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But let him have the last word. In his journal he wrote:

I have confidence in the laws of morals as of botany. I have planted maize in my field every June for seventeen years and I never knew it come up strychnine. My parsley, beet, turnip, carrot, buck-thorn, chestnut, acorn, are as sure. I believe that justice produces justice, and injustice injustice.

In Poe's stories and poems we hear continually about compulsion, terrors loosed by the powerful upon the weak (or the powerful components of the mind upon the weak components of the mind); we hear about plague, and tortures, and revenge. But none of these elements does more than forward the real subject of Poe's work, which is the anguish of knowing nothing for sure about the construct of the universe, or about the existence of a moral order within it—anything that would clarify its seemingly total and imperial indifference toward individual destiny.

Poe is no different from any of us—we all choke in
such vapors, somewhat, sometimes. A normal life includes the occasional black mood. But most of us have had some real enough experience with certainty, which helps us to sustain ourselves through passages of metaphysical gloom. While Poe had none. Not little, but none.

This lack disordered him. It is not a spiritual lack, but rather a lack of emotional organization, of confidence. And not self-confidence, which is already a complicated asset, but a lack of confidence in the world entire, and its benevolent as well as malevolent possibilities. In the deepest sense, Poe was without confidence in a future that might be different from the past. He was, forever, reliving an inescapable, original woe.

At the same time he was both a powerful constructor of narrative and a perfect acrobat of language. He was also a man of enormous courage. With almost superhuman will he wrote his poems and his stories—I almost want to say
he wrote and rewrote his story and his poem
—trying to solve the unsolvable and move on. But he never moved on. He never solved anything.

His mother, Eliza Poe, an actress, died when Edgar was two years old. She was twenty-four. It was a pitiful finish
to a miserable story: Eliza Poe was penniless, consumptive, and abandoned by Edgar's father, whose occasional and itinerant occupation was also acting.

In Richmond, Virginia, where Eliza died, Poe was taken to live with the John Allan family, perhaps by the whim of Frances Allan, who had no children and had witnessed the death of Eliza. The relationship between Poe and John Allan, a successful merchant, was perpetually and mutually difficult. Though he took the family's name, Poe was never legally adopted.

Poe became friends with a woman named Jane Stanard, the mother of a schoolboy friend. She was a strange, closeted, not too steady figure. Even as their friendship deepened, Jane Stanard sickened, was declared insane, and died. Frances Allan also had never been robust. When Poe was twenty years old, and away from home, Frances Allan died. It was a separation without closure, since John Allan chose not to summon Poe home in time for a last meeting before the final and implacable silence of death.

In 1834, when he was twenty-five, Poe married his cousin Virginia Clemm; she was thirteen years old. Does the future seem ensured? Eight years later, while Virginia was singing, blood began to run from her mouth. It was, it is fair to say, consumption. In 1847 Virginia died. She was twenty-five.

Poe had two years to live. With terrifying gusto, he drank his way through them.

_______

In the Free Library of Philadelphia there is a portrait of the actress Eliza Poe. She is at once curiously stiff and visibly animated; her long black hair curls at the ends and frames the wide brow and the enormous dark eyes. The same dark curls, the same large eyes—in fact, a very similar white, low-bodiced dress—appear in another painting, this one in Richmond, of Frances Allan. And Virginia Clemm? She is described as having had a chalky white complexion, and long black hair, and a high, clear brow, and large eyes that grew even larger and ever more luminous during her illness.

To readers of Poe's poems and tales, it is an altogether familiar face:

The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once jetty hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets, now of a vivid yellow, and jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning melancholy of the countenance. (“Berenice”)
*

I examined the contour of the lofty and pale forehead—it was faultless—how cold indeed that word when applied to a majesty so divine!—the skin rivalling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant, and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, “hyacinthine”! (“Ligeia”)

If the faces of Poe's women are often strikingly similar, other characteristics are no less consistent:

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche

How
statue-like
I see thee stand. . . .

(“To Helen”)
*

So Poe writes of that pale beauty—that Helen, who is also Lenore in “The Raven” and Eleonora in the story named for her. And the Lady Madeline in “The Fall of the House of Usher” comes from the grave “a
lofty
and enshrouded figure.” And Ligeia “came and departed as a shadow.” And her eyes were large—“far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race.” There is not the
briefest glimpse of Annabel Lee in the rhapsodic, death-soaked poem of that name, yet we know, don't we, what she must have looked like. Pale, dark-haired, with wide and luminous eyes—vivacious in the trembling, fragile way of mayflies. The narrator says of Berenice: “Oh, gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh, sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! Oh, Naiad among its fountains!” Of Eleonora: “like the ephemeron, she had been made perfect in loveliness only to die.” Of Ligeia again: she has “the face of the water-nymph, that lives but an hour” and “the beauty of the fabulous Houri of the Turk.”

In Poe's stories overall, no focus is so constant as that of the face and, within the face, the look of the eyes. “The
expression
of the eyes of Ligeia!” the narrator cries aloud and, sacrificing the “blue-eyed Lady Rowena,” wills the dead, dark-eyed Ligeia to return to him within the vehicle of Rowena's body. When the corpse stirs slowly and opens its eyes, he shrieks—of course it is the end of the story—“these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes of my lost love.”

Nothing, nothing in all the secret and beautiful and peaceful Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, where the narrator is but a boy and loves for the first time—nothing shines so brightly as the eyes of the first-beloved, Eleonora.

Said the poet Robert Frost, “We begin in infancy by establishing correspondence of eyes with eyes.”
*
It is deeply true. It is where the confidence comes from; the child whose gaze is met learns that the world is real, and desirable—that the child himself is real, and cherished. The look in the eyes of Poe's heroines—it is the same intensity, over and over, upon the long string of his many tales. It is the look that, briefly, begins to give such confidence—then fades.

Not in “Ligeia” and “Berenice” and “Eleonora” only, but in other stories too, the eye is a critical feature. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator murders an old man of whom he is truly fond because of the blue veil that is cast over one eye. “The vulture eye,” he calls it.

Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.

It is a simple case. The eye that does not look back does not acknowledge. To Poe's narrator, it is unbearable.

The eyes of Augustus Bedloe, in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” are

abnormally large, and round like those of a cat. . . . In moments of excitement the orbs grew bright to a degree almost inconceivable; seeming to emit luminous rays, not of a reflected but of an intrinsic lustre, as does a candle or the sun.

Bedloe, otherwise a corpse-like figure, gains vigor through his daily use of morphine. He is, we understand, a man who is being medically supervised; he has even been hypnotized. He tells his story: one afternoon, in the mountains of Virginia, he breaks through the wall of time and place. “You will say now, of course, that I dreamed; but not so,” he says. But his inexorable original fate, in the trivia of this new time and place, the Virginia wilderness, waits for him. He cannot escape it.

In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the gloomy mansion itself takes on the look of a face, with its “vacant and eye-like windows.” The same face makes its grim appearance in the poem “The Haunted Palace.” In the tale “William Wilson,” on the other hand, such play
of eye correspondence is significantly lacking; the two William Wilsons of the story are, of course, one person.

Neither does the flash of the eye, luminous or overcast, play a role in “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

At length, with a wild desperation at heart, I quickly unclosed my eyes. My worst thoughts, then, were confirmed. The blackness of eternal night encompassed me.

Underneath its ropes and rats, its tensions and extraordinary machineries, “The Pit and the Pendulum” is the story of the soul struggling with the tortures of an indifferent universe. It is a tale of unmatchable horror—as it is equally a tale of all but unmatchable endurance. In the context of Poe's work as a whole, both the “eternal night” and the narrator's solitude are elements that make of the pit's chamber an even more terrible tableau. In the blackness of the pit there is nothing—and no one. Not even the eye with the blue veil.

It is not hard to recognize Poe's many narrators as a single sensibility, as one character, and to see this character
as other than rational. He is a man of nervous temperament; he is capable of great love, loyalty, grief, of “wild excitement” (a recurring phrase); he owns a strange and unfettered imagination. His enterprise is to challenge and dissolve a particular fact or circumstance that represents the natural order of things—specifically, death's irreversibility. He therefore seeks to understand the world in a way that will disprove such circumstance. Discovering a “different” world assumes
experiencing manifestations of that different world
. To begin, then, it is necessary to disassociate from the world as it is ordinarily experienced. And not casually. He must unstring the universe to its farthest planet and star, and restring it in another way.

His posture is transcendentalism, of the nineteenth-century Germanic variety. The possibilities of alchemy, mesmerism, occultism appeal to him. He is no Orpheus, begging an exception and a second chance, but rather—I mean from his own view—a visionary. To change his own fate, he would change our comprehension of the entire world.

_______

The question of madness is always present. The actions of the narrator are often recognizably insane. But the definitions of madness and rationality have been thrown
here into the wind; in Poe's stories, such states are uncertainly bordered areas in which, suddenly, ghosts walk. “Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence,” the narrator says in “Eleonora.”

Illness, as well, is a presence, an excuse for clearly inexcusable actions. The narrator in “Berenice” is named Egaeus, a word wondrously close to “aegis,” which, in English schools, is a term meaning a note that signifies sickness as an excuse. It is an uncommon term, but Poe, who went to school in England for five years while the Allans were living in London, no doubt knew it.

Upon the wing of such pure or near madness, the effort toward re-visioning goes on. The mind deranged, by alcohol, opium or morphine, or insanity, sees a world differently from the sane and the sober—
but, in fact, it does see a world
. Poe's narrators drink furiously, and when they can get it, they take into their bodies the white powder opium; thus they lean, trembling, against the walls of ordinary perception. And thus, over and over, with “wild excitement,” they “swoon” out of this world.

_______

To swoon is not only to pass from consciousness physically; it may also represent a willingness, even an
eagerness, to experience unknown parts of life—obscure regions that might lead one toward a re-visioning. One swoons for many reasons and from many causes—from fever, sheer fright, extreme agitation, from exertion or exhaustion. The effects of opium and alcohol alone, in sufficient doses, will also bring on a kind of swooning; one leaves the realm of the rational and the known for that shapeless, unmapped region of “seeming.” What is certain in the rational realm is by no means certain in the kingdom of swoon.
And though nothing in that dark kingdom is provable, neither can its nonexistence be proven.
If nothing there is solid to the hand, it is solid enough to the mind, and upon that smallest beginning the need of the mind builds.

Poe's fascination with enclosed space (the brain shape) as pit, maelstrom, catacomb, ballroom (in “Hop-Frog”), and the many chambers and turrets of castles, reaches a curious pitch in a piece called “Philosophy of Furniture.” Here Poe describes, in intense and elaborate detail, his “favorite room.” The description is obsessional. Here are carpets and curtains in mute and lustrous colors, paintings, furniture, giltwork and fringe, draperies, mirrors, Sèvres vases, candelabra; we are given not only their exact shapes and colors but their precise placement within the room. It is a room where “repose
speaks in all.” Yet it is not a bedroom—there is no bed here for sleeping on in the ordinary way of well-earned and deep rest. There are two sofas, and upon one, says Poe, the proprietor lies asleep. But it is sleep as Poe most sought and valued it—not for the sake of rest, but for escape. Sleep, too, is a kind of swooning out of this world.

Poe's work is exquisitely and opulently constructed; the narratives have a fascination that is a sure-hold—a quality that, for lack of another word, one might simply call entertainment. They are frightening—but not in the way that Kafka's “The Metamorphosis,” for example, or James's “The Turn of the Screw” is frightening. In spite of the extreme and macabre symbolism in Kafka's story, both “The Metamorphosis” and “The Turn of the Screw” take place in a world uncomfortably familiar, and the stories unfold, both of them, in a terrifyingly low-key, unextraordinary way. They are, horribly and unmistakably, descriptions of life as we know it, or
could
easily know it. While Poe's stories are—stories. Full of the hardware of the nightmare—graves, corpses, storms,
moldering castles, catacombs—and hovering always at the edge of tension and incredulity, they never fail to thrill as
stories
.