Edgar Allan Poe, “Sonnet—To Science” and “To Helen”
We are living in strange times, in which anti-science ideology dominates many. No science, no medical doctors, no vaccine: Small minded-people seem intent on not only rejecting modernity, but on committing ignorant suicide by forgoing vaccinations.
Since I first drafted this letter, a new book has been published: The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science, by the historian John Tresch. Tresch argues that Poe was very interested in science, that he valued the scientific advances that were being made in his time, that he also anticipated scientific advances of our time (especially the “Big Bang” theory of the origin of the universe), and that he described his own poetical inventions in ‘empirical’ terms.
In the letter which follows I stress Poe’s opposition to science. Such opposition has a long history, and not all who reject the rational biases of science are morons. It is not in the light of anti-vaccine know-nothings that I take up Poe in what follows. My interest is to see what ‘drives’ Poe. I started out by disliking Poe. I still, his good arguments about science as expressed below notwithstanding, do not like him. That dive into beauty, into an alternate reality, unsettles me. It is too direct a dive….
Sonnet—To Science
Edgar Allan PoeScience! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
My friend Tony, who has been a faithful and generous reader of these letters, delivered his verdict to me last week. “It is time you wrote about Poe,” he wrote. Tony loves Poe. Me, I don’t like Poe all that much and understand him even less. I admit to what Tony has charged me with, “your reticence to recognize EAP as ‘the great god’ Baudelaire woke up every morning acknowledging.”
Something about Poe the poet makes me greatly uncomfortable. I came to understand, as I wrote this, what discomforts me in his closeness to the transcendent, to what he called ‘Beauty.’ He leaps right into it, as if his being could just leap into the empyrean.
I will write about Poe, mainly because I believe in challenging oneself and one’s preconceptions. But I will pass by on writing about Tony’s favorite poems, which all “create a characteristic emphasis on Poe as fantasist, the creator of worlds that never were nor could be,” to look at an early Poe poem which heads toward that direction, a poem which does appeal to me.
Let me start with an odd digression, but one that may orient us in the right direction. I am a great lover of detective fiction. Poe invented detective fiction! And in his three stores about Inspector C. Auguste Dupin, Edgar Allan Poe invented all the directions in which detective fiction would go, for all this past century and a half! (And Poe based detective fiction on ‘ratiocination,’ on thinking rationally, which will form half of the pair rationality/imagination which structures the poem before us.)
As an avid reader of detective fiction, I plunged into a finely realized recreation of Raymond Chandler by Benjamin Black, The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel. Now Black is no slouch – he won the Booker Prize for fiction as John Banville, his real name, since ‘Black’ is a pen name – so the following description comes with a deep awareness of literary history and the past two centuries’ dedication to ‘Nature.’ Marlowe, Chandler’s creation here channeled by Black, says,
I liked the idea of the outdoors. I mean I liked the thought of it being there: the trees, the grass, birds in the bushes, all that. I even liked looking at it, sometimes, from the highway, say, through a car windshield. What I didn’t much care for was being out in it, unprotected…..
There is in these lines a rejection of that deep love of nature that we find in Wordsworth, or in his American equivalent, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yes, Philip Marlowe tells us, nature is fine, but we might want to be at some degree of separation from the natural world. Not for Marlowe, and I would say for Poe as well, are those great Emersonian articles of faith, as expressed in his essay “Nature”:
1. Words are signs of natural facts.
2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.
Black’s Philip Marlowe suggests nature is not where we start, if we want to come to spirit. Poe says, I think, that we must leap over nature and come at spirit, soul, directly.
Poe’s poems are not about the world we experience through our senses, the world which lies immediately before us. His poems are not about experiences, but are ‘compositions’ which create experiences – effects – in us. This is what Poe writes in an essay which, even after 150 years, is as challenging as it is memorable, “The Philosophy of Composition.” In it, he says he wrote the well-known poem “The Raven” to create an effect – beauty – and all his decisions about how to create that effect were rational (limit the length of the poem to 108 lines, readable in one sitting; aspire toward the beautiful; aim for a tone of sadness; use a refrain of one word; use the “most poetical” of all topics, “the death…of a beautiful woman”). (Think I am kidding? Here, in this footnote, is Poe’s internal summary[1].)
Yikes. I don’t subscribe to this. In a marginal notation to the poem “Israfel” I wrote fifty years ago and would write again today, I compared Poe and his sense of an ideal world of beauty that is out of this world, to Wallace Stevens’ poem, “The Poems of Our Climate,” which recognizes that poetry must write about the imperfections of this, our physical world, in language that is imperfect:
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
We can compare Stevens to Poe – and I recognize the irony that Stevens himself is one of the most mellifluous of poets! – as we look at the first stanza of “The Raven,” with its astonishing use of not only rhyme but internal rhyme. This, I need add, is a pattern that he will adhere to for the entire poem.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
Wow. And I have underlined only the central rhymes, ignoring the omnipresent alliteration.
I write a lot, in these letters, about meter and rhyme. Here, Poe anticipates me, doing a better job of analysis than I can do. If you can stand it, this his assessment in “The Philosophy of Composition.” (Ignore it if you wish: He is very hard-core, here.)
Of course, I pretend to no originality in either the rhythm or meter of the “Raven.” The former is trochaic—the latter is octameter acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic. Less pedantically—the feet employed throughout (trochees) consist of a long syllable followed by a short: the first line of the stanza consists of eight of these feet—the second of seven and a half (in effect two-thirds)—the third of eight—the fourth of seven and a half—the fifth the same—the sixth three and a half. Now, each of these lines, taken individually, has been employed before, and what originality the “Raven” has, is in their combination into stanza; nothing even remotely approaching this combination has ever been attempted. The effect of this originality of combination is aided by other unusual, and some altogether novel effects, arising from an extension of the application of the principles of rhyme and alliteration.
Whew.
Ok, enough tap-dancing around. Let us examine “Sonnet – To Science.” First, of course, it is a sonnet, fourteen lines; an octave of eight lines and a sestet of six. It is largely in a conventional meter, iambic pentameter, although there are certain exceptions: line three when spoken begins with a trochee (a trochee is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable) and line five is irregular, as are lines nine and thirteen, involving two unstressed syllables in a row in the first two cases and three unstressed syllables and two spondees (two stresses in a row) in line thirteen.
Here is the octave:
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
It is a Petrarchan sonnet: The problem is posed in those eight lines, the ‘solution’ in the sestet which follows. Well, it is a Petrarchan sonnet as Spenser refined it, with a rhyme scheme – following Spenser – of ABAB//BCBC. (The sestet rhymes DEDEFF. That final couplet, FF, hearkens back to both Spenser and Shakespeare.)
I don’t like Poe’s use of ‘poetic’ language, and his inability to embrace the vernacular, as his slightly later American contemporaries Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson did. “Thou art…alterest…thy…preyest thou … thee…deem thee…why wouldst not…albeit…undaunted. ” Who speaks this way, except poets trying to be poetic? So, in short, I am not amused nor even praiseful.
Yet what Poe writes strikes a nerve. Science was born of the ancients, of the desire to know how the world works, of its first principles. It alters, true, but by providing understanding. [Although in all honesty, Poe is channeling Wordsworth here, even if I earlier said he takes a very different path than his British forebear.
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Wordsworth preceded these lines with “Sweet is the lore which Nature
brings,” giving a primacy to the physical world that Poe, I think, never accepts.]
In the third and fourth lines of the poem, science is a vulture, a bird of prey feasting on dead things, here the poet’s heart which has been engulfed by facts and rational enquiry; the wings of this vulture are the “dull realities” of everyday life, of the physical world in which we live and which science investigates.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
Yet these “dull realities” are what keeps science aloft.
So the poet cogently asks, for who could love a feasting vulture, “How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise…” Science, Poe claims, finds its nourishment in “dull realities,” and does not leave us to do as wish, to ‘soar,’ unencumbered, “undaunted.”
We wish to leave the fetters of this physical world to go where our imaginations would take us, to find some “treasure in the jewelled skies.” Small wonder that Charles Baudelaire would be attracted to Poe, for Baudelaire, and his followers Verlaine and Rimbaud and then Mallarmé, wanted to go beyond the tawdry realities of everyday life and explore, “with an undaunted wing,” the delights which only the imagination can find. [Wordsworth too believed in the imagination. If you will pardon me, let me cite the magnificent ending of The Prelude, where you can note the primacy of the imagination:
what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things
(Which, 'mid all revolution in the hopes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of quality and fabric more divine.]
There is a very great distinction looming here, and yet it is hard to see. Wordsworth and Emerson believed in the imagination, but they saw the human mind springing, as from a diving board, off of the encounterable facts of the sensible world, into the realm of the imagination. ( Here are my very favorite lines from Emerson, from his speech/essay “The American Scholar.” Forgive me for quoting them, but I love the lines so much that I cannot resist.
Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; — show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature… )
Poe, and his French followers, thought the sensible world a barrier to what the imagination could encounter if only it could take wing apart from the sensual world. Springboard or barrier: that is what differentiates Emerson and Poe, or Wordsworth and Baudelaire.
Thus, science with its dependence on the vacuity of “dull realities,” is humanity’s antagonist. For Wordsworth at Cambridge, a marble statue of the great scientist Isaac Newton was a beacon, in lines I profoundly love:
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind forever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
But for Poe, in this sonnet, the scientist is not a voyager. Science rips us away from the mythic. Here is the sestet, which ‘answers’ the octave.
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
Diana? Goddess of the moon, which is her “car.” Hamadryad? A female wood spirit, connected to a tree, who dies when the tree dies. Naiad? A spirit of a lake or river, a water spirit. Elfin? From ‘elf,’ a mischievous spirt who dwells in the natural world. Roman, Greek, Greek, Anglo-Saxon: Minor gods all.
Science, the lines tell us, strips the supernatural, the spirit world – and the spirit of the world – from the world. A moon without Diana, the woods without their minor goddess, the water without its presiding spirit, the very grass itself from its animating force.
and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
So he too, the poet, has been stripped of his dream. Science would leave him, were he to allow it, mired in “dull realities.” But he wishes to dream in a tropical paradise. (The tamarind is a tropical tree.) So although Poe had, as Tresch’s book tells us, a deep commitment to science and scientific exploration, he had an even deeper attachment to the realm of beauty. If he had to choose, goodbye science (as in this sonnet), and hello, beauty.
He wants to leap to a world beyond this one, a world where all is perfection, a realm where as Baudelaire so wonderfully put it,
Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.There, all is order and beauty,
Luxury, calm and voluptuousness.
Poe so much wants that world, and yet at the same time knows it cannot be. All his poems, it seems to me, are about loss – about the wondrous world he and we have lost, a world of innocence and unfurrowed beauty. He wants to get back to this world, but it is gone, behind us. It might be lost irretrievably – except for the miraculous power of beauty , a beauty that can transfigure us and allow us entrance into the magical kingdom of The Beautiful. And the gateway into Beauty is – the poem.
There is a remarkable poem in which Emily Dickinson encounters a bird, undoubtedly a robin. In the first few stanzas of “A Bird, came down the Walk” the bird does its bird-y things and then notices the poet observing it. The robin takes wing, flying someplace that will be less dangerous, with no poets wandering around looking at birds. That last stanza points toward a seamless reality, here the sky, which shows neither wake nor splashes, a world that the poet cannot inhabit, while the bird soars into it. (The poet, even a small careful woman like Emily Dickinson, is burdened with a consciousness of self the natural world does not exhibit).
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home -Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.
Poe, in the poems I do not consider here, always feels the regret that his leap into the perfection of beauty is occasioned by loss. He has lost Beauty – “the death of a beautiful woman” – and if he wants to return to it, he must turn his back on the world in which he lives. He must, as this poem warns us, live in his imagination, not on a rational consideration of the factuality of human existence.
Once, we were young, beautiful, happy. That is behind us, even as we seek to remedy our loss through the recovery of beauty.
No one has so consciously embraced the beautiful as Poe: Even his mellifluous words strive for a beauty that is beyond the ordinary. And no one, in a strange way, has indicated as clearly that lack, absence, loss is what propels us toward a need to encounter and inhabit a beautiful and perfect world.
Poe wrote another short poem about beauty, and his desire for it, and loss, and the attempt to find beauty again in ‘art.’
To HelenHelen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.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.Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy-Land!
Beauty is our home (“his own native shore”) and it is to beauty we long to return. In the second stanza of “To Helen” Poe uses, as I see it, the strategy of
Wordsworth’s German contemporary, Friedrich Hölderlin. For Wordsworth, the ‘return’ meant going back to childhood, or to nature, or to the emotions. (For Poe, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” it is the effect and not the subject of the poem that is important. The ‘effect’ of a poem was the reader’s emotional response. Hmmm. I am not sure I believe him when he says that.) For Hölderlin, the regression was, as in the poem before us, a return to an earlier civilization, particularly to Greece, where humans were ‘closer’ to whatever is ‘real’ and powerful.
In stanza two, the poet thinks of Helen, the classical icon of beauty, with her “hyacinth hair” and her “classic face.” In stanza three, the poet sees her bust, but that bust becomes identical with the real Helen.
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy-Land!
Helen, the icon of beauty, the actual and real historical Helen, stands like a statue (he is in fact seeing a bust) in his “window-niche.” Agate is a stone known to the ancients, and here the lamp – maybe the whole sculpture? – is carved from it. .
Psyche, we recall (well, at least with the help of Wikipedia) was the goddess of soul, and of unsurpassed beauty. Thus, here Helen is Psyche, both in her beauty and in her inhabiting a realm that is beyond the physical. And that realm, of beauty and soul, is for the poet the “Holy-Land.”
This is quintessential Poe. There is a world beyond this one, a world where all is beauty. And this ‘world beyond,’ paradoxically, is our “own native shore.” We long to voyage back to that shore, to that realm of the ideal. Though we may, as in this poem, roam “on desperate seas,” the world we associate with our distant past, and which is our true home, beckons us. It is the “Holy-Land” which we seek: Or at least the world which Poe seeks. It is far from the things of everyday, the things we encounter in the world we inhabit. Beauty does not inhere in the everyday, nor can it be embraced by embracing the things of every day and moving beyond them into a realm which they promise. We must turn away from the everyday, and voyage straight toward beauty.
I don’t subscribe to that view of where we need to go, or how to get there. As Richard Wilbur wrote (in the title of a great poem) “Love calls us to the things of this world.” Wilbur was a great admirer of Poe, I hasten to add; but as his poem (which can be read, perhaps, as his response to Poe) suggests, it is in the colors of this world, not the pure whites of the ideal, that we find ourselves and our destiny.
It is not Helen we seek, but our real selves. In the real world.
Footnotes:
[1] I had now gone so far as the conception of a Raven—the bird of ill omen—monotonously repeating the one word, “Nevermore,” at the conclusion of each stanza, in a poem of melancholy tone, and in length about one hundred lines. Now, never losing sight of the object supremeness, or perfection, at all points, I asked myself—“Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death—was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious—“When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—equally is beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”