Edgar Allan Poe and the Terror of Meaning

By Brenton L. Delp

Halloween usually comes with an understanding. We agree to be frightened for an evening, provided that the fear remains entertaining and the dead respect the boundaries of the occasion. The skeleton hangs beside the porch light. The ghost is someone we know beneath a sheet. Tomorrow the decorations can be put away. Death has been invited, suitably dressed, to a gathering from which we expect it to depart.

Edgar Allan Poe is a less considerate host. Recognizing the machinery does not make his rooms safe. We can understand how the effect was produced and still be left with what produced the need for it. The person who died remains unavailable. The mind that demanded an answer may discover that it has furnished the voice answering it.

Poe approaches this difficulty as a storyteller. He gives us a chamber, an interruption, a person who cannot stop listening. We enter an experience before we can turn it into a position about existence. His characters have something to lose, and the story allows us to feel how much before showing us how little that importance may protect them.

The existential terror concerns what death may do to the significance of having lived at all. A beloved person is irreplaceable. An injury demands an answer. Years of effort ought to amount to something. These convictions possess an authority within consciousness that death appears under no obligation to recognize. There may be no final explanation proportionate to what has been endured, no reconciliation waiting beyond the last breath. The possibility reaches backward into the life still being lived.

Prince Prospero has a practical answer. In “The Masque of the Red Death,” he takes his companions into an abbey and seals the gates while pestilence devastates the country. “The external world could take care of itself.” Inside, the arrangement is explicit:

In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure.¹

Poe supplies the inventory and its reassuring geography: “All these and security were within. Without was the ‘Red Death.’” Wealth has purchased a place where thinking can be treated as bad manners. A clock interrupts the festivities, but the dancers repeatedly recover their composure. They mistake the next interval for another exemption.

At midnight the stranger appears. Prospero’s dagger accomplishes nothing. Beneath the costume, the revellers find the grave-clothes “untenanted by any tangible form.” They die; the clock and lights follow:

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.¹

There is nobody left inside to turn the experience into a lesson. The party does not recover from its interruption. It was always taking place on borrowed time.

“The Raven” makes the enclosure private. A grieving reader has sought “From my books surcease of sorrow.” At the door he finds “Darkness there and nothing more.” When a bird enters, he suspects its utterance is “its only stock and store.” Nevertheless, he asks:

Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore —
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”²

The speaker’s question makes a borrowed word answer for eternity. We can see the poverty of the oracle without possessing a better assurance of reunion. Knowing how he constructs the torment does not return Lenore. The visitor needs no knowledge of death; the bereaved man supplies everything its answer requires. Eventually the word seems to govern his own future:

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted — nevermore!²

The poem ends inside the certainty it has watched him produce. Explanation remains outside, correctly describing the lock.

“The Conqueror Worm” enlarges the room into a theatre:

An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears.³

The human figures are “Mere puppets.” Their pursuit returns them to the same place, with “Horror the soul of the plot.” Then the worm enters and feeds. The witnesses possess enough understanding to mourn and supply no rescue. Heaven’s representatives have seats for the performance. Being seen has made no difference to being devoured.

The closing movement gives the audience its verdict:

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.³

Recognition survives long enough to name the catastrophe. The poem shows us no passage from that recognition into redemption. Its angels can announce the title when the bodies have finished dying.

In “Ligeia,” extraordinary intelligence offers no composure before death. The narrator describes his wife’s resistance:

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 alike the uttermost of folly.⁴

Her question is fierce: “shall these things be undeviatingly so? — shall this Conqueror be not once unconquered?” After her death, the narrator becomes “a bounden slave in the trammels of opium.” A second marriage places Rowena in a world already occupied by the lost woman. At Rowena’s deathbed, he finally identifies an apparently revived figure as Ligeia.⁴

The desire receives an image of fulfillment through a narration we cannot safely trust. Perhaps the beloved has returned. Perhaps grief and intoxication have made another person unrecognizable except as the one he demands to see. Either reading leaves the apparent miracle surrounded by destruction. Rowena’s place in the story makes the cost particularly ugly: the living woman has scarcely been permitted to exist outside the longing for the dead one.

“The Oval Portrait” gives the wish to preserve a more respectable occupation. Its painter is a man “having already a bride in his Art.” His wife sits while he works, becoming weaker as the image approaches completion:

And he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him.⁵

His final recognition comes in two movements:

“This is indeed Life itself!”

Then he turns toward the woman:

She was dead!⁵

The portrait survives to impress another visitor. The achievement remains available; its subject does not. That is a peculiarly human arrangement, worthy of our admiration until someone troubles to explain where the colors came from. The story makes preservation appalling by allowing it to succeed in the wrong place. Something has been kept. The person whose presence should have mattered has been lost during the keeping. No claim about the endurance of beauty can quietly put her back into the room.

“A Dream Within a Dream” takes the effort into the speaker’s hand:

And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!⁶

He reduces the demand until it should seem almost modest:

O, God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?⁶

Even one would interrupt the totality of the loss. The appeal receives no answer before the poem ends with its question:

Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?⁶

Loss has entered the reality of what was possessed. The speaker cannot hold it, and begins questioning what it was. The sand does not pause while the distinction is considered. The poem allows the question to remain open while continuing to empty the hand.

Yet Poe cannot honestly be made the author of a single doctrine of annihilation. In Eureka, he attempts a divine account in which “the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness.” He claims that “the existence of Evil becomes intelligible; but in this view it becomes more — it becomes endurable.” The conclusion insists:

In the meantime bear in mind that all is Life — Life — Life within Life — the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine.⁷

This attempt at reconciliation belongs to the struggle. It cannot compel the reader to feel reconciled. If the person disappears into a greater unity, we can still ask what has become of the person we wanted back. A universe made coherent may leave that particular demand unsatisfied. The tales and poems give the individual loss a weight that the encompassing account must answer. Their terror is not removed simply because a speculative work announces that existence can be understood otherwise.

To force these works into agreement would deprive them of part of their force. Poe’s narrators are not reliable messengers carrying one final answer from their creator. They remember, invent, insist, and sometimes lose their capacity to distinguish what occurred from what they needed to occur. The reader must listen without granting them everything. That uncertainty is part of the fear.

Nor does their terror establish that life is meaningless. A story can make a possibility nearly unbearable without proving it true. The difficulty is that recognizing this leaves the possibility intact. We have explained why the voice may be mistaken. We have not thereby established that anything will answer the loss which made the voice necessary.

Poe makes meaning intensely present and its security doubtful. The beloved cannot be replaced. The suffering cannot be undone. The mind can demand a significance that no event within the story confirms. It can also manufacture an answer and become imprisoned by it. We cannot safely confuse the strength of the demand with evidence that the world intends to satisfy it.

For Halloween, this is a less marketable fear than a figure waiting behind a door. A figure can be exposed, defeated, or revealed as someone enjoying a joke. The darker possibility is that we might understand perfectly what has happened and still be unable to live with what it means. The house can be empty. The footsteps can have an explanation. The person we were hoping to find can still be gone.

We can finish the story and switch on another light. The room is familiar again. What has changed is how confidently we believe that familiarity protects us. The decorations will come down. The questions have nowhere else to go.

Notes

Quotations are from Poe’s original works, which are in the public domain. Verse line breaks are retained; quotation marks and spacing are regularized.

1. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death”⁠, Broadway Journal, July 19, 1845, pp. 17–19. “Grieve” follows the editors’ correction of a typographical error.
2. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”⁠, The Raven and Other Poems (1845), pp. 1–5, incorporating subsequent manuscript revisions. “Aidenn” names Eden or Paradise.
3. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Conqueror Worm”⁠, text incorporating revisions associated with the Richmond Examiner proof sheets, about September 1849, reconstructed from J. H. Whitty’s description.
4. Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia”⁠, New World, February 15, 1845, pp. 100–101.
5. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Oval Portrait”⁠, editorial reading text based on the Broadway Journal version. The final quotations are separated here to emphasize the concluding turn.
6. Edgar Allan Poe, “A Dream Within a Dream”⁠, editorial reading text. Quotations from the second stanza.
7. Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka⁠, concluding section⁠, revised text of Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848), pp. 141–143.