Poe's Poems Pwn Posers Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Raven

In "The Raven", an unnamed lover who, while pondering many a work of yore and lamenting the death of his beloved Lenore, is taunted by a talking raven, who after rapping, tapping at his chamber door, will leave him nevermore. As Poe was writing "The Raven", his wife Virginia lay dying of tuberculosis, and so the work conveys loss that Poe knew all too well as his mother, brother, and foster mother had all died of TB, and his wife would be next. Poe borrowed the idea of a talking raven from a the Dickens novel 'Barnaby Rudge' (1840), and the meter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" (1844). (Poe dedicated his volume 'The Raven and Other Poems' (1845) to Browning, whom he admired greatly.) After publication in 'The New York Mirror', "The Raven" was a smash, quickly copied and parodied, and it made Poe a celebrity, but he remained poor as a churchmouse, all the more.

Paul Gaugin painted "Nevermore" in reference to the poem.

From "The Raven":
"Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting-
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!--quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."

Answer: Lenore

"Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!"

So begins "Lenore" (1843), published two years before "The Raven", yet made all the more famous because of its connection to the popular poem. There are at least two speakers in the poem, one of whom is Guy De Vere, Lenore's lamenting lover. Originally called "Paean" (which means a formal expression of praise, like a eulogy), the poem pursues Poe's favorite subject, the death of a beautiful woman, which he called "the most poetical topic in the world".

From "Lenore":
"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her-- that she died!
How shall the ritual, then, be read?-- the requiem how be sung
By you-- by yours, the evil eye,- by yours, the slanderous tongue
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?"

Answer: Annabel Lee

"Annabel Lee" was Poe's last poem, published in the New York Tribune in 1849, two days after his death. Poe likely penned "Annabel Lee" to memorialize his wife Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe, who had passed away two years earlier. The poem was the inspiration for the episode "The Castle By the Sea" of 'Hermit's Cave', broadcast in 1942 over U.S. radio syndication; the first stanza (below) was repeated throughout the episode as a woman is driven mad by the possessive love of her husband, even after his death. (Poe owns the radio, too.)

From "Annabel Lee":
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

Answer: Ulalume

Unlike "Annabel Lee" and similar poems, the narrator is not conscious of his return to the grave of his dearly departed until (voilà!) he finds himself there. The poem makes many allusions, especially to mythology (Venus, Astarte, etc.). The identity of Ulalume herself has been a subject of debate (perhaps his late wife?).

Poe originally wrote "Ulalume" (1847), which was *not* well received by critics, as an exercise in elocution. Aldous Huxley dismissed it as "a carapace of jewelled sound"; poet Daniel Hoffman compared it to marzipan. Yet other writers have admired and alluded to it. In Tennessee Williams' play 'A Streetcar Named Desire', Blanche DuBois compares the home of her sister Stella to the "ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir", referring of course to "Ulalume".

From "Ulalume":
The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crispéd and sere-
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir-
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

(Emily Dickinson wrote "Because I could not stop for Death"; Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken"; and Elizabeth Barret Browning, "How Do I Love Thee? [Sonnet 43]".)

Answer: To Helen

Inspired by the poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poe wrote various poems called "To Helen". One such poem was first published in 1831 and honors Jane Stanard, the mother of a childhood friend who had died recently. It begins with "Helen, thy beauty is to me / Like those Nicean barks of yore". Poe revised it in 1845 with the famous line: "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." A less-quoted "To Helen" was written to his later love, the poet, essayist, and Transcendentalist Sarah Helen Whitman in 1848. She suffered from a heart ailment (after all, what kind of muse is a healthy woman?), although she survived her admirer and wrote a defense of his work, 'Edgar Allan Poe and His Critics' (1860).

From "To Helen" (1845):
"On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome."

Answer: Israfel

The poem commences as a lyric poem with complex meter in praise of the angel Israfel. By the end, however, Poe suggests that *he* would sound as sweet as Israfel if he were in Paradise and Israfel were stuck on the Earth, where "our flowers are merely--flowers". In 'The Raven and Other Poems', Poe includes a citation in a footnote to the poem: "'And the angel Israfel, whose heartstrings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God's creatures'-Koran'". Yet Israfel is not named in the Koran (or Qur'an), although he is one of the four Islamic archangels, along with Michael, Gabriel, and Azrael. He is equivalent to the Judaeo-Christian angel Raphael, and Muslims believe he is the archangel who will blow the trumpet on the Day of Resurrection. In "Israfel", Poe has taken an element from Middle Eastern culture and made it universal by applying it to the entire cosmos.

From "Israfel":
In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
⁠"Whose heart-strings are a lute;"
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell)
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
⁠ Of his voice, all mute.

Answer: The Sleeper

Like many of Poe's works, "The Sleeper" (1831) was revised multiple times by the perfectionist bard, its original title being "Irene". The poem strongly resembles Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Christabel". Mere coincidence? Hardly, Coleridge heavily influenced Poe, although Poe took Romanticism to a darker, more Gothic level. Poe thought "The Sleeper" a superior poem to the outrageously popular and ubiquitous "The Raven", though he conceded, "there is not one man in a million who could be brought to agree with me in this opinion".

From "The Sleeper":
"Wrapping the fog about its breast,
The ruin moulders into rest;
Looking like Lethe, see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not, for the world, awake.
All Beauty sleeps!-and lo! where lies
(Her casement open to the skies)
Irene, with her Destinies!"

Answer: The Haunted Palace

Another popular Poe poem, "The Haunted Palace" (1839) captured the imagination of the nineteenth century audience six years before "The Raven" made Poe a superstar. Elements from this vivid work were further developed in the short story "The Fall of the House of Usher", which was published later that year -- particularly the use of a decaying, decrepit mansion as an allegory for depression followed by descent into madness.

From "The Haunted Palace":
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn!--for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And round about his home the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.

Answer: The Bells

Poe pens pieces for particular sounds, and "The Bells" is a perfect example. "Diacope" occurs when the same word or phrase occurs on either side of an intervening word or phrase. "The Bells" is a grand study in this, along with onomatopoeia and neologism. Published posthumously, "The Bells" has four parts: the silver jingle bells of youth and excitement; the golden wedding bells of romance and marriage; the brass alarm bells of terror and despair; and finally the solemn iron bells that toll death. It has marvelous words like "tintinnabulation", and the very rhythm of the rhyme vividly depicts bells.

From "The Bells" (stanza 1):
Hear the sledges with the bells--
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells--
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Answer: Eldorado

"El Dorado", Spanish for "the golden one", once referred to a fabled tribal chief in the Americas. Over time, the legend transformed into a city whose streets were lined with gold, and it became a passion for many a disappointed conquistador. It's quite possible that Poe was using "Eldorado" (1849), peculiar spelling and all, to comment upon the California Gold Rush which had begun the year before. The story of El Dorado and the vain search for gold, or indeed any impossible quest or hopeless obsession, has been the stuff of countless fables and films, and even an exasperating riddle at FunTrivia.com that few have solved!

From "Eldorado":
Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old--
This knight so bold--
And o'er his heart a shadow--
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.