Edgar Allen Poe's philosophy of Life? It may be summed up in the lines from that little poem, where he leaves her side who has, for a moment, turned his heart from the Tomb. The reader will remember the way it begins: "Take this kiss upon thy brow." And the conclusion is the confusion of the whole matter:
"All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream."
Strangely--in forlorn silence--passes before us, as we close his pages, that procession of "dead, cold Maids." Ligeia follows Ulalume; and Lenore follows Ligeia; and after them Eulalie and Annabel; and the moaning of the sea-tides that wash their feet is the moaning of eternity. I suppose it needs a certain kindred perversion, in the reader, to know the shudder of the loss, more dear than life, of such as these! The more normal memory of man will still continue repeating the liturgical syllables of a very different requiem:
"O daughters of dreams and of stories, That Life is not wearied of yet-- Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores, Felise, and Yolande and Julette!"
Yes, Life and the Life-Lovers are enamoured still of these exquisite witches, these philtre-bearers, these Sirens, these children of Circe. But a few among us--those who understand the poetry of Edgar Allen--turn away from them, to that rarer, colder, more virginal Figure; to Her who has been born and has died, so many times; to Her who was Ligeia and Ulalume and Helen and Lenore--for are not all these One?--to Her we have loved in vain and shall love in vain until the end--to Her who wears, even in the triumph of her Immortality, the close-clinging, heavily-scented cerements of the Dead!
"The old bards shall cease and their memory that lingers Of frail brides and faithless shall be shrivelled as with fire, For they loved us not nor knew us and our lips were dumb, our fingers Could wake not the secret of the lyre. Else, else, O God, the Singer, I had sung, amid their rages, The long tale of Man, And his deeds for good and ill. But the Old World knoweth--'tis the speech of all his ages-- Man's wrong and ours; he knoweth and is still."
I want to approach this great Soothsayer from the angle least of all profaned by popular verdicts. I mean from the angle of his poetry. We all know what a splendid heroic Anarchist he was. We all know with what rude zest he gave himself up to that "Cosmic Emotion," to which in these days the world does respectful, if distant, reverence. We know his mania for the word "en masse," for the words "ensemble," "democracy" and "libertad." We know his defiant celebrations of Sex, of amorousness, of maternity; of that Love of Comrades which "passeth the love of women." We know the world-shaking effort he made--and to have made it at all, quite apart from its success, marks him a unique genius!--to write poetry about every mortal thing that exists, and to bring the whole breathing palpable world into his Gargantuan Catalogues. It is absurd to grumble at these Inventories of the Round Earth. They may not all move to Dorian flutes, but they form a background--like the lists of the Kings in the Bible and the lists of the Ships in Homer--against which, as against the great blank spaces of Life itself, "the writing upon the wall" may make itself visible.