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.

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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.

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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 …

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

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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.

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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.

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Edgar Allan Poe’s Spirits of the Dead

Poe’s A City In The Sea is an apocalyptic vision, a conspiracy of evil set to rise up and usher in Hell on Earth.

The city in question lies unnamed and without location, somewhere in the west. It’s a peaceful city, not unlike the Atlantis legend, but it would be more apt to describe a progressive Sodom and Gomorrah. Poe describes towers, shrines, turrets, domes and spires, yet the light of heaven never reaches there. Instead the perpetual night is only lit by a glow emanating from the lurid sea.

The locations of Poe’s City in the Sea, the west has long been associated with death and the afterlife, and here it is ruled by Death personified, or rather deified. Death as person is common, coming for the living robed and with his scythe. Poe takes it a step further and rather than a messenger, Death wields more power here than previously given credit.

In Poe’s city in the sea, the population is dressed in their finery, dressed for the grave. That’s where they lie, devoid of life, movement and even the flowers are lifeless, stone carvings.

Perhaps the city in the sea is an offering to figure greater than Death itself, Satan. For the climax of the poem, Hell rises up and takes sovereign over the city and beyond, and the city sinks into the red sea. It is the coming of Satan and apocalypse is unleashed up on the land.

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Edgar Allan Poe’s A City In The Sea

LO! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently —
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free —
Up domes — up spires — up kingly halls —
Up fanes — up Babylon-like walls —
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers —
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine. [page 22:]

Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye —
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass —
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea —
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave — there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrown aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide —
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow —
The hours are breathing faint and low —
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence. [[,]]
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

All in all, recording Poe’s The Raven took place over a period of eighteen months, with far too much of that time actually going into that song alone. Was it worth it? I believe so. But I can’t help but wish I could start it over from scratch.

That will happen … never more.

We’ve played with video for a while, and all along we hoped to make Poe videos for each of the songs on The Conqueror Worm.

Since most people find our music typically find it through YouTube, and YouTube is a video platform, why not make the most of it? The original guidelines for the Poe videos were simple, shoot it on a phone or iPad, and use iMovie to edit. I wanted these videos to be something any band could do, and to find out what the limits of the technology, and our creativity would be.

Towards the end I moved to editing with Adobe Premier, but otherwise we stuck to the rules.

After doing a few previous Poe videos I realized having repeating characters made the acting easier, and held the songs together. It makes acting easier because as is well known, when you put on a mask you can stop being yourself. In my case it’s makeup, and it’s not that I stop being myself, but rather I find ways of expressing what I feel wordlessly.

It helps that these songs convey misery, and filming in a house without air conditioning with a heat index of nearly a hundred degrees, makes having your face painted utterly miserable. I didn’t have to act.

Poe’s poetry is filled with pain and loss. I’ve had a lot of experience with that of late, so it was particularly cathartic to let some of that shit go. Poe didn’t keep his loss bottled up behind a stiff upper lip and staid exterior. He let it out, publicly falling apart around New York City, privately going to pieces at home and pouring his pain out on paper. I’m at a point in my life where holding it together is important. But I could still pour out my pain into my art.

After looking over a few of the videos I’d done, I came to realize where my influences lie. I’d love to say it was all intentional, but it was unconscious. It all can be traced back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which I’d seen quite some time ago. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is one of the prime examples of German Expressionist cinema. I was an art major in college and ditched school before I got to the Expressionists in art history, but I knew enough to understand what they were up to.

Expressionism found its flower in Berlin of the twenties, a period which has long inspired artists such as Bowie, Lou Reed and lately Marilyn Manson. As such, it fit with some of the music quite well, particularly To One in Paradise and Spirits of the Dead.

The idea behind Expressionism was a rejection of realism. It’s a purposeful distortion of reality to express underlying emotions, how a moment felt from the inside rather than how things appear on the surface. It’s an idea I quite like. After all, isn’t that the idea behind poetry?

The last piece to be filmed was The Raven. It’s the story of a man coming to grips with the loss of his love, realizing that the loss is permanent and his descent into madness. As luck would have it, I filmed my parts the day I realized the love of my life wasn’t coming back, and so it became autobiographical.

As with all these videos, there were no scripts or storyboards. It was all made up on the spot, improvised, the opposite of how the music was recorded, and the reverse of how most bands do these kind of things.

But this is a new era and perhaps it’s time to turn the status quo upside down.

Notes on The Conqueror Worm sixty minute version of the Poe videos

I always wanted to stitch the Poe videos together into a one long film. The earliest ones had a somewhat silent film vibe, and I began to think of the project as a silent musical.

It takes a certain kind of person to sit through an hour of this. Drugs help, alcohol likely does as well. Perhaps having an affinity for pain and loss could make the whole experience cathartic, but I’m not daft enough to think that viewing this is particularly a pleasant experience.

Poe videos are typically in the realm of horror, and these are no exception. Even though the subject matter veers from the macabre nature of his tales, the horror is just as real and perhaps more so. It’s my guess Poe saw his poetry as an expression of himself, and as his art as opposed to being merely craft, a way of making a living.

While the craftsmanship might not up to Poe’s standards, I think he’d approve of how it turned out. Those feelings of loss, alienation and the hopelessness of it all have only grown over the past couple hundred years, and each new generation finds new acolytes of the poet. We’re all just links in the rattling chain.

Download Edgar Allan Poe’s Deep In Earth on Bandcamp

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The Individual Videos