Journal

Poe’s To One In Paradise tells of the sorrow felt when you lose the connection to the one you love, essentially being shut out of paradise. Poe creates an almost Biblical tone, comparisons to the Garden of Eden and man’s fall from God’s grace are inevitable.

Has his love left this life to go to paradise, or is he simply deprived of her company, Poe’s To One In Paradise is vague on the matter? What he isn’t vague about is the loss – the light of life is over. For Poe’s love was all to him, as it is to all of us.

Poe’s To One In Paradise draws a picture of nature as Eden, but it’s nature with the hand of man upon it … a fountain, a shrine, as well as the hand of the supernatural … fairy fruits and flowers.

The author walks through life in a trance, an unending sorrow, for even in his dreams, he sees the world through her eyes, and finds life seeing the world as she does, following in her footsteps, and who of us haven’t done the same thing? There’s something that draws us to memory when we retrace the steps we took together, which she now takes alone.

Once again there is no hope, no anticipation of a second chance, just the certainty that all is lost and all is over in Poe’s To One In Paradise.

https://youtu.be/zwek_53ZR9I

Analyzing Poe’s A Dream Within A Dream is an exercise in futility. Poe’s intentions can’t be known, but it doesn’t stop people from trying.

Read straightforward you get a sense that Poe is on the verge of loss, he’s kissing his loved one goodbye, and if there’s a sense that he’s accepted it, it’s because accepted the reality, or unreality of life. You can’t live a dream for long, because it’s simply a dream within the dream that is life.

In A Dream Within A Dream, everything slips away, like sand through the fingertips, you can’t hold onto anything, particularly something that is fluid. A dream within a dream is fluid by nature, for dreams aren’t bound by nature’s law. Instead they build upon the imagination, where there are no laws.

Life, like sand held in the fingertips beneath the waves is always being sucked into the deep, washed away by nature’s tides. Man has the ability to imagine anything he wants, and in the imagination those dreams can live. But in life, we are bound by nature’s laws, which deem in the end, all is lost.

https://youtu.be/zFe8zhpuOXE

Download Edgar Allan Poe’s Spirits of the Dead on Bandcamp

Learn more about The Conqueror Worm, the album by Folkswitch

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone? 
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
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!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Annabel Lee was Poe’s last poem. Legends abound that it’s based on a story from Charleston, South Carolina, but that’s unlikely. In reality he wrote it about his wife, recently deceased.

It’s the story of a man haunted by love, and follows love into the grave. It’s an exploration of obsessive love, doomed love that keep the mind busy for some time, working it out for ourselves.

Holding onto your love after the death, literal or metaphoric of the one you love, is a romantic notion. It’s one we hold true in the beginning of relationships, and perhaps we never really think of the lessons of Annabel Lee till we’re forced to. Annabel Lee suffered physical death, but any permanent separation to the one left behind is a kind of death as well. One doesn’t have to be a widow or widower to identify with the longing and loss found in Annabel Lee.

Nor does one have to experience or even long to experience the implied necrophilia of Poe’s Annabel Lee. But who amongst haven’t longed to hold in our arms one long and forever lost to us, and remember a time when we believed that even death could never break our love.

Poe did return to the pursuit, for he did love beautiful women, but perhaps his last poem shone a light into his heart, which said his heart really wasn’t into it. But instead lie at night with his bride, in that sepulcher by the sea.

https://youtu.be/Vnjk0yWfyNw

Download Edgar Allan Poe’s Deep In Earth on Bandcamp

Learn more about The Conqueror Worm, the album by Folkswitch

Annabel Lee

The Hearse Song is one of the first songs I ever learned, albeit in a shortened version”

The worms crawl in,
The worms crawl out.
The worms play pinochle on your snout.
You spread it on  a piece of bread,
And that’s what you eat when you are dead.

Now a keen eye will instantly recognize that there’s something missing. What the hell are you eating on a piece of bread? I learned The Hearse Song from my sister, but it was a popular song in Jefferson grade school, and we all sang it the same way. It turns out there are regional variations.

It was some decades later, during the recording of this piece that I noticed the omission. We were laying down the base tracks for The Conqueror Worm which at that point was three sections. But I ran out of lyrics on the second, and needed something to fill the space while we played. I opened my mouth and The Hearse Song fell out.

There wasn’t a lot of time to figure this out. Teelin’s time is valuable, and we only had a weekend to record three drum parts. Being a considerate neighbor we like to quit drum related activity somewhat early. We had the riff and no idea what Teelin would play, but when he did that, we knew we had to record it. And it was little more than an excuse to let him unleash everything he’d built up sowing restraint throughout recording The Raven.

This is maybe half of his performance, because I eventually ran out of alternate lines for the Hearse Song. Teelin can, and will fill every available space with drums given the opportunity. To be young and hyperactive again …

https://youtu.be/0gwdoH8u0bk

Download Edgar Allan Poe’s Spirits of the Dead on Bandcamp

Learn more about The Conqueror Worm, the album by Folkswitch

Poe’s Deep in Earth is a curious couplet. It was found pencilled in on a copy of the manuscript to Eulalie, which speaks of the joy of his marriage.

Perhaps that scribbling is Poe thinking out loud, taking a note to remind himself of a couplet which he might use later. Perhaps he was adding a postscript to Eulalie, what happens after the ending.

His wife had died earlier that year and Poe had fallen apart. It was in this stasis that he found madness, and Poe’s Deep In Earth comes from that period , unable to leave his wife’s memory and begin life anew. Till he could throw over her ghost which haunted him, he was condemned, like one of protagonists to walk in that grey twilight, to wander amongst the graves. Poe looked at death unflinchingly, the conqueror worm dissolves all of us, the gruesome details we inevitably ponder when our loved ones are placed in the ground.

And Poe had a better imagination than most. Poe’s Deep In Earth is more than a metaphysical thought, but also speaks to the reality of the moment.

Deep in earth is where we console ourselves that our loved one’s body is safe. But in reality, deep in earth is simply a way to take the waste of life from our sight. Bodies aren’t buried deep for the benefit of nature, unless by number they become a health hazard. Nature disposes of the dead if given a chance, quite gleefully. We bury our dead to avoid nature’s blight on our consciousness.

But the grave to Poe, as it is to us is a barrier, between ourselves and those we once loved. It’s a closed gate to the physical manifestation of the person we loved. We can cross through that gate only by going deep in earth, to our own grave. Where we must lie, and weep alone.

https://youtu.be/WLN29P01FSs

Download Edgar Allan Poe’s Deep In Earth on Bandcamp

Learn more about The Conqueror Worm, the album by Folkswitch

Edgar Allan Poe’s Deep In Earth

Deep in earth my love is lying

And I must weep alone.

Poe’s Spirits of the Dead is a walk through the graveyard, a treatise on death by one in mourning.

The spirits of the dead live on in Poe’s poem, and surround you as you walk the alleys of tombstones. The feeling of loneliness one gets as you wander the graves, Poe reasons is without merit, for the dead all around you.

The time for spirits of the dead to walk again is the night, but night means something different to the dead. Whereas the stars that shine above fill the living with hope, to the dead are but faint red glows, devoid of the hope of escaping.

For the dead take their sorrows and concerns with them to the grave. There is no solace from the thought or memory which haunts you in life, in the afterlife. Instead you’re trapped in endless night with those thoughts, and eternity to carry the burden.

https://youtu.be/_PZri6W3UTE

Download Edgar Allan Poe’s Spirits of the Dead on Bandcamp

Learn more about The Conqueror Worm, the album by Folkswitch

Edgar Allan Poe’s Spirits of the Dead