Poe shadow Read Free Page B

made excellent partners. My parents were both gone by then, killed by a carriage accident while they were traveling in Brazil for my father’s business. There was an empty spot where there once had been guidance from my father. And yet, the life he’d arranged for me flowed on in his absence—all this, Hattie, Peter, the well-pressed clients appearing daily in our offices, my stately family house shaded by ancient poplars and known as Glen Eliza, after my mother. All this ran on as though operated by some noiseless and ingenious automatic machine. Until Poe’s death.
    I had the young man’s weakness of wishing others to understand everything that concerned me—of needing to
make
others understand. I believed I could. I can call to mind the very first time I told Peter we should work to protect Edgar A. Poe. Believing that, as a result of the compliance I imagined on the part of Peter, I would be able to report back the good tidings to Mr. Poe.
    My very first letter to Edgar Poe, on March 16, 1845, was brought about by a question I had when reading “The Raven,” then a recently published poem. The final verses leave the raven sitting atop a bust of Pallas “above my chamber door.” With these last lines of the poem, the impish and mysterious bird continues to haunt the young man of the poem, perhaps for eternity:
     
    And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
    And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
    And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
    Shall be lifted
—
nevermore!
     
    If the raven sits at the top of the chamber door, though, what lamplight would be behind him in such a way as to cast his shadow to the floor? With the impetuousness of youth, I wrote to Poe himself for an answer, for I wanted to be able to envision every crevice and corner of the poem. Along with the question, I enclosed in the same letter to Mr. Poe a subscription fee for a new magazine called
The Broadway Journal,
which Poe was then editing, to make sure I’d see whatever else flowed from his pen.
    After months without receiving any reply, and without a single number of
The Broadway Journal,
I wrote again to Mr. Poe. When the silence persisted, I addressed a complaint to an associate of the magazine in New York and insisted that my subscription be refunded in full. I no longer desired to ever see it. One day, I received my three dollars back, along with a letter.
    Signed Edgar A. Poe.
    How startling, how uplifting that was, such a lofty visionary bringing himself to personally address a mere reader of three and twenty years! He even explained the minor mystery regarding the raven’s shadow: “My conception was that of the bracket candelabrum affixed against the wall, high up above the door and bust—as is often seen in the English palaces, and even in some of the better houses in New-York.”
    There was the very nature of the raven’s shadow explained just for me! Poe also thanked me for my literary opinions and encouraged me to send more. He explained that his financial partners in
The Broadway Journal
had forced its termination in yet another defeat in the struggle between money and literature. He had never regarded the journal as more than a temporary adjunct to other designs. One day, he said, we might meet in person and he would confide in me his plans, and inquire my advice. “I am entirely ignorant,” he stated, “of all law matters.”
    I wrote nine letters to Poe between 1845 and his death in October 1849. I received in return four courteous and sincere notes in his own hand.
    His most energetic comments were about his ambitions for his proposed journal,
The Stylus.
Poe had spent years editing other people’s magazines. Poe said the journal would finally allow
men of genius
to triumph over
men of talent,
men who could feel rather than men who could think. It would cheer no author who did not deserve it, and would publish all literature that was