The Slender Poe Anthology Read Free Page A

is one of my favorite works of Poe, for I have spent more than one magical hour listening to the River of Silence.
    This arabesque attracts other poets as well. In her essay, The Bright Eyes of Eleonora , Mary Oliver calls Poe “a perfect acrobat of language.” In his introduction to a special edition of Eleonora , Richard Wilbur, always one of the most insightful and generous of Poe exegetes, notes “an admirably subtle use of light and dark and shadow throughout the story.”

ELEONORA
    â€œSub conservatione formae specificae salva anima.”
—Raymond Lully
    I am come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Menhave called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whethermadness is or is not the loftiest intelligence — whether much that isglorious — whether all that is profound — does not spring from diseaseof thought — from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the generalintellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things whichescape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtainglimpses of eternity, and thrill, in awakening, to find that theyhave been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learnsomething of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledgewhich is of evil. They penetrate, however, rudderless or compasslessinto the vast ocean of the “light ineffable,” and again, like theadventures of the Nubian geographer, “ agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi .”
    We will say, then, that I am mad. I grant, at least, that there are twodistinct conditions of my mental existence — the condition of a lucidreason, not to be disputed, and belonging to the memory of eventsforming the first epoch of my life — and a condition of shadow and doubt,appertaining to the present, and to the recollection of what constitutesthe second great era of my being. Therefore, what I shall tell of theearlier period, believe; and to what I may relate of the later time,give only such credit as may seem due, or doubt it altogether, or, ifdoubt it ye cannot, then play unto its riddle the Oedipus.
    She whom I loved in youth, and of whom I now pen calmly and distinctlythese remembrances, was the sole daughter of the only sister of mymother long departed. Eleonora was the name of my cousin. We hadalways dwelled together, beneath a tropical sun, in the Valley of theMany-Colored Grass. No unguided footstep ever came upon that vale; forit lay away up among a range of giant hills that hung beetling aroundabout it, shutting out the sunlight from its sweetest recesses. No pathwas trodden in its vicinity; and, to reach our happy home, there wasneed of putting back, with force, the foliage of many thousands offorest trees, and of crushing to death the glories of many millions offragrant flowers. Thus it was that we lived all alone, knowing nothingof the world without the valley — I, and my cousin, and her mother.
    From the dim regions beyond the mountains at the upper end of ourencircled domain, there crept out a narrow and deep river, brighter thanall save the eyes of Eleonora; and, winding stealthily about in mazycourses, it passed away, at length, through a shadowy gorge, among hillsstill dimmer than those whence it had issued. We called it the “Riverof Silence”; for there seemed to be a hushing influence in its flow.No murmur arose from its bed, and so gently it wandered along, that thepearly pebbles upon which we loved to gaze, far down within its bosom,stirred not at all, but lay in a motionless content, each in its own oldstation, shining on gloriously forever.
    The margin of the river, and of the many dazzling rivulets that glidedthrough devious ways into its channel, as well as the spaces thatextended from the margins away down into the depths of the streams untilthey reached the bed of pebbles at the bottom, — these spots, not lessthan the whole surface of the