even in the grave. Poe teaches us not to let go, but to hold onto whatever insane hope you can grasp, even if others look on in horror.

But was that Edgar Allan Poe? When he regained a bit of reason after the death of his wife, he threw himself into the search for a replacement. But it seems obvious that all those he courted he chose for wealth and status. Did he fall in love with them?

Perhaps Poe could love at the drop of a hat. Perhaps he could make himself believe he loved, because it kept his heart pure in his pursuits.

At any rate, he failed with them all. He tried suicide, but was prevented from being successful at that too.

Then like me, he found himself in the town where he grew up. It provides a sense of familiarity when your world has turned upside down.

There he found his childhood sweetheart, widowed, wealthy and still carrying a torch for Edgar.

Or so it would appear. Truth and legend are impossibly entwined in the story of Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton. According to the story, they were engaged when Poe went away to college. He wrote her but her father never delivered the letters and she eventually married another, breaking Edgar’s heart.

Whether true or not, he did seem to write about her, she pops in his poetry, she kept a drawing of herself that Edgar drew as a young man. And when he met her again there in Richmond, I have no doubts that he believed he’d found his lost love. It might have been imagination on his part, but it was well within his grasp of imagining.

In The Raven, Poe asks for assurances that he will once again find his lost Lenore. The raven utters of course, nevermore.

But it was Poe’s claim at the end, that this was the lady who inspired him in The Raven, the woman who was his Lenore.

Historians will tell you that at best, Lenore is an amalgamation of all of Poe’s lost loves. I believe that, but more important, I believe that Poe believed when he told her, that she was the one, the only one.

And when Poe left Richmond for Baltimore, he was engaged to be her husband. The raven’s refrain of nevermore proved to be fiction.

The raven was wrong.

Eating Poe: A look at the life of Edgar Allan Poe and a culinary literary travelogue

Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe

Classic Gothic Ghost Stories, Edgar Allan Poe, February - A celebration of love

“The death… of a beautiful woman” is “unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world”
Edgar Allan Poe

Ligeia is a curious one in the Poe canon. Published in 1838, scholars are still debating how to take it. Some see it as a tale reminiscent of reincarnation, others a supernatural tale and quite possibly the hallucinations of an opium addict. Some even argue it’s satire. I believe the best way to read Poe is however you find it yourself. Poe did aspire to art, but he also aspired to make a living, and he knew what was popular to the masses. On Ligeia, Poe hits his mark and regardless of whatever layers of intent lie within, it’s an amazing tale of suspense and gothic horror.

Top Photo: Lacock Abbey by Todd Atteberry

Ligeia

And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.—Joseph Glanvill.

I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or, perhaps, I cannot now bring these points to mind, because, in truth, the character of my beloved, her rare learning, her singular yet placid cast of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical language, made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and stealthily progressive that they have been unnoticed and unknown. Yet I believe that I met her first and most frequently in some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine. Of her family—I have surely heard her speak. That it is of a remotely ancient date cannot be doubted. Ligeia! Ligeia! in studies of a nature more than all else adapted to deaden impressions of the outward world, it is by that sweet word alone—by Ligeia—that I bring before mine eyes in fancy the image of her who is no more. And now, while I write, a recollection flashes upon me that I have never known the paternal name of her who was my friend and my betrothed, and who became the partner of my studies, and finally the wife of my bosom. Was it a playful charge on the part of my Ligeia? or was it a test of my strength of affection, that I should institute no inquiries upon this point? or was it rather a caprice of my own—a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion? I but indistinctly recall the fact itself—what wonder that I have utterly forgotten the circumstances which originated or attended it? And, indeed, if ever she, the wan and the misty-winged Ashtophet of idolatrous Egypt, presided, as they tell, over marriages ill-omened, then most surely she presided over mine.

There is one dear topic, however, on which my memory fails me not. It is the person of Ligeia. In stature she was tall, somewhat slender, and, in her latter days, even emaciated. I would in vain attempt to portray the majesty, the quiet ease, of her demeanor, or the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her footfall. She came and departed as a shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study save by the dear music of her low sweet voice, as she placed her marble hand upon my shoulder. In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream—an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered vision about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. Yet her features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen. “There is no exquisite beauty,” says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, “without some strangeness in the proportion.” Yet, although I saw that the features of Ligeia were not of a classic regularity—although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed “exquisite,” and felt that there was much of “strangeness” pervading it, yet I have tried in vain to detect the irregularity and to trace home my own perception of “the strange.” I examined the contour of the lofty and pale forehead—it was faultless—how cold indeed that word when applied to a majesty so divine!—the skin rivalling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, “hyacinthine!” I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose—and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of surface, the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the aquiline, the same harmoniously curved nostrils speaking the free spirit. I regarded the sweet mouth. Here was indeed the triumph of all things heavenly—the magnificent turn of the short upper lip—the soft, voluptuous slumber of the under—the dimples which sported, and the color which spoke—the teeth glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling, every ray of the holy light which fell upon them in her serene and placid, yet most exultingly radiant of all smiles. I scrutinized the formation of the chin—and here, too, I found the gentleness of breadth, the softness and the majesty, the fullness and the spirituality, of the Greek—the contour which the god Apollo revealed but in a dream, to Cleomenes, the son of the Athenian. And then I peered into the large eyes of Ligeia.

For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique. It might have been, too, that in these eyes of my beloved lay the secret to which Lord Verulam alludes. They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad. Yet it was only at intervals—in moments of intense excitement—that this peculiarity became more than slightly noticeable in Ligeia. And at such moments was her beauty—in my heated fancy thus it appeared perhaps—the beauty of beings either above or apart from the earth—the beauty of the fabulous Houri of the Turk. The hue of the orbs was the most brilliant of black, and, far over them, hung jetty lashes of great length. The brows, slightly irregular in outline, had the same tint. The “strangeness,” however, which I found in the eyes, was of a nature distinct from the formation, or the color, or the brilliancy of the features, and must, after all, be referred to the expression. Ah, word of no meaning! behind whose vast latitude of mere sound we intrench our ignorance of so much of the spiritual. The expression of the eyes of Ligeia! How for long hours have I pondered upon it! How have I, through the whole of a midsummer night, struggled to fathom it! What was it—that something more profound than the well of Democritus—which lay far within the pupils of my beloved? What was it? I was possessed with a passion to discover. Those eyes! those large, those shining, those divine orbs! they became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers.

There is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact—never, I believe, noticed in the schools—that, in our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember. And thus how frequently, in my intense scrutiny of Ligeia’s eyes, have I felt approaching the full knowledge of their expression—felt it approaching—yet not quite be mine—and so at length entirely depart! And (strange, oh strangest mystery of all!) I found, in the commonest objects of the universe, a circle of analogies to that expression. I mean to say that, subsequently to the period when Ligeia’s beauty passed into my spirit, there dwelling as in a shrine, I derived, from many existences in the material world, a sentiment such as I felt always aroused within me by her large and luminous orbs. Yet not the more could I define that sentiment, or analyze, or even steadily view it. I recognized it, let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidly-growing vine—in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean; in the falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually aged people. And there are one or two stars in heaven—(one especially, a star of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be found near the large star in Lyra) in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made aware of the feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds from stringed instruments, and not unfrequently by passages from books. Among innumerable other instances, I well remember something in a volume of Joseph Glanvill, which (perhaps merely from its quaintness—who shall say?) never failed to inspire me with the sentiment;—“And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”

Length of years, and subsequent reflection, have enabled me to trace, indeed, some remote connection between this passage in the English moralist and a portion of the character of Ligeia. An intensity in thought, action, or speech, was possibly, in her, a result, or at least an index, of that gigantic volition which, during our long intercourse, failed to give other and more immediate evidence of its existence. Of all the women whom I have ever known, she, the outwardly calm, the ever-placid Ligeia, was the most violently a prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern passion. And of such passion I could form no estimate, save by the miraculous expansion of those eyes which at once so delighted and appalled me—by the almost magical melody, modulation, distinctness and placidity of her very low voice—and by the fierce energy (rendered doubly effective by contrast with her manner of utterance) of the wild words which she habitually uttered.

I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense—such as I have never known in woman. In the classical tongues was she deeply proficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended in regard to the modern dialects of Europe, I have never known her at fault. Indeed upon any theme of the most admired, because simply the most abstruse of the boasted erudition of the academy, have I ever found Ligeia at fault? How singularly—how thrillingly, this one point in the nature of my wife has forced itself, at this late period only, upon my attention! I said her knowledge was such as I have never known in woman—but where breathes the man who has traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science? I saw not then what I now clearly perceive, that the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were astounding; yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most busily occupied during the earlier years of our marriage. With how vast a triumph—with how vivid a delight—with how much of all that is ethereal in hope—did I feel, as she bent over me in studies but little sought—but less known—that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I might at length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!

How poignant, then, must have been the grief with which, after some years, I beheld my well-grounded expectations take wings to themselves and fly away! Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted. Her presence, her readings alone, rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed. Wanting the radiant lustre of her eyes, letters, lambent and golden, grew duller than Saturnian lead. And now those eyes shone less and less frequently upon the pages over which I pored. Ligeia grew ill. The wild eyes blazed with a too—too glorious effulgence; the pale fingers became of the transparent waxen hue of the grave, and the blue veins upon the lofty forehead swelled and sank impetuously with the tides of the gentle emotion. I saw that she must die—and I struggled desperately in spirit with the grim Azrael. And the struggles of the passionate wife were, to my astonishment, even more energetic than my own. There had been much in her stern nature to impress me with the belief that, to her, death would have come without its terrors;—but not so. Words are impotent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled with the Shadow. I groaned in anguish at the pitiable spectacle. I would have soothed—I would have reasoned; but, in the intensity of her wild desire for life,—for life—but for life—solace and reason were the uttermost folly. Yet not until the last instance, amid the most convulsive writhings of her fierce spirit, was shaken the external placidity of her demeanor. Her voice grew more gentle—grew more low—yet I would not wish to dwell upon the wild meaning of the quietly uttered words. My brain reeled as I hearkened entranced, to a melody more than mortal—to assumptions and aspirations which mortality had never before known.

That she loved me I should not have doubted; and I might have been easily aware that, in a bosom such as hers, love would have reigned no ordinary passion. But in death only, was I fully impressed with the strength of her affection. For long hours, detaining my hand, would she pour out before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate devotion amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to be so blessed by such confessions?—how had I deserved to be so cursed with the removal of my beloved in the hour of her making them? But upon this subject I cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only, that in Ligeia’s more than womanly abandonment to a love, alas! all unmerited, all unworthily bestowed, I at length recognized the principle of her longing with so wildly earnest a desire for the life which was now fleeing so rapidly away. It is this wild longing—it is this eager vehemence of desire for life—but for life—that I have no power to portray—no utterance capable of expressing.

At high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning me, peremptorily, to her side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed by herself not many days before. I obeyed her.—They were these:

Lo! ‘tis a gala night Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high, Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly; Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings Invisible Wo!

That motley drama!—oh, be sure It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased forever more,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness and more of Sin And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout, A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs The mimes become its food,
And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs In human gore imbued.

Out—out are the lights—out all! And over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling,
affirm That the play is the tragedy,
“Man,” And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

“O God!” half shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet and extending her arms aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these lines—“O God! O Divine Father!—shall these things be undeviatingly so?—shall this Conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee? Who—who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor? Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”

And now, as if exhausted with emotion, she suffered her white arms to fall, and returned solemnly to her bed of death. And as she breathed her last sighs, there came mingled with them a low murmur from her lips. I bent to them my ear and distinguished, again, the concluding words of the passage in Glanvill—“Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”

She died;—and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could no longer endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim and decaying city by the Rhine. I had no lack of what the world calls wealth. Ligeia had brought me far more, very far more than ordinarily falls to the lot of mortals. After a few months, therefore, of weary and aimless wandering, I purchased, and put in some repair, an abbey, which I shall not name, in one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England. The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored memories connected with both, had much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into that remote and unsocial region of the country. Yet although the external abbey, with its verdant decay hanging about it, suffered but little alteration, I gave way, with a child-like perversity, and perchance with a faint hope of alleviating my sorrows, to a display of more than regal magnificence within.—For such follies, even in childhood, I had imbibed a taste and now they came back to me as if in the dotage of grief. Alas, I feel how much even of incipient madness might have been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic draperies, in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices and furniture, in the Bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted gold! I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams. But these absurdities I must not pause to detail. Let me speak only of that one chamber, ever accursed, whither in a moment of mental alienation, I led from the altar as my bride—as the successor of the unforgotten Ligeia—the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine.

There is no individual portion of the architecture and decoration of that bridal chamber which is not now visibly before me. Where were the souls of the haughty family of the bride, when, through thirst of gold, they permitted to pass the threshold of an apartment so bedecked, a maiden and a daughter so beloved? I have said that I minutely remember the details of the chamber—yet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep moment—and here there was no system, no keeping, in the fantastic display, to take hold upon the memory. The room lay in a high turret of the castellated abbey, was pentagonal in shape, and of capacious size. Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagon was the sole window—an immense sheet of unbroken glass from Venice—a single pane, and tinted of a leaden hue, so that the rays of either the sun or moon, passing through it, fell with a ghastly lustre on the objects within. Over the upper portion of this huge window, extended the trellice-work of an aged vine, which clambered up the massy walls of the turret. The ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device. From out the most central recess of this melancholy vaulting, depended, by a single chain of gold with long links, a huge censer of the same metal, Saracenic in pattern, and with many perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them, as if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of parti-colored fires.

Some few ottomans and golden candelabra, of Eastern figure, were in various stations about—and there was the couch, too—bridal couch—of an Indian model, and low, and sculptured of solid ebony, with a pall-like canopy above. In each of the angles of the chamber stood on end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs of the kings over against Luxor, with their aged lids full of immemorial sculpture. But in the draping of the apartment lay, alas! the chief phantasy of all. The lofty walls, gigantic in height—even unproportionably so—were hung from summit to foot, in vast folds, with a heavy and massive-looking tapestry—tapestry of a material which was found alike as a carpet on the floor, as a covering for the ottomans and the ebony bed, as a canopy for the bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of the curtains which partially shaded the window. The material was the richest cloth of gold. It was spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures, about a foot in diameter, and wrought upon the cloth in patterns of the most jetty black. But these figures partook of the true character of the arabesque only when regarded from a single point of view. By a contrivance now common, and indeed traceable to a very remote period of antiquity, they were made changeable in aspect. To one entering the room, they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities; but upon a farther advance, this appearance gradually departed; and step by step, as the visitor moved his station in the chamber, he saw himself surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong to the superstition of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the draperies—giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.

In halls such as these—in a bridal chamber such as this—I passed, with the Lady of Tremaine, the unhallowed hours of the first month of our marriage—passed them with but little disquietude. That my wife dreaded the fierce moodiness of my temper—that she shunned me and loved me but little—I could not help perceiving; but it gave me rather pleasure than otherwise. I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man. My memory flew back, (oh, with what intensity of regret!) to Ligeia, the beloved, the august, the beautiful, the entombed. I revelled in recollections of her purity, of her wisdom, of her lofty, her ethereal nature, of her passionate, her idolatrous love. Now, then, did my spirit fully and freely burn with more than all the fires of her own. In the excitement of my opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in the shackles of the drug) I would call aloud upon her name, during the silence of the night, or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by day, as if, through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the consuming ardor of my longing for the departed, I could restore her to the pathway she had abandoned—ah, could it be forever?—upon the earth.

About the commencement of the second month of the marriage, the Lady Rowena was attacked with sudden illness, from which her recovery was slow. The fever which consumed her rendered her nights uneasy; and in her perturbed state of half-slumber, she spoke of sounds, and of motions, in and about the chamber of the turret, which I concluded had no origin save in the distemper of her fancy, or perhaps in the phantasmagoric influences of the chamber itself. She became at length convalescent—finally well. Yet but a brief period elapsed, ere a second more violent disorder again threw her upon a bed of suffering; and from this attack her frame, at all times feeble, never altogether recovered. Her illnesses were, after this epoch, of alarming character, and of more alarming recurrence, defying alike the knowledge and the great exertions of her physicians. With the increase of the chronic disease which had thus, apparently, taken too sure hold upon her constitution to be eradicated by human means, I could not fail to observe a similar increase in the nervous irritation of her temperament, and in her excitability by trivial causes of fear. She spoke again, and now more frequently and pertinaciously, of the sounds—of the slight sounds—and of the unusual motions among the tapestries, to which she had formerly alluded.

One night, near the closing in of September, she pressed this distressing subject with more than usual emphasis upon my attention. She had just awakened from an unquiet slumber, and I had been watching, with feelings half of anxiety, half of vague terror, the workings of her emaciated countenance. I sat by the side of her ebony bed, upon one of the ottomans of India. She partly arose, and spoke, in an earnest low whisper, of sounds which she then heard, but which I could not hear—of motions which she then saw, but which I could not perceive. The wind was rushing hurriedly behind the tapestries, and I wished to show her (what, let me confess it, I could not all believe) that those almost inarticulate breathings, and those very gentle variations of the figures upon the wall, were but the natural effects of that customary rushing of the wind. But a deadly pallor, overspreading her face, had proved to me that my exertions to reassure her would be fruitless. She appeared to be fainting, and no attendants were within call. I remembered where was deposited a decanter of light wine which had been ordered by her physicians, and hastened across the chamber to procure it. But, as I stepped beneath the light of the censer, two circumstances of a startling nature attracted my attention. I had felt that some palpable although invisible object had passed lightly by my person; and I saw that there lay upon the golden carpet, in the very middle of the rich lustre thrown from the censer, a shadow—a faint, indefinite shadow of angelic aspect—such as might be fancied for the shadow of a shade. But I was wild with the excitement of an immoderate dose of opium, and heeded these things but little, nor spoke of them to Rowena. Having found the wine, I recrossed the chamber, and poured out a gobletful, which I held to the lips of the fainting lady. She had now partially recovered, however, and took the vessel herself, while I sank upon an ottoman near me, with my eyes fastened upon her person. It was then that I became distinctly aware of a gentle footfall upon the carpet, and near the couch; and in a second thereafter, as Rowena was in the act of raising the wine to her lips, I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid. If this I saw—not so Rowena. She swallowed the wine unhesitatingly, and I forbore to speak to her of a circumstance which must, after all, I considered, have been but the suggestion of a vivid imagination, rendered morbidly active by the terror of the lady, by the opium, and by the hour.

Yet I cannot conceal it from my own perception that, immediately subsequent to the fall of the ruby-drops, a rapid change for the worse took place in the disorder of my wife; so that, on the third subsequent night, the hands of her menials prepared her for the tomb, and on the fourth, I sat alone, with her shrouded body, in that fantastic chamber which had received her as my bride.—Wild visions, opium-engendered, flitted, shadow-like, before me. I gazed with unquiet eye upon the sarcophagi in the angles of the room, upon the varying figures of the drapery, and upon the writhing of the parti-colored fires in the censer overhead. My eyes then fell, as I called to mind the circumstances of a former night, to the spot beneath the glare of the censer where I had seen the faint traces of the shadow. It was there, however, no longer; and breathing with greater freedom, I turned my glances to the pallid and rigid figure upon the bed. Then rushed upon me a thousand memories of Ligeia—and then came back upon my heart, with the turbulent violence of a flood, the whole of that unutterable wo with which I had regarded her thus enshrouded. The night waned; and still, with a bosom full of bitter thoughts of the one only and supremely beloved, I remained gazing upon the body of Rowena.

It might have been midnight, or perhaps earlier, or later, for I had taken no note of time, when a sob, low, gentle, but very distinct, startled me from my revery.—I felt that it came from the bed of ebony—the bed of death. I listened in an agony of superstitious terror—but there was no repetition of the sound. I strained my vision to detect any motion in the corpse—but there was not the slightest perceptible. Yet I could not have been deceived. I had heard the noise, however faint, and my soul was awakened within me. I resolutely and perseveringly kept my attention riveted upon the body. Many minutes elapsed before any circumstance occurred tending to throw light upon the mystery. At length it became evident that a slight, a very feeble, and barely noticeable tinge of color had flushed up within the cheeks, and along the sunken small veins of the eyelids. Through a species of unutterable horror and awe, for which the language of mortality has no sufficiently energetic expression, I felt my heart cease to beat, my limbs grow rigid where I sat. Yet a sense of duty finally operated to restore my self-possession. I could no longer doubt that we had been precipitate in our preparations—that Rowena still lived. It was necessary that some immediate exertion be made; yet the turret was altogether apart from the portion of the abbey tenanted by the servants—there were none within call—I had no means of summoning them to my aid without leaving the room for many minutes—and this I could not venture to do. I therefore struggled alone in my endeavors to call back the spirit ill hovering. In a short period it was certain, however, that a relapse had taken place; the color disappeared from both eyelid and cheek, leaving a wanness even more than that of marble; the lips became doubly shrivelled and pinched up in the ghastly expression of death; a repulsive clamminess and coldness overspread rapidly the surface of the body; and all the usual rigorous illness immediately supervened. I fell back with a shudder upon the couch from which I had been so startlingly aroused, and again gave myself up to passionate waking visions of Ligeia.

An hour thus elapsed when (could it be possible?) I was a second time aware of some vague sound issuing from the region of the bed. I listened—in extremity of horror. The sound came again—it was a sigh. Rushing to the corpse, I saw—distinctly saw—a tremor upon the lips. In a minute afterward they relaxed, disclosing a bright line of the pearly teeth. Amazement now struggled in my bosom with the profound awe which had hitherto reigned there alone. I felt that my vision grew dim, that my reason wandered; and it was only by a violent effort that I at length succeeded in nerving myself to the task which duty thus once more had pointed out. There was now a partial glow upon the forehead and upon the cheek and throat; a perceptible warmth pervaded the whole frame; there was even a slight pulsation at the heart. The lady lived; and with redoubled ardor I betook myself to the task of restoration. I chafed and bathed the temples and the hands, and used every exertion which experience, and no little medical reading, could suggest. But in vain. Suddenly, the color fled, the pulsation ceased, the lips resumed the expression of the dead, and, in an instant afterward, the whole body took upon itself the icy chilliness, the livid hue, the intense rigidity, the sunken outline, and all the loathsome peculiarities of that which has been, for many days, a tenant of the tomb.

And again I sunk into visions of Ligeia—and again, (what marvel that I shudder while I write,) again there reached my ears a low sob from the region of the ebony bed. But why shall I minutely detail the unspeakable horrors of that night? Why shall I pause to relate how, time after time, until near the period of the gray dawn, this hideous drama of revivification was repeated; how each terrific relapse was only into a sterner and apparently more irredeemable death; how each agony wore the aspect of a struggle with some invisible foe; and how each struggle was succeeded by I know not what of wild change in the personal appearance of the corpse? Let me hurry to a conclusion.

The greater part of the fearful night had worn away, and she who had been dead, once again stirred—and now more vigorously than hitherto, although arousing from a dissolution more appalling in its utter hopelessness than any. I had long ceased to struggle or to move, and remained sitting rigidly upon the ottoman, a helpless prey to a whirl of violent emotions, of which extreme awe was perhaps the least terrible, the least consuming. The corpse, I repeat, stirred, and now more vigorously than before. The hues of life flushed up with unwonted energy into the countenance—the limbs relaxed—and, save that the eyelids were yet pressed heavily together, and that the bandages and draperies of the grave still imparted their charnel character to the figure, I might have dreamed that Rowena had indeed shaken off, utterly, the fetters of Death. But if this idea was not, even then, altogether adopted, I could at least doubt no longer, when, arising from the bed, tottering, with feeble steps, with closed eyes, and with the manner of one bewildered in a dream, the thing that was enshrouded advanced boldly and palpably into the middle of the apartment.

I trembled not—I stirred not—for a crowd of unutterable fancies connected with the air, the stature, the demeanor of the figure, rushing hurriedly through my brain, had paralyzed—had chilled me into stone. I stirred not—but gazed upon the apparition. There was a mad disorder in my thoughts—a tumult unappeasable. Could it, indeed, be the living Rowena who confronted me? Could it indeed be Rowena at all—the fair-haired, the blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine? Why, why should I doubt it? The bandage lay heavily about the mouth—but then might it not be the mouth of the breathing Lady of Tremaine? And the cheeks—there were the roses as in her noon of life—yes, these might indeed be the fair cheeks of the living Lady of Tremaine. And the chin, with its dimples, as in health, might it not be hers?—but had she then grown taller since her malady? What inexpressible madness seized me with that thought? One bound, and I had reached her feet! Shrinking from my touch, she let fall from her head, unloosened, the ghastly cerements which had confined it, and there streamed forth, into the rushing atmosphere of the chamber, huge masses of long and dishevelled hair; it was blacker than the raven wings of the midnight! And now slowly opened the eyes of the figure which stood before me. “Here then, at least,” I shrieked aloud, “can I never—can I never be mistaken—these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes—of my lost love—of the lady—of the LADY LIGEIA.”

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