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Edgar Allan Poe’s The Conqueror Worm: The play is the tragedy, ‘Man’  And its hero, the Conqueror Worm

Journal, Poe's Poetry / by

Poe’s The Conqueror Worm can be found in his tale Ligeia, a story of death, resurrection, opium abuse, more death and madness. The poem depicts a performance of mimes, controlled by vast, shapeless forms offstage. High above angels watch and weep, and at last an evil, formless shape crawls center stage and eats the hapless mimes, and as the curtain comes down, the title of the play, Man is revealed, and the hero, The Conqueror Worm introduced.

Poe’s mimes represent man, who given the illusion of self determination, are in fact, ruled by dark forces unseen and unstoppable. Even those deities and their minions in which we place hope, in Poe’s The Conqueror Worm are helpless to intervene. Poe proclaims we all meet the same fate, certain and hideous death, and the inevitable decomposition of what remains of us.

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Edgar Allan Poe’s The Conqueror Worm

Lo! ’t is 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 for evermore
   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 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,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
   Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
   And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

 

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About the author and artist

The haunted, macabre, the downright peculiar ….the curiously gothic world of Todd Atteberry

 

Gothic horror stories, haunted travelogues, a healthy dose of witchcraft, paganism, stone circles and ancient trackways.

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