letters/poetry/poe_poetical_works.json

[
  {
    "title": "The Raven.",
    "body": "  Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,\n  Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--\n  While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,\n  As of some one gently rapping--rapping at my chamber door.\n  \"'Tis some visitor,\" I muttered, \"tapping at my chamber door--\n          Only this and nothing more.\"\n\n  Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December,\n  And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.\n  Eagerly I wished the morrow;--vainly I had sought to borrow\n  From my books surcease of sorrow--sorrow for the lost Lenore--\n  For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore--\n          Nameless here for evermore.\n\n  And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain\n  Thrilled me--filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;\n  So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating\n  \"'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door--\n  Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;--\n      This it is and nothing more.\"\n\n  Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,\n  \"Sir,\" said I, \"or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;\n  But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,\n  And so faintly you came tapping--tapping at my chamber door,\n  That I scarce was sure I heard you\"--here I opened wide the door:--\n        Darkness there and nothing more.\n\n  Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering,\n    fearing,\n  Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;\n  But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,\n  And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, \"Lenore!\"\n  This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, \"Lenore!\"\n        Merely this and nothing more.\n\n  Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,\n  Soon I heard again a tapping, somewhat louder than before.\n  \"Surely,\" said I, \"surely that is something at my window lattice;\n  Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore--\n  Let my heart be still a moment, and this mystery explore;--\n      'Tis the wind and nothing more.\"\n\n  Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,\n  In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;\n  Not the least obeisance made he: not an instant stopped or stayed he;\n  But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door--\n  Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door--\n      Perched, and sat, and nothing more.\n\n  Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,\n  By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,\n  \"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,\" I said, \"art sure no\n    craven,\n  Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore--\n  Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!\"\n        Quoth the Raven, \"Nevermore.\"\n\n  Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,\n  Though its answer little meaning--little relevancy bore;\n  For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being\n  Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door--\n  Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,\n        With such name as \"Nevermore.\"\n\n  But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only\n  That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.\n  Nothing further then he uttered--not a feather then he fluttered--\n  Till I scarcely more than muttered, \"Other friends have flown before--\n  On the morrow _he_ will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.\"\n        Then the bird said, \"Nevermore.\"\n\n  Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,\n  \"Doubtless,\" said I, \"what it utters is its only stock and store,\n  Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster\n  Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore--\n  Till the dirges of his Hope the melancholy burden bore\n      Of 'Never--nevermore.'\"\n\n  But the Raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,\n  Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and\n    door;\n  Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking\n  Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore--\n  What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore\n      Meant in croaking \"Nevermore.\"\n\n  This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing\n  To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;\n  This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining\n  On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,\n  But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er,\n        _She_ shall press, ah, nevermore!\n\n  Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer\n  Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.\n  \"Wretch,\" I cried, \"thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath\n    sent thee\n  Respite--respite aad nepenthé from thy memories of Lenore!\n  Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthé, and forget this lost Lenore!\"\n        Quoth the Raven, \"Nevermore.\"\n\n  \"Prophet!\" said I, \"thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil!--\n  Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,\n  Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted--\n  On this home by Horror haunted--tell me truly, I implore--\n  Is there--_is_ there balm in Gilead?--tell me--tell me, I implore!\"\n      Quoth the Raven, \"Nevermore.\"\n\n  \"Prophet!\" said I, \"thing of evil!--prophet still, if bird or devil!\n  By that Heaven that bends above us--by that God we both adore--\n  Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,\n  It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore--\n  Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.\"\n        Quoth the Raven, \"Nevermore.\"\n\n  \"Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!\" I shrieked,\n    upstarting--\n  \"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!\n  Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!\n  Leave my loneliness unbroken!--quit the bust above my door!\n  Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!\"\n      Quoth the Raven, \"Nevermore.\"\n\n  And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting\n  On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;\n  And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,\n  And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;\n  And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor\n      Shall be lifted--nevermore!\n\n\nPublished, 1845.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Bells,",
    "body": "I.\n\n  Hear the sledges with the bells--\n  Silver bells!\n  What a world of merriment their melody foretells!\n  How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,\n  In their icy air of night!\n  While the stars, that oversprinkle\n  All the heavens, seem to twinkle\n  With a crystalline delight;\n  Keeping time, time, time,\n  In a sort of Runic rhyme,\n  To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells\n  From the bells, bells, bells, bells,\n  Bells, bells, bells--\n  From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.\n\n\nII.\n\n  Hear the mellow wedding bells,\n  Golden bells!\n  What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!\n  Through the balmy air of night\n  How they ring out their delight!\n  From the molten golden-notes,\n  And all in tune,\n  What a liquid ditty floats\n  To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats\n  On the moon!\n  Oh, from out the sounding cells,\n  What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!\n  How it swells!\n  How it dwells\n  On the future! how it tells\n  Of the rapture that impels\n  To the swinging and the ringing\n  Of the bells, bells, bells,\n  Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,\n  Bells, bells, bells--\n  To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!\n\n\nIII.\n\n  Hear the loud alarum bells--\n  Brazen bells!\n  What a tale of terror now their turbulency tells!\n  In the startled ear of night\n  How they scream out their affright!\n  Too much horrified to speak,\n  They can only shriek, shriek,\n  Out of tune,\n  In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,\n  In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire\n  Leaping higher, higher, higher,\n  With a desperate desire,\n  And a resolute endeavor\n  Now--now to sit or never,\n  By the side of the pale-faced moon.\n  Oh, the bells, bells, bells!\n  What a tale their terror tells\n  Of Despair!\n  How they clang, and clash, and roar!\n  What a horror they outpour\n  On the bosom of the palpitating air!\n  Yet the ear it fully knows,\n  By the twanging,\n  And the clanging,\n  How the danger ebbs and flows;\n  Yet the ear distinctly tells,\n  In the jangling,\n  And the wrangling,\n  How the danger sinks and swells,\n  By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells--\n  Of the bells--\n  Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,\n  Bells, bells, bells--\n  In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!\n\n\nIV.\n\n  Hear the tolling of the bells--\n  Iron bells!\n  What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!\n  In the silence of the night,\n  How we shiver with affright\n  At the melancholy menace of their tone!\n  For every sound that floats\n  From the rust within their throats\n     Is a groan.\n  And the people--ah, the people--\n  They that dwell up in the steeple.\n      All alone,\n  And who tolling, tolling, tolling,\n    In that muffled monotone,\n  Feel a glory in so rolling\n    On the human heart a stone--\n  They are neither man nor woman--\n  They are neither brute nor human--\n      They are Ghouls:\n  And their king it is who tolls;\n  And he rolls, rolls, rolls,\n           Rolls\n  A pæan from the bells!\n  And his merry bosom swells\n  With the pæan of the bells!\n  And he dances, and he yells;\n  Keeping time, time, time,\n  In a sort of Runic rhyme,\n  To the pæan of the bells--\n      Of the bells:\n  Keeping time, time, time,\n  In a sort of Runic rhyme,\n    To the throbbing of the bells--\n  Of the bells, bells, bells--\n    To the sobbing of the bells;\n  Keeping time, time, time,\n    As he knells, knells, knells,\n  In a happy Runic rhyme,\n  To the rolling of the bells--\n  Of the bells, bells, bells--\n  To the tolling of the bells,\n  Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,\n    Bells, bells, bells--\n  To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.\n\n\n\n1849.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Ulalume.",
    "body": "  The skies they were ashen and sober;\n    The leaves they were crisped and sere--\n    The leaves they were withering and sere;\n  It was night in the lonesome October\n    Of my most immemorial year;\n  It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,\n    In the misty mid region of Weir--\n  It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,\n    In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.\n\n  Here once, through an alley Titanic.\n    Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul--\n    Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.\n  These were days when my heart was volcanic\n    As the scoriac rivers that roll--\n    As the lavas that restlessly roll\n  Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek\n    In the ultimate climes of the pole--\n  That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek\n    In the realms of the boreal pole.\n\n  Our talk had been serious and sober,\n    But our thoughts they were palsied and sere--\n    Our memories were treacherous and sere--\n  For we knew not the month was October,\n  And we marked not the night of the year--\n    (Ah, night of all nights in the year!)\n  We noted not the dim lake of Auber--\n    (Though once we had journeyed down here)--\n  Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,\n    Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.\n\n  And now as the night was senescent\n    And star-dials pointed to morn--\n    As the sun-dials hinted of morn--\n  At the end of our path a liquescent\n    And nebulous lustre was born,\n  Out of which a miraculous crescent\n    Arose with a duplicate horn--\n  Astarte's bediamonded crescent\n    Distinct with its duplicate horn.\n\n  And I said--\"She is warmer than Dian:\n    She rolls through an ether of sighs--\n    She revels in a region of sighs:\n  She has seen that the tears are not dry on\n    These cheeks, where the worm never dies,\n  And has come past the stars of the Lion\n    To point us the path to the skies--\n    To the Lethean peace of the skies--\n  Come up, in despite of the Lion,\n    To shine on us with her bright eyes--\n  Come up through the lair of the Lion,\n    With love in her luminous eyes.\"\n\n  But Psyche, uplifting her finger,\n    Said--\"Sadly this star I mistrust--\n    Her pallor I strangely mistrust:--\n  Oh, hasten!--oh, let us not linger!\n    Oh, fly!--let us fly!--for we must.\"\n  In terror she spoke, letting sink her\n    Wings till they trailed in the dust--\n  In agony sobbed, letting sink her\n    Plumes till they trailed in the dust--\n    Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.\n\n  I replied--\"This is nothing but dreaming:\n    Let us on by this tremulous light!\n    Let us bathe in this crystalline light!\n  Its Sibyllic splendor is beaming\n    With Hope and in Beauty to-night:--\n    See!--it flickers up the sky through the night!\n  Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,\n    And be sure it will lead us aright--\n  We safely may trust to a gleaming\n    That cannot but guide us aright,\n    Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night.\"\n\n  Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,\n    And tempted her out of her gloom--\n    And conquered her scruples and gloom;\n  And we passed to the end of a vista,\n    But were stopped by the door of a tomb--\n    By the door of a legended tomb;\n  And I said--\"What is written, sweet sister,\n    On the door of this legended tomb?\"\n    She replied--\"Ulalume--Ulalume--\n    'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!\"\n\n  Then my heart it grew ashen and sober\n    As the leaves that were crisped and sere--\n    As the leaves that were withering and sere;\n  And I cried--\"It was surely October\n    On _this_ very night of last year\n    That I journeyed--I journeyed down here--\n    That I brought a dread burden down here!\n    On this night of all nights in the year,\n    Ah, what demon has tempted me here?\n  Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber--\n    This misty mid region of Weir--\n  Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,--\n    This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.\"\n\n\n1847.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "To Helen.",
    "body": "  I saw thee once--once only--years ago:\n  I must not say _how_ many--but _not_ many.\n  It was a July midnight; and from out\n  A full-orbed moon, that, like thine own soul, soaring,\n  Sought a precipitate pathway up through heaven,\n  There fell a silvery-silken veil of light,\n  With quietude, and sultriness and slumber,\n  Upon the upturn'd faces of a thousand\n  Roses that grew in an enchanted garden,\n  Where no wind dared to stir, unless on tiptoe--\n  Fell on the upturn'd faces of these roses\n  That gave out, in return for the love-light,\n  Their odorous souls in an ecstatic death--\n  Fell on the upturn'd faces of these roses\n  That smiled and died in this parterre, enchanted\n  By thee, and by the poetry of thy presence.\n\n  Clad all in white, upon a violet bank\n  I saw thee half-reclining; while the moon\n  Fell on the upturn'd faces of the roses,\n  And on thine own, upturn'd--alas, in sorrow!\n\n  Was it not Fate, that, on this July midnight--\n  Was it not Fate (whose name is also Sorrow),\n  That bade me pause before that garden-gate,\n  To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses?\n  No footstep stirred: the hated world all slept,\n  Save only thee and me--(O Heaven!--O God!\n  How my heart beats in coupling those two words!)--\n  Save only thee and me. I paused--I looked--\n  And in an instant all things disappeared.\n  (Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!)\n  The pearly lustre of the moon went out:\n  The mossy banks and the meandering paths,\n  The happy flowers and the repining trees,\n  Were seen no more: the very roses' odors\n  Died in the arms of the adoring airs.\n  All--all expired save thee--save less than thou:\n  Save only the divine light in thine eyes--\n  Save but the soul in thine uplifted eyes.\n  I saw but them--they were the world to me.\n  I saw but them--saw only them for hours--\n  Saw only them until the moon went down.\n  What wild heart-histories seemed to lie unwritten\n  Upon those crystalline, celestial spheres!\n  How dark a woe! yet how sublime a hope!\n  How silently serene a sea of pride!\n  How daring an ambition! yet how deep--\n  How fathomless a capacity for love!\n\n  But now, at length, dear Dian sank from sight,\n  Into a western couch of thunder-cloud;\n  And thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees\n  Didst glide away. _Only thine eyes remained._\n  They _would not_ go--they never yet have gone.\n  Lighting my lonely pathway home that night,\n  _They_ have not left me (as my hopes have) since.\n  They follow me--they lead me through the years.\n\n  They are my ministers--yet I their slave.\n  Their office is to illumine and enkindle--\n  My duty, _to be saved_ by their bright light,\n  And purified in their electric fire,\n  And sanctified in their elysian fire.\n  They fill my soul with Beauty (which is Hope),\n  And are far up in Heaven--the stars I kneel to\n  In the sad, silent watches of my night;\n  While even in the meridian glare of day\n  I see them still--two sweetly scintillant\n  Venuses, unextinguished by the sun!\n\n\n1846.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Annabel Lee.",
    "body": "  It was many and many a year ago,\n    In a kingdom by the sea,\n  That a maiden there lived whom you may know\n    By the name of ANNABEL LEE;\n  And this maiden she lived with no other thought\n    Than to love and be loved by me.\n\n  _I_ was a child and _she_ was a child,\n    In this kingdom by the sea:\n  But we loved with a love that was more than love--\n    I and my ANNABEL LEE;\n  With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven\n    Coveted her and me.\n\n  And this was the reason that, long ago,\n    In this kingdom by the sea,\n  A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling\n    My beautiful ANNABEL LEE;\n  So that her highborn kinsmen came\n    And bore her away from me,\n  To shut her up in a sepulchre\n    In this kingdom by the sea.\n\n  The angels, not half so happy in heaven,\n    Went envying her and me--\n  Yes!--that was the reason (as all men know,\n    In this kingdom by the sea)\n  That the wind came out of the cloud by night,\n    Chilling and killing my ANNABEL LEE.\n\n  But our love it was stronger by far than the love\n    Of those who were older than we--\n    Of many far wiser than we--\n  And neither the angels in heaven above,\n    Nor the demons down under the sea,\n  Can ever dissever my soul from the soul\n    Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE.\n\n  For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams\n    Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE;\n  And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes\n    Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE;\n  And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side\n  Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,\n    In her sepulchre there by the sea--\n    In her tomb by the side of the sea.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "A Valentine.",
    "body": "  For her this rhyme is penned, whose luminous eyes,\n    Brightly expressive as the twins of Leda,\n  Shall find her own sweet name, that, nestling lies\n    Upon the page, enwrapped from every reader.\n  Search narrowly the lines!--they hold a treasure\n    Divine--a talisman--an amulet\n  That must be worn _at heart_. Search well the measure--\n    The words--the syllables! Do not forget\n  The trivialest point, or you may lose your labor!\n    And yet there is in this no Gordian knot\n  Which one might not undo without a sabre,\n    If one could merely comprehend the plot.\n  Enwritten upon the leaf where now are peering\n    Eyes scintillating soul, there lie _perdus_\n  Three eloquent words oft uttered in the hearing\n    Of poets by poets--as the name is a poet's, too.\n  Its letters, although naturally lying\n    Like the knight Pinto--Mendez Ferdinando--\n  Still form a synonym for Truth--Cease trying!\n    You will not read the riddle, though you do the best you _can_ do.\n\n\n1846.\n\n[To discover the names in this and the following poem, read the first\nletter of the first line in connection with the second letter of the\nsecond line, the third letter of the third line, the fourth, of the\nfourth and so on, to the end.]\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "An Enigma.",
    "body": "  \"Seldom we find,\" says Solomon Don Dunce,\n      \"Half an idea in the profoundest sonnet.\n    Through all the flimsy things we see at once\n      As easily as through a Naples bonnet--\n      Trash of all trash!--how _can_ a lady don it?\n    Yet heavier far than your Petrarchan stuff--\n    Owl-downy nonsense that the faintest puff\n      Twirls into trunk-paper the while you con it.\"\n    And, veritably, Sol is right enough.\n    The general tuckermanities are arrant\n    Bubbles--ephemeral and _so_ transparent--\n      But _this is_, now--you may depend upon it--\n    Stable, opaque, immortal--all by dint\n    Of the dear names that lie concealed within't.\n\n\n[See note after previous poem.]\n\n1847.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "To My Mother.",
    "body": "  Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,\n    The angels, whispering to one another,\n  Can find, among their burning terms of love,\n    None so devotional as that of \"Mother,\"\n  Therefore by that dear name I long have called you--\n    You who are more than mother unto me,\n  And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you,\n    In setting my Virginia's spirit free.\n  My mother--my own mother, who died early,\n    Was but the mother of myself; but you\n  Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,\n    And thus are dearer than the mother I knew\n  By that infinity with which my wife\n    Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life.\n\n\n1849.\n\n\n[The above was addressed to the poet's mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm.--Ed.]\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "For Annie.",
    "body": "  Thank Heaven! the crisis--\n    The danger is past,\n  And the lingering illness\n    Is over at last--\n  And the fever called \"Living\"\n    Is conquered at last.\n\n  Sadly, I know,\n    I am shorn of my strength,\n  And no muscle I move\n    As I lie at full length--\n  But no matter!--I feel\n    I am better at length.\n\n  And I rest so composedly,\n    Now in my bed,\n  That any beholder\n    Might fancy me dead--\n  Might start at beholding me\n    Thinking me dead.\n\n  The moaning and groaning,\n    The sighing and sobbing,\n  Are quieted now,\n    With that horrible throbbing\n  At heart:--ah, that horrible,\n    Horrible throbbing!\n\n  The sickness--the nausea--\n    The pitiless pain--\n  Have ceased, with the fever\n    That maddened my brain--\n  With the fever called \"Living\"\n    That burned in my brain.\n\n  And oh! of all tortures\n    _That_ torture the worst\n  Has abated--the terrible\n    Torture of thirst,\n  For the naphthaline river\n    Of Passion accurst:--\n  I have drank of a water\n    That quenches all thirst:--\n\n  Of a water that flows,\n    With a lullaby sound,\n  From a spring but a very few\n    Feet under ground--\n  From a cavern not very far\n    Down under ground.\n\n  And ah! let it never\n    Be foolishly said\n  That my room it is gloomy\n    And narrow my bed--\n  For man never slept\n    In a different bed;\n  And, to _sleep_, you must slumber\n    In just such a bed.\n\n  My tantalized spirit\n    Here blandly reposes,\n  Forgetting, or never\n    Regretting its roses--\n  Its old agitations\n    Of myrtles and roses:\n\n  For now, while so quietly\n    Lying, it fancies\n  A holier odor\n    About it, of pansies--\n  A rosemary odor,\n    Commingled with pansies--\n  With rue and the beautiful\n    Puritan pansies.\n\n  And so it lies happily,\n    Bathing in many\n  A dream of the truth\n    And the beauty of Annie--\n  Drowned in a bath\n    Of the tresses of Annie.\n\n  She tenderly kissed me,\n    She fondly caressed,\n  And then I fell gently\n    To sleep on her breast--\n  Deeply to sleep\n    From the heaven of her breast.\n\n  When the light was extinguished,\n    She covered me warm,\n  And she prayed to the angels\n    To keep me from harm--\n  To the queen of the angels\n    To shield me from harm.\n\n  And I lie so composedly,\n    Now in my bed\n  (Knowing her love)\n    That you fancy me dead--\n  And I rest so contentedly,\n    Now in my bed,\n  (With her love at my breast)\n    That you fancy me dead--\n  That you shudder to look at me.\n    Thinking me dead.\n\n  But my heart it is brighter\n    Than all of the many\n  Stars in the sky,\n    For it sparkles with Annie--\n  It glows with the light\n    Of the love of my Annie--\n  With the thought of the light\n    Of the eyes of my Annie.\n\n\n1849.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n\n\n\n\nTO F--\n\n\n  Beloved! amid the earnest woes\n    That crowd around my earthly path--\n  (Drear path, alas! where grows\n  Not even one lonely rose)--\n    My soul at least a solace hath\n  In dreams of thee, and therein knows\n  An Eden of bland repose.\n\n  And thus thy memory is to me\n    Like some enchanted far-off isle\n  In some tumultuous sea--\n  Some ocean throbbing far and free\n    With storm--but where meanwhile\n  Serenest skies continually\n    Just o'er that one bright inland smile.\n\n\n1845.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "To Frances S. Osgood.",
    "body": "  Thou wouldst be loved?--then let thy heart\n    From its present pathway part not;\n  Being everything which now thou art,\n    Be nothing which thou art not.\n  So with the world thy gentle ways,\n    Thy grace, thy more than beauty,\n  Shall be an endless theme of praise.\n    And love a simple duty.\n\n\n1845.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Eldorado.",
    "body": "    Gaily bedight,\n    A gallant knight,\n  In sunshine and in shadow,\n    Had journeyed long,\n    Singing a song,\n  In search of Eldorado.\n    But he grew old--\n    This knight so bold--\n  And o'er his heart a shadow\n    Fell as he found\n    No spot of ground\n  That looked like Eldorado.\n\n  And, as his strength\n    Failed him at length,\n  He met a pilgrim shadow--\n    \"Shadow,\" said he,\n    \"Where can it be--\n  This land of Eldorado?\"\n\n    \"Over the Mountains\n    Of the Moon,\n  Down the Valley of the Shadow,\n    Ride, boldly ride,\"\n    The shade replied,\n  \"If you seek for Eldorado!\"\n\n\n1849.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Eulalie.",
    "body": "               I dwelt alone\n               In a world of moan,\n           And my soul was a stagnant tide,\n  Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride--\n  Till the yellow-haired young Eulalie became my smiling bride.\n               Ah, less--less bright\n               The stars of the night\n           Than the eyes of the radiant girl!\n               And never a flake\n               That the vapor can make\n           With the moon-tints of purple and pearl,\n  Can vie with the modest Eulalie's most unregarded curl--\n  Can compare with the bright-eyed Eulalie's most humble and careless\n    curl.\n               Now Doubt--now Pain\n               Come never again,\n           For her soul gives me sigh for sigh,\n               And all day long\n               Shines, bright and strong,\n           Astarté within the sky,\n  While ever to her dear Eulalie upturns her matron eye--\n  While ever to her young Eulalie upturns her violet eye.\n\n1845.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "A Dream Within A Dream.",
    "body": "  Take this kiss upon the brow!\n  And, in parting from you now,\n  Thus much let me avow--\n  You are not wrong, who deem\n  That my days have been a dream:\n  Yet if hope has flown away\n  In a night, or in a day,\n  In a vision or in none,\n  Is it therefore the less _gone_?\n  _All_ that we see or seem\n  Is but a dream within a dream.\n\n  I stand amid the roar\n  Of a surf-tormented shore,\n  And I hold within my hand\n  Grains of the golden sand--\n  How few! yet how they creep\n  Through my fingers to the deep\n  While I weep--while I weep!\n  O God! can I not grasp\n  Them with a tighter clasp?\n  O God! can I not save\n  _One_ from the pitiless wave?\n  Is _all_ that we see or seem\n  But a dream within a dream?\n\n\n1849.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "To Marie Louise (Shew).",
    "body": "  Of all who hail thy presence as the morning--\n  Of all to whom thine absence is the night--\n  The blotting utterly from out high heaven\n  The sacred sun--of all who, weeping, bless thee\n  Hourly for hope--for life--ah, above all,\n  For the resurrection of deep buried faith\n  In truth, in virtue, in humanity--\n  Of all who, on despair's unhallowed bed\n  Lying down to die, have suddenly arisen\n  At thy soft-murmured words, \"Let there be light!\"\n  At thy soft-murmured words that were fulfilled\n  In thy seraphic glancing of thine eyes--\n  Of all who owe thee most, whose gratitude\n  Nearest resembles worship,--oh, remember\n  The truest, the most fervently devoted,\n  And think that these weak lines are written by him--\n  By him who, as he pens them, thrills to think\n  His spirit is communing with an angel's.\n\n1847.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "To Marie Louise (Shew).",
    "body": "  Not long ago, the writer of these lines,\n  In the mad pride of intellectuality,\n  Maintained \"the power of words\"--denied that ever\n  A thought arose within the human brain\n  Beyond the utterance of the human tongue:\n  And now, as if in mockery of that boast,\n  Two words--two foreign soft dissyllables--\n  Italian tones, made only to be murmured\n  By angels dreaming in the moonlit \"dew\n  That hangs like chains of pearl on Hermon hill,\"--\n  Have stirred from out the abysses of his heart,\n  Unthought-like thoughts that are the souls of thought,\n  Richer, far wilder, far diviner visions\n  Than even the seraph harper, Israfel,\n  (Who has \"the sweetest voice of all God's creatures,\")\n  Could hope to utter. And I! my spells are broken.\n  The pen falls powerless from my shivering hand.\n  With thy dear name as text, though hidden by thee,\n  I cannot write--I cannot speak or think--\n  Alas, I cannot feel; for 'tis not feeling,\n  This standing motionless upon the golden\n  Threshold of the wide-open gate of dreams,\n  Gazing, entranced, adown the gorgeous vista,\n  And thrilling as I see, upon the right,\n  Upon the left, and all the way along,\n  Amid empurpled vapors, far away\n  To where the prospect terminates--_thee only_!\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "The City In The Sea.",
    "body": "  Lo! Death has reared himself a throne\n  In a strange city lying alone\n  Far down within the dim West,\n  Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best\n  Have gone to their eternal rest.\n  There shrines and palaces and towers\n  (Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)\n  Resemble nothing that is ours.\n  Around, by lifting winds forgot,\n  Resignedly beneath the sky\n  The melancholy waters lie.\n\n  No rays from the holy Heaven come down\n  On the long night-time of that town;\n  But light from out the lurid sea\n  Streams up the turrets silently--\n  Gleams up the pinnacles far and free--\n  Up domes--up spires--up kingly halls--\n  Up fanes--up Babylon-like walls--\n  Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers\n  Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers--\n  Up many and many a marvellous shrine\n  Whose wreathed friezes intertwine\n  The viol, the violet, and the vine.\n\n  Resignedly beneath the sky\n  The melancholy waters lie.\n  So blend the turrets and shadows there\n  That all seem pendulous in air,\n  While from a proud tower in the town\n  Death looks gigantically down.\n\n  There open fanes and gaping graves\n  Yawn level with the luminous waves;\n  But not the riches there that lie\n  In each idol's diamond eye--\n  Not the gaily-jewelled dead\n  Tempt the waters from their bed;\n  For no ripples curl, alas!\n  Along that wilderness of glass--\n  No swellings tell that winds may be\n  Upon some far-off happier sea--\n  No heavings hint that winds have been\n  On seas less hideously serene.\n\n  But lo, a stir is in the air!\n  The wave--there is a movement there!\n  As if the towers had thrust aside,\n  In slightly sinking, the dull tide--\n  As if their tops had feebly given\n  A void within the filmy Heaven.\n  The waves have now a redder glow--\n  The hours are breathing faint and low--\n  And when, amid no earthly moans,\n  Down, down that town shall settle hence,\n  Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,\n  Shall do it reverence.\n\n\n1835?\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Sleeper",
    "body": "  At midnight, in the month of June,\n  I stand beneath the mystic moon.\n  An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,\n  Exhales from out her golden rim,\n  And, softly dripping, drop by drop,\n  Upon the quiet mountain top,\n  Steals drowsily and musically\n  Into the universal valley.\n  The rosemary nods upon the grave;\n  The lily lolls upon the wave;\n  Wrapping the fog about its breast,\n  The ruin moulders into rest;\n  Looking like Lethe, see! the lake\n  A conscious slumber seems to take,\n  And would not, for the world, awake.\n  All Beauty sleeps!--and lo! where lies\n  (Her casement open to the skies)\n  Irene, with her Destinies!\n\n  Oh, lady bright! can it be right--\n  This window open to the night!\n  The wanton airs, from the tree-top,\n  Laughingly through the lattice-drop--\n  The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,\n  Flit through thy chamber in and out,\n  And wave the curtain canopy\n  So fitfully--so fearfully--\n  Above the closed and fringed lid\n  'Neath which thy slumb'ring soul lies hid,\n  That, o'er the floor and down the wall,\n  Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall!\n  Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?\n  Why and what art thou dreaming here?\n  Sure thou art come o'er far-off seas,\n  A wonder to these garden trees!\n  Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress!\n  Strange, above all, thy length of tress,\n  And this all-solemn silentness!\n\n  The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep\n  Which is enduring, so be deep!\n  Heaven have her in its sacred keep!\n  This chamber changed for one more holy,\n  This bed for one more melancholy,\n  I pray to God that she may lie\n  For ever with unopened eye,\n  While the dim sheeted ghosts go by!\n\n  My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,\n  As it is lasting, so be deep;\n  Soft may the worms about her creep!\n  Far in the forest, dim and old,\n  For her may some tall vault unfold--\n  Some vault that oft hath flung its black\n  And winged panels fluttering back,\n  Triumphant, o'er the crested palls,\n  Of her grand family funerals--\n  Some sepulchre, remote, alone,\n  Against whose portal she hath thrown,\n  In childhood many an idle stone--\n  Some tomb from out whose sounding door\n  She ne'er shall force an echo more,\n  Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!\n  It was the dead who groaned within.\n\n\n1845.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Bridal Ballad.",
    "body": "  The ring is on my hand,\n    And the wreath is on my brow;\n  Satins and jewels grand\n  Are all at my command.\n    And I am happy now.\n\n  And my lord he loves me well;\n    But, when first he breathed his vow,\n  I felt my bosom swell--\n  For the words rang as a knell,\n  And the voice seemed _his_ who fell\n  In the battle down the dell,\n    And who is happy now.\n\n  But he spoke to reassure me,\n    And he kissed my pallid brow,\n  While a reverie came o'er me,\n  And to the churchyard bore me,\n  And I sighed to him before me,\n  Thinking him dead D'Elormie,\n    \"Oh, I am happy now!\"\n\n  And thus the words were spoken,\n    And thus the plighted vow,\n  And, though my faith be broken,\n  And, though my heart be broken,\n  Behold the golden keys\n    That _proves_ me happy now!\n\n  Would to God I could awaken\n    For I dream I know not how,\n  And my soul is sorely shaken\n  Lest an evil step be taken,--\n  Lest the dead who is forsaken\n    May not be happy now.\n\n\n1845.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Lenore.",
    "body": "  Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!\n  Let the bell toll!--a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river.\n  And, Guy de Vere, hast _thou_ no tear?--weep now or never more!\n  See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!\n  Come! let the burial rite be read--the funeral song be sung!--\n  An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young--\n  A dirge for her, the doubly dead in that she died so young.\n\n  \"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,\n  And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her--that she died!\n  How _shall_ the ritual, then, be read?--the requiem how be sung\n  By you--by yours, the evil eye,--by yours, the slanderous tongue\n  That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?\"\n\n  _Peccavimus;_ but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song\n  Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong!\n  The sweet Lenore hath \"gone before,\" with Hope, that flew beside,\n  Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride--\n  For her, the fair and _débonnaire_, that now so lowly lies,\n  The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes--\n  The life still there, upon her hair--the death upon her eyes.\n\n  \"Avaunt! to-night my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise,\n  But waft the angel on her flight with a pæan of old days!\n  Let _no_ bell toll!--lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth,\n  Should catch the note, as it doth float up from the damned Earth.\n  To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven--\n  From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven--\n  From grief and groan to a golden throne beside the King of Heaven.\"\n\n\n1844.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "To One In Paradise,",
    "body": "  Thou wast that all to me, love,\n    For which my soul did pine--\n  A green isle in the sea, love,\n    A fountain and a shrine,\n  All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,\n  And all the flowers were mine.\n\n  Ah, dream too bright to last!\n    Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise\n  But to be overcast!\n    A voice from out the Future cries,\n  \"On! on!\"--but o'er the Past\n    (Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies\n  Mute, motionless, aghast!\n\n  For, alas! alas! with me\n    The light of Life is o'er!\n  \"No more--no more--no more\"--\n  (Such language holds the solemn sea\n    To the sands upon the shore)\n  Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree,\n    Or the stricken eagle soar!\n\n  And all my days are trances,\n    And all my nightly dreams\n  Are where thy dark eye glances,\n    And where thy footstep gleams--\n  In what ethereal dances,\n    By what eternal streams!\n\n  Alas! for that accursed time\n    They bore thee o'er the billow,\n  From love to titled age and crime,\n    And an unholy pillow!\n  From me, and from our misty clime,\n    Where weeps the silver willow!\n\n\n1835\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Coliseum.",
    "body": "  Type of the antique Rome! Rich reliquary\n  Of lofty contemplation left to Time\n  By buried centuries of pomp and power!\n  At length--at length--after so many days\n  Of weary pilgrimage and burning thirst,\n  (Thirst for the springs of lore that in thee lie,)\n  I kneel, an altered and an humble man,\n  Amid thy shadows, and so drink within\n  My very soul thy grandeur, gloom, and glory!\n\n  Vastness! and Age! and Memories of Eld!\n  Silence! and Desolation! and dim Night!\n  I feel ye now--I feel ye in your strength--\n  O spells more sure than e'er Judæan king\n  Taught in the gardens of Gethsemane!\n  O charms more potent than the rapt Chaldee\n  Ever drew down from out the quiet stars!\n\n  Here, where a hero fell, a column falls!\n  Here, where the mimic eagle glared in gold,\n  A midnight vigil holds the swarthy bat!\n  Here, where the dames of Rome their gilded hair\n  Waved to the wind, now wave the reed and thistle!\n  Here, where on golden throne the monarch lolled,\n  Glides, spectre-like, unto his marble home,\n  Lit by the wan light of the horned moon,\n  The swift and silent lizard of the stones!\n\n  But stay! these walls--these ivy-clad arcades--\n  These mouldering plinths--these sad and blackened shafts--\n  These vague entablatures--this crumbling frieze--\n  These shattered cornices--this wreck--this ruin--\n  These stones--alas! these gray stones--are they all--\n  All of the famed, and the colossal left\n  By the corrosive Hours to Fate and me?\n\n  \"Not all\"--the Echoes answer me--\"not all!\n  Prophetic sounds and loud, arise forever\n  From us, and from all Ruin, unto the wise,\n  As melody from Memnon to the Sun.\n  We rule the hearts of mightiest men--we rule\n  With a despotic sway all giant minds.\n  We are not impotent--we pallid stones.\n  Not all our power is gone--not all our fame--\n  Not all the magic of our high renown--\n  Not all the wonder that encircles us--\n  Not all the mysteries that in us lie--\n  Not all the memories that hang upon\n  And cling around about us as a garment,\n  Clothing us in a robe of more than glory.\"\n\n\n1838.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Haunted Palace.",
    "body": "  In the greenest of our valleys\n    By good angels tenanted,\n  Once a fair and stately palace--\n    Radiant palace--reared its head.\n  In the monarch Thought's dominion--\n    It stood there!\n  Never seraph spread a pinion\n    Over fabric half so fair!\n\n  Banners yellow, glorious, golden,\n    On its roof did float and flow,\n  (This--all this--was in the olden\n    Time long ago),\n  And every gentle air that dallied,\n    In that sweet day,\n  Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,\n    A winged odor went away.\n\n  Wanderers in that happy valley,\n    Through two luminous windows, saw\n  Spirits moving musically,\n    To a lute's well-tunëd law,\n  Bound about a throne where, sitting\n    (Porphyrogene!)\n  In state his glory well befitting,\n    The ruler of the realm was seen.\n\n  And all with pearl and ruby glowing\n    Was the fair palace door,\n  Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,\n    And sparkling evermore,\n  A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty\n    Was but to sing,\n  In voices of surpassing beauty,\n    The wit and wisdom of their king.\n\n  But evil things, in robes of sorrow,\n    Assailed the monarch's high estate.\n  (Ah, let us mourn!--for never morrow\n    Shall dawn upon him desolate !)\n  And round about his home the glory\n    That blushed and bloomed,\n  Is but a dim-remembered story\n    Of the old time entombed.\n\n  And travellers, now, within that valley,\n    Through the red-litten windows see\n  Vast forms, that move fantastically\n    To a discordant melody,\n    While, like a ghastly rapid river,\n    Through the pale door\n  A hideous throng rush out forever\n    And laugh--but smile no more.\n\n\n1838.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Conqueror Worm.",
    "body": "  Lo! 'tis a gala night\n    Within the lonesome latter years!\n  An angel throng, bewinged, bedight\n    In veils, and drowned in tears,\n  Sit in a theatre, to see\n    A play of hopes and fears,\n  While the orchestra breathes fitfully\n    The music of the spheres.\n\n  Mimes, in the form of God on high,\n    Mutter and mumble low,\n  And hither and thither fly--\n    Mere puppets they, who come and go\n  At bidding of vast formless things\n    That shift the scenery to and fro,\n  Flapping from out their Condor wings\n    Invisible Wo!\n\n  That motley drama--oh, be sure\n    It shall not be forgot!\n  With its Phantom chased for evermore,\n    By a crowd that seize it not,\n  Through a circle that ever returneth in\n    To the self-same spot,\n  And much of Madness, and more of Sin,\n    And Horror the soul of the plot.\n\n  But see, amid the mimic rout\n    A crawling shape intrude!\n  A blood-red thing that writhes from out\n    The scenic solitude!\n  It writhes!--it writhes!--with mortal pangs\n    The mimes become its food,\n  And the angels sob at vermin fangs\n    In human gore imbued.\n\n  Out--out are the lights--out all!\n    And, over each quivering form,\n  The curtain, a funeral pall,\n    Comes down with the rush of a storm,\n  And the angels, all pallid and wan,\n    Uprising, unveiling, affirm\n  That the play is the tragedy, \"Man,\"\n    And its hero the Conqueror Worm.\n\n\n1838\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Silence.",
    "body": "  There are some qualities--some incorporate things,\n    That have a double life, which thus is made\n  A type of that twin entity which springs\n    From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.\n  There is a twofold _Silence_--sea and shore--\n    Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places,\n    Newly with grass o'ergrown; some solemn graces,\n  Some human memories and tearful lore,\n  Render him terrorless: his name's \"No More.\"\n  He is the corporate Silence: dread him not!\n    No power hath he of evil in himself;\n  But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!)\n    Bring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf,\n  That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod\n  No foot of man), commend thyself to God!\n\n\n1840\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Dreamland.",
    "body": "  By a route obscure and lonely,\n  Haunted by ill angels only,\n  Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,\n  On a black throne reigns upright,\n  I have reached these lands but newly\n  From an ultimate dim Thule--\n  From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,\n    Out of SPACE--out of TIME.\n\n  Bottomless vales and boundless floods,\n  And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,\n  With forms that no man can discover\n  For the dews that drip all over;\n  Mountains toppling evermore\n  Into seas without a shore;\n  Seas that restlessly aspire,\n  Surging, unto skies of fire;\n  Lakes that endlessly outspread\n  Their lone waters--lone and dead,\n  Their still waters--still and chilly\n  With the snows of the lolling lily.\n\n  By the lakes that thus outspread\n  Their lone waters, lone and dead,--\n  Their sad waters, sad and chilly\n  With the snows of the lolling lily,--\n\n  By the mountains--near the river\n  Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever,--\n  By the gray woods,--by the swamp\n  Where the toad and the newt encamp,--\n  By the dismal tarns and pools\n    Where dwell the Ghouls,--\n  By each spot the most unholy--\n  In each nook most melancholy,--\n\n  There the traveller meets aghast\n  Sheeted Memories of the past--\n  Shrouded forms that start and sigh\n  As they pass the wanderer by--\n  White-robed forms of friends long given,\n  In agony, to the Earth--and Heaven.\n\n  For the heart whose woes are legion\n  'Tis a peaceful, soothing region--\n  For the spirit that walks in shadow\n  'Tis--oh, 'tis an Eldorado!\n  But the traveller, travelling through it,\n  May not--dare not openly view it;\n  Never its mysteries are exposed\n  To the weak human eye unclosed;\n  So wills its King, who hath forbid\n  The uplifting of the fringed lid;\n  And thus the sad Soul that here passes\n  Beholds it but through darkened glasses.\n\n  By a route obscure and lonely,\n  Haunted by ill angels only.\n\n  Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,\n  On a black throne reigns upright,\n  I have wandered home but newly\n  From this ultimate dim Thule.\n\n\n1844\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "To Zante.",
    "body": "  Fair isle, that from the fairest of all flowers,\n    Thy gentlest of all gentle names dost take!\n  How many memories of what radiant hours\n    At sight of thee and thine at once awake!\n  How many scenes of what departed bliss!\n    How many thoughts of what entombed hopes!\n  How many visions of a maiden that is\n    No more--no more upon thy verdant slopes!\n\n  _No more!_ alas, that magical sad sound\n    Transforming all! Thy charms shall please _no more_--\n  Thy memory _no more!_ Accursed ground\n    Henceforward I hold thy flower-enamelled shore,\n  O hyacinthine isle! O purple Zante!\n    \"Isola d'oro! Fior di Levante!\"\n\n\n1887.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Hymn.",
    "body": "  At morn--at noon--at twilight dim--\n  Maria! thou hast heard my hymn!\n  In joy and wo--in good and ill--\n  Mother of God, be with me still!\n  When the Hours flew brightly by,\n  And not a cloud obscured the sky,\n  My soul, lest it should truant be,\n  Thy grace did guide to thine and thee\n  Now, when storms of Fate o'ercast\n  Darkly my Present and my Past,\n  Let my future radiant shine\n  With sweet hopes of thee and thine!\n\n\n1885.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Sonnet--To Science.",
    "body": "  SCIENCE! true daughter of Old Time thou art!\n    Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.\n  Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,\n    Vulture, whose wings are dull realities\n  How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,\n    Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering\n  To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,\n    Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing!\n  Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?\n    And driven the Hamadryad from the wood\n  To seek a shelter in some happier star?\n    Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,\n  The Elfin from the green grass, and from me\n  The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?\n\n\n1829.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n\n\n\n\nPrivate reasons--some of which have reference to the sin of plagiarism,\nand others to the date of Tennyson's first poems [1]--have induced me,\nafter some hesitation, to republish these, the crude compositions of my\nearliest boyhood. They are printed 'verbatim'--without alteration from\nthe original edition--the date of which is too remote to be judiciously\nacknowledged.--E. A. P. (1845).\n\n\n\n[Footnote 1: This refers to the accusation brought against Edgar Poe\nthat he was a copyist of Tennyson.--Ed.]\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Al Aaraaf — Part I.",
    "body": "  O! nothing earthly save the ray\n  (Thrown back from flowers) of Beauty's eye,\n  As in those gardens where the day\n  Springs from the gems of Circassy--\n  O! nothing earthly save the thrill\n  Of melody in woodland rill--\n  Or (music of the passion-hearted)\n  Joy's voice so peacefully departed\n  That like the murmur in the shell,\n  Its echo dwelleth and will dwell--\n  O! nothing of the dross of ours--\n  Yet all the beauty--all the flowers\n  That list our Love, and deck our bowers--\n  Adorn yon world afar, afar--\n  The wandering star.\n\n  'Twas a sweet time for Nesace--for there\n  Her world lay lolling on the golden air,\n  Near four bright suns--a temporary rest--\n  An oasis in desert of the blest.\n  Away away--'mid seas of rays that roll\n  Empyrean splendor o'er th' unchained soul--\n  The soul that scarce (the billows are so dense)\n  Can struggle to its destin'd eminence--\n  To distant spheres, from time to time, she rode,\n  And late to ours, the favour'd one of God--\n  But, now, the ruler of an anchor'd realm,\n  She throws aside the sceptre--leaves the helm,\n  And, amid incense and high spiritual hymns,\n  Laves in quadruple light her angel limbs.\n\n  Now happiest, loveliest in yon lovely Earth,\n  Whence sprang the \"Idea of Beauty\" into birth,\n  (Falling in wreaths thro' many a startled star,\n  Like woman's hair 'mid pearls, until, afar,\n  It lit on hills Achaian, and there dwelt),\n  She look'd into Infinity--and knelt.\n  Rich clouds, for canopies, about her curled--\n  Fit emblems of the model of her world--\n  Seen but in beauty--not impeding sight--\n  Of other beauty glittering thro' the light--\n  A wreath that twined each starry form around,\n  And all the opal'd air in color bound.\n\n  All hurriedly she knelt upon a bed\n  Of flowers: of lilies such as rear'd the head\n  On the fair Capo Deucato [2], and sprang\n  So eagerly around about to hang\n  Upon the flying footsteps of--deep pride--\n  Of her who lov'd a mortal--and so died [3].\n  The Sephalica, budding with young bees,\n  Uprear'd its purple stem around her knees:\n  And gemmy flower, of Trebizond misnam'd [4]--\n  Inmate of highest stars, where erst it sham'd\n  All other loveliness: its honied dew\n  (The fabled nectar that the heathen knew)\n  Deliriously sweet, was dropp'd from Heaven,\n  And fell on gardens of the unforgiven\n  In Trebizond--and on a sunny flower\n  So like its own above that, to this hour,\n  It still remaineth, torturing the bee\n  With madness, and unwonted reverie:\n  In Heaven, and all its environs, the leaf\n  And blossom of the fairy plant, in grief\n  Disconsolate linger--grief that hangs her head,\n  Repenting follies that full long have fled,\n  Heaving her white breast to the balmy air,\n  Like guilty beauty, chasten'd, and more fair:\n  Nyctanthes too, as sacred as the light\n  She fears to perfume, perfuming the night:\n  And Clytia [5] pondering between many a sun,\n  While pettish tears adown her petals run:\n  And that aspiring flower that sprang on Earth [6]--\n  And died, ere scarce exalted into birth,\n  Bursting its odorous heart in spirit to wing\n  Its way to Heaven, from garden of a king:\n  And Valisnerian lotus thither flown [7]\n  From struggling with the waters of the Rhone:\n  And thy most lovely purple perfume, Zante [8]!\n  Isola d'oro!--Fior di Levante!\n  And the Nelumbo bud that floats for ever [9]\n  With Indian Cupid down the holy river--\n  Fair flowers, and fairy! to whose care is given\n  To bear the Goddess' song, in odors, up to Heaven [10]:\n\n    \"Spirit! that dwellest where,\n      In the deep sky,\n    The terrible and fair,\n      In beauty vie!\n    Beyond the line of blue--\n      The boundary of the star\n    Which turneth at the view\n      Of thy barrier and thy bar--\n    Of the barrier overgone\n      By the comets who were cast\n    From their pride, and from their throne\n      To be drudges till the last--\n    To be carriers of fire\n      (The red fire of their heart)\n    With speed that may not tire\n      And with pain that shall not part--\n    Who livest--_that_ we know--\n      In Eternity--we feel--\n    But the shadow of whose brow\n      What spirit shall reveal?\n    Tho' the beings whom thy Nesace,\n      Thy messenger hath known\n    Have dream'd for thy Infinity\n      A model of their own [11]--\n    Thy will is done, O God!\n      The star hath ridden high\n    Thro' many a tempest, but she rode\n      Beneath thy burning eye;\n    And here, in thought, to thee--\n      In thought that can alone\n    Ascend thy empire and so be\n      A partner of thy throne--\n    By winged Fantasy [12],\n       My embassy is given,\n    Till secrecy shall knowledge be\n      In the environs of Heaven.\"\n\n  She ceas'd--and buried then her burning cheek\n  Abash'd, amid the lilies there, to seek\n  A shelter from the fervor of His eye;\n  For the stars trembled at the Deity.\n  She stirr'd not--breath'd not--for a voice was there\n  How solemnly pervading the calm air!\n  A sound of silence on the startled ear\n  Which dreamy poets name \"the music of the sphere.\"\n  Ours is a world of words: Quiet we call\n  \"Silence\"--which is the merest word of all.\n\n  All Nature speaks, and ev'n ideal things\n  Flap shadowy sounds from the visionary wings--\n  But ah! not so when, thus, in realms on high\n  The eternal voice of God is passing by,\n  And the red winds are withering in the sky!\n  \"What tho' in worlds which sightless cycles run [13],\n  Link'd to a little system, and one sun--\n  Where all my love is folly, and the crowd\n  Still think my terrors but the thunder cloud,\n  The storm, the earthquake, and the ocean-wrath\n  (Ah! will they cross me in my angrier path?)\n  What tho' in worlds which own a single sun\n  The sands of time grow dimmer as they run,\n  Yet thine is my resplendency, so given\n  To bear my secrets thro' the upper Heaven.\n  Leave tenantless thy crystal home, and fly,\n  With all thy train, athwart the moony sky--\n  Apart--like fire-flies in Sicilian night [14],\n  And wing to other worlds another light!\n  Divulge the secrets of thy embassy\n  To the proud orbs that twinkle--and so be\n  To ev'ry heart a barrier and a ban\n  Lest the stars totter in the guilt of man!\"\n\n   Up rose the maiden in the yellow night,\n  The single-mooned eve!-on earth we plight\n  Our faith to one love--and one moon adore--\n  The birth-place of young Beauty had no more.\n  As sprang that yellow star from downy hours,\n  Up rose the maiden from her shrine of flowers,\n  And bent o'er sheeny mountain and dim plain\n  Her way--but left not yet her Therasæan reign [15].",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Al Aaraaf — Part Ii.",
    "body": "  High on a mountain of enamell'd head--\n  Such as the drowsy shepherd on his bed\n  Of giant pasturage lying at his ease,\n  Raising his heavy eyelid, starts and sees\n  With many a mutter'd \"hope to be forgiven\"\n  What time the moon is quadrated in Heaven--\n  Of rosy head, that towering far away\n  Into the sunlit ether, caught the ray\n  Of sunken suns at eve--at noon of night,\n  While the moon danc'd with the fair stranger light--\n  Uprear'd upon such height arose a pile\n  Of gorgeous columns on th' uuburthen'd air,\n  Flashing from Parian marble that twin smile\n  Far down upon the wave that sparkled there,\n  And nursled the young mountain in its lair.\n  Of molten stars their pavement, such as fall [16]\n  Thro' the ebon air, besilvering the pall\n  Of their own dissolution, while they die--\n  Adorning then the dwellings of the sky.\n  A dome, by linked light from Heaven let down,\n  Sat gently on these columns as a crown--\n  A window of one circular diamond, there,\n  Look'd out above into the purple air\n  And rays from God shot down that meteor chain\n  And hallow'd all the beauty twice again,\n  Save when, between th' Empyrean and that ring,\n  Some eager spirit flapp'd his dusky wing.\n  But on the pillars Seraph eyes have seen\n  The dimness of this world: that grayish green\n  That Nature loves the best for Beauty's grave\n  Lurk'd in each cornice, round each architrave--\n  And every sculptured cherub thereabout\n  That from his marble dwelling peered out,\n  Seem'd earthly in the shadow of his niche--\n  Achaian statues in a world so rich?\n  Friezes from Tadmor and Persepolis [17]--\n  From Balbec, and the stilly, clear abyss\n  Of beautiful Gomorrah! Oh, the wave [18]\n  Is now upon thee--but too late to save!\n  Sound loves to revel in a summer night:\n  Witness the murmur of the gray twilight\n  That stole upon the ear, in Eyraco [19],\n  Of many a wild star-gazer long ago--\n  That stealeth ever on the ear of him\n  Who, musing, gazeth on the distance dim,\n  And sees the darkness coming as a cloud--\n  Is not its form--its voice--most palpable and loud?  [20]\n   But what is this?--it cometh--and it brings\n  A music with it--'tis the rush of wings--\n  A pause--and then a sweeping, falling strain,\n  And Nesace is in her halls again.\n  From the wild energy of wanton haste\n  Her cheeks were flushing, and her lips apart;\n  The zone that clung around her gentle waist\n  Had burst beneath the heaving of her heart.\n  Within the centre of that hall to breathe\n  She paus'd and panted, Zanthe! all beneath,\n  The fairy light that kiss'd her golden hair\n  And long'd to rest, yet could but sparkle there!\n\n  Young flowers were whispering in melody [21]\n  To happy flowers that night--and tree to tree;\n  Fountains were gushing music as they fell\n  In many a star-lit grove, or moon-light dell;\n  Yet silence came upon material things--\n  Fair flowers, bright waterfalls and angel wings--\n  And sound alone that from the spirit sprang\n  Bore burthen to the charm the maiden sang:\n\n    \"Neath blue-bell or streamer--\n      Or tufted wild spray\n    That keeps, from the dreamer,\n      The moonbeam away--[22]\n    Bright beings! that ponder,\n      With half-closing eyes,\n    On the stars which your wonder\n      Hath drawn from the skies,\n    Till they glance thro' the shade, and\n      Come down to your brow\n    Like--eyes of the maiden\n      Who calls on you now--\n    Arise! from your dreaming\n      In violet bowers,\n    To duty beseeming\n      These star-litten hours--\n    And shake from your tresses\n      Encumber'd with dew\n\n    The breath of those kisses\n      That cumber them too--\n    (O! how, without you, Love!\n      Could angels be blest?)\n    Those kisses of true love\n      That lull'd ye to rest!\n    Up! shake from your wing\n      Each hindering thing:\n    The dew of the night--\n      It would weigh down your flight;\n    And true love caresses--\n      O! leave them apart!\n    They are light on the tresses,\n      But lead on the heart.\n\n    Ligeia! Ligeia!\n      My beautiful one!\n    Whose harshest idea\n      Will to melody run,\n    O! is it thy will\n      On the breezes to toss?\n    Or, capriciously still,\n      Like the lone Albatross, [23]\n    Incumbent on night\n      (As she on the air)\n    To keep watch with delight\n      On the harmony there?\n\n    Ligeia! wherever\n      Thy image may be,\n    No magic shall sever\n      Thy music from thee.\n    Thou hast bound many eyes\n      In a dreamy sleep--\n    But the strains still arise\n      Which _thy_ vigilance keep--\n\n    The sound of the rain\n      Which leaps down to the flower,\n    And dances again\n      In the rhythm of the shower--\n    The murmur that springs [24]\n      From the growing of grass\n    Are the music of things--\n      But are modell'd, alas!\n    Away, then, my dearest,\n      O! hie thee away\n    To springs that lie clearest\n      Beneath the moon-ray--\n    To lone lake that smiles,\n      In its dream of deep rest,\n    At the many star-isles\n    That enjewel its breast--\n    Where wild flowers, creeping,\n      Have mingled their shade,\n    On its margin is sleeping\n      Full many a maid--\n    Some have left the cool glade, and\n      Have slept with the bee--[25]\n    Arouse them, my maiden,\n      On moorland and lea--\n\n    Go! breathe on their slumber,\n      All softly in ear,\n    The musical number\n      They slumber'd to hear--\n    For what can awaken\n      An angel so soon\n    Whose sleep hath been taken\n      Beneath the cold moon,\n    As the spell which no slumber\n      Of witchery may test,\n    The rhythmical number\n      Which lull'd him to rest?\"\n\n  Spirits in wing, and angels to the view,\n  A thousand seraphs burst th' Empyrean thro',\n  Young dreams still hovering on their drowsy flight--\n  Seraphs in all but \"Knowledge,\" the keen light\n  That fell, refracted, thro' thy bounds afar,\n  O death! from eye of God upon that star;\n  Sweet was that error--sweeter still that death--\n  Sweet was that error--ev'n with _us_ the breath\n  Of Science dims the mirror of our joy--\n  To them 'twere the Simoom, and would destroy--\n  For what (to them) availeth it to know\n  That Truth is Falsehood--or that Bliss is Woe?\n  Sweet was their death--with them to die was rife\n  With the last ecstasy of satiate life--\n  Beyond that death no immortality--\n  But sleep that pondereth and is not \"to be\"--\n  And there--oh! may my weary spirit dwell--\n  Apart from Heaven's Eternity--and yet how far from Hell! [26]\n\n  What guilty spirit, in what shrubbery dim\n  Heard not the stirring summons of that hymn?\n  But two: they fell: for heaven no grace imparts\n  To those who hear not for their beating hearts.\n  A maiden-angel and her seraph-lover--\n  O! where (and ye may seek the wide skies over)\n  Was Love, the blind, near sober Duty known?\n  Unguided Love hath fallen--'mid \"tears of perfect moan.\" [27]\n\n  He was a goodly spirit--he who fell:\n  A wanderer by mossy-mantled well--\n  A gazer on the lights that shine above--\n  A dreamer in the moonbeam by his love:\n  What wonder? for each star is eye-like there,\n  And looks so sweetly down on Beauty's hair--\n  And they, and ev'ry mossy spring were holy\n  To his love-haunted heart and melancholy.\n  The night had found (to him a night of wo)\n  Upon a mountain crag, young Angelo--\n  Beetling it bends athwart the solemn sky,\n  And scowls on starry worlds that down beneath it lie.\n  Here sate he with his love--his dark eye bent\n  With eagle gaze along the firmament:\n  Now turn'd it upon her--but ever then\n  It trembled to the orb of EARTH again.\n\n  \"Ianthe, dearest, see! how dim that ray!\n  How lovely 'tis to look so far away!\n  She seemed not thus upon that autumn eve\n  I left her gorgeous halls--nor mourned to leave,\n  That eve--that eve--I should remember well--\n  The sun-ray dropped, in Lemnos with a spell\n  On th' Arabesque carving of a gilded hall\n  Wherein I sate, and on the draperied wall--\n  And on my eyelids--O, the heavy light!\n  How drowsily it weighed them into night!\n  On flowers, before, and mist, and love they ran\n  With Persian Saadi in his Gulistan:\n  But O, that light!--I slumbered--Death, the while,\n  Stole o'er my senses in that lovely isle\n  So softly that no single silken hair\n  Awoke that slept--or knew that he was there.\n\n  \"The last spot of Earth's orb I trod upon\n  Was a proud temple called the Parthenon; [28]\n  More beauty clung around her columned wall\n  Then even thy glowing bosom beats withal, [29]\n  And when old Time my wing did disenthral\n  Thence sprang I--as the eagle from his tower,\n  And years I left behind me in an hour.\n  What time upon her airy bounds I hung,\n  One half the garden of her globe was flung\n  Unrolling as a chart unto my view--\n  Tenantless cities of the desert too!\n  Ianthe, beauty crowded on me then,\n  And half I wished to be again of men.\"\n\n  \"My Angelo! and why of them to be?\n  A brighter dwelling-place is here for thee--\n  And greener fields than in yon world above,\n  And woman's loveliness--and passionate love.\"\n  \"But list, Ianthe! when the air so soft\n  Failed, as my pennoned spirit leapt aloft, [30]\n  Perhaps my brain grew dizzy--but the world\n  I left so late was into chaos hurled,\n  Sprang from her station, on the winds apart,\n  And rolled a flame, the fiery Heaven athwart.\n  Methought, my sweet one, then I ceased to soar,\n  And fell--not swiftly as I rose before,\n  But with a downward, tremulous motion thro'\n  Light, brazen rays, this golden star unto!\n  Nor long the measure of my falling hours,\n  For nearest of all stars was thine to ours--\n  Dread star! that came, amid a night of mirth,\n  A red Daedalion on the timid Earth.\"\n\n  \"We came--and to thy Earth--but not to us\n  Be given our lady's bidding to discuss:\n  We came, my love; around, above, below,\n  Gay fire-fly of the night we come and go,\n  Nor ask a reason save the angel-nod\n  _She_ grants to us as granted by her God--\n  But, Angelo, than thine gray Time unfurled\n  Never his fairy wing o'er fairer world!\n  Dim was its little disk, and angel eyes\n  Alone could see the phantom in the skies,\n  When first Al Aaraaf knew her course to be\n  Headlong thitherward o'er the starry sea--\n  But when its glory swelled upon the sky,\n  As glowing Beauty's bust beneath man's eye,\n  We paused before the heritage of men,\n  And thy star trembled--as doth Beauty then!\"\n\n  Thus in discourse, the lovers whiled away\n  The night that waned and waned and brought no day.\n  They fell: for Heaven to them no hope imparts\n  Who hear not for the beating of their hearts.\n\n\n1839.\n\n\n\n[Footnote 1: A star was discovered by Tycho Brahe which appeared\nsuddenly in the heavens--attained, in a few days, a brilliancy\nsurpassing that of Jupiter--then as suddenly disappeared, and has never\nbeen seen since.]\n\n\n[Footnote 2: On Santa Maura--olim Deucadia.]\n\n\n[Footnote 3: Sappho.]\n\n\n[Footnote 4: This flower is much noticed by Lewenhoeck and Tournefort.\nThe bee, feeding upon its blossom, becomes intoxicated.]\n\n\n[Footnote: Clytia--the Chrysanthemum Peruvianum, or, to employ a\nbetter-known term, the turnsol--which turns continually towards the sun,\ncovers itself, like Peru, the country from which it comes, with dewy\nclouds which cool and refresh its flowers during the most violent heat\nof the day.--'B. de St. Pierre.']\n\n\n[Footnote 6: There is cultivated in the king's garden at Paris, a\nspecies of serpentine aloe without prickles, whose large and beautiful\nflower exhales a strong odor of the vanilla, during the time of its\nexpansion, which is very short. It does not blow till towards the month\nof July--you then perceive it gradually open its petals--expand\nthem--fade and die.--'St. Pierre'.]\n\n\n[Footnote 7: There is found, in the Rhone, a beautiful lily of the\nValisnerian kind. Its stem will stretch to the length of three or four\nfeet--thus preserving its head above water in the swellings of the\nriver.]\n\n\n[Footnote 8: The Hyacinth.]\n\n\n[Footnote 9: It is a fiction of the Indians, that Cupid was first seen\nfloating in one of these down the river Ganges, and that he still loves\nthe cradle of his childhood.]\n\n\n[Footnote 10: And golden vials full of odors which are the prayers of\nthe saints.--'Rev. St. John.']\n\n\n[Footnote 11: The Humanitarians held that God was to be understood as\nhaving really a human form.--'Vide Clarke's Sermons', vol. I, page 26,\nfol. edit.\n\nThe drift of Milton's argument leads him to employ language which would\nappear, at first sight, to verge upon their doctrine; but it will be\nseen immediately, that he guards himself against the charge of having\nadopted one of the most ignorant errors of the dark ages of the\nChurch.--'Dr. Sumner's Notes on Milton's Christian Doctrine'.\n\nThis opinion, in spite of many testimonies to the contrary, could never\nhave been very general. Andeus, a Syrian of Mesopotamia, was condemned\nfor the opinion, as heretical. He lived in the beginning of the fourth\ncentury. His disciples were called Anthropomorphites.--'Vide du Pin'.\n\nAmong Milton's minor poems are these lines:\n\n\n  Dicite sacrorum præesides nemorum Dese, etc.,\n  Quis ille primus cujus ex imagine\n  Natura solers finxit humanum genus?\n  Eternus, incorruptus, æquævus polo,\n  Unusque et universus exemplar Dei.\n\n--And afterwards,\n\n  Non cui profundum Cæcitas lumen dedit\n  Dircæus augur vidit hunc alto sinu, etc.]\n\n\n[Footnote 12:\n\n  Seltsamen Tochter Jovis\n  Seinem Schosskinde\n  Der Phantasie.\n\n'Goethe'.]\n\n\n[Footnote 13: Sightless--too small to be seen.--'Legge'.]\n\n\n[Footnote 14: I have often noticed a peculiar movement of the\nfire-flies; they will collect in a body and fly off, from a common\ncentre, into innumerable radii.]\n\n\n[Footnote 15: Therasæa, or Therasea, the island mentioned by Seneca,\nwhich, in a moment, arose from the sea to the eyes of astonished\nmariners.]\n\n\n[Footnote 16:\n\n  Some star which, from the ruin'd roof\n  Of shak'd Olympus, by mischance did fall.\n\n'Milton'.]\n\n\n[Footnote 17: Voltaire, in speaking of Persepolis, says,\n\n  \"Je connais bien l'admiration qu'inspirent ces ruines--mais un palais\n  érigé au pied d'une chaîne de rochers steriles--peut-il être un chef\n  d'oeuvre des arts!\"]\n\n\n[Footnote 18: \"Oh, the wave\"--Ula Deguisi is the Turkish appellation;\nbut, on its own shores, it is called Baliar Loth, or Al-motanah. There\nwere undoubtedly more than two cities engulphed in the \"dead sea.\" In\nthe valley of Siddim were five--Adrah, Zeboin, Zoar, Sodom and Gomorrah.\nStephen of Byzantium mentions eight, and Strabo thirteen (engulphed)\n--but the last is out of all reason. It is said (Tacitus, Strabo,\nJosephus, Daniel of St. Saba, Nau, Maundrell, Troilo, D'Arvieux), that\nafter an excessive drought, the vestiges of columns, walls, etc., are\nseen above the surface. At 'any' season, such remains may be discovered\nby looking down into the transparent lake, and at such distance as would\nargue the existence of many settlements in the space now usurped by the\n\"Asphaltites.\"]\n\n\n[Footnote 19: Eyraco-Chaldea.]\n\n\n[Footnote 20: I have often thought I could distinctly hear the sound of\nthe darkness as it stole over the horizon.]\n\n\n[Footnote 21:\n\n  Fairies use flowers for their charactery.\n\n'Merry Wives of Windsor'.]\n\n\n[Footnote 22: In Scripture is this passage:\n\n  \"The sun shall not harm thee by day, nor the moon by night.\"\n\nIt is, perhaps, not generally known that the moon, in Egypt, has the\neffect of producing blindness to those who sleep with the face exposed\nto its rays, to which circumstances the passage evidently\nalludes.]\n\n\n[Footnote 23: The Albatross is said to sleep on the wing.]\n\n\n[Footnote 24: I met with this idea in an old English tale, which I am\nnow unable to obtain and quote from memory:\n\n  \"The verie essence and, as it were, springe heade and origine of all\n  musiche is the verie pleasaunte sounde which the trees of the forest\n  do make when they growe.\"]\n\n\n[Footnote 25: The wild bee will not sleep in the shade if there be\nmoonlight. The rhyme in the verse, as in one about sixty lines before,\nhas an appearance of affectation. It is, however, imitated from Sir W.\nScott, or rather from Claud Halcro--in whose mouth I admired its effect:\n\n  O! were there an island,\n    Tho' ever so wild,\n  Where woman might smile, and\n    No man be beguil'd, etc. ]\n\n\n[Footnote 26: With the Arabians there is a medium between Heaven and\nHell, where men suffer no punishment, but yet do not attain that\ntranquil and even happiness which they suppose to be characteristic of\nheavenly enjoyment.\n\n  Un no rompido sueno--\n  Un dia puro--allegre--libre\n  Quiera--\n  Libre de amor--de zelo--\n  De odio--de esperanza--de rezelo.\n\n'Luis Ponce de Leon.'\n\nSorrow is not excluded from \"Al Aaraaf,\" but it is that sorrow which the\nliving love to cherish for the dead, and which, in some minds, resembles\nthe delirium of opium.\n\nThe passionate excitement of Love and the buoyancy of spirit attendant\nupon intoxication are its less holy pleasures--the price of which, to\nthose souls who make choice of \"Al Aaraaf\" as their residence after\nlife, is final death and annihilation.]\n\n\n[Footnote 27:\n\n  There be tears of perfect moan\n  Wept for thee in Helicon.\n\n'Milton'.]\n\n\n[Footnote 28: It was entire in 1687--the most elevated spot in Athens.]\n\n\n[Footnote 29:\n\n  Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows\n  Than have the white breasts of the queen of love.\n\n'Marlowe.']\n\n\n[Footnote 30: Pennon, for pinion.--'Milton'.]\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Tamerlane.",
    "body": "  Kind solace in a dying hour!\n  Such, father, is not (now) my theme--\n  I will not madly deem that power\n  Of Earth may shrive me of the sin\n  Unearthly pride hath revelled in--\n  I have no time to dote or dream:\n  You call it hope--that fire of fire!\n  It is but agony of desire:\n  If I _can_ hope--O God! I can--\n  Its fount is holier--more divine--\n  I would not call thee fool, old man,\n  But such is not a gift of thine.\n\n  Know thou the secret of a spirit\n  Bowed from its wild pride into shame\n  O yearning heart! I did inherit\n  Thy withering portion with the fame,\n  The searing glory which hath shone\n  Amid the Jewels of my throne,\n  Halo of Hell! and with a pain\n  Not Hell shall make me fear again--\n  O craving heart, for the lost flowers\n  And sunshine of my summer hours!\n  The undying voice of that dead time,\n  With its interminable chime,\n  Rings, in the spirit of a spell,\n  Upon thy emptiness--a knell.\n\n  I have not always been as now:\n  The fevered diadem on my brow\n  I claimed and won usurpingly--\n  Hath not the same fierce heirdom given\n  Rome to the Cæsar--this to me?\n  The heritage of a kingly mind,\n  And a proud spirit which hath striven\n  Triumphantly with human kind.\n  On mountain soil I first drew life:\n  The mists of the Taglay have shed\n  Nightly their dews upon my head,\n  And, I believe, the winged strife\n  And tumult of the headlong air\n  Have nestled in my very hair.\n\n  So late from Heaven--that dew--it fell\n  ('Mid dreams of an unholy night)\n  Upon me with the touch of Hell,\n  While the red flashing of the light\n  From clouds that hung, like banners, o'er,\n  Appeared to my half-closing eye\n  The pageantry of monarchy;\n  And the deep trumpet-thunder's roar\n  Came hurriedly upon me, telling\n  Of human battle, where my voice,\n  My own voice, silly child!--was swelling\n  (O! how my spirit would rejoice,\n  And leap within me at the cry)\n  The battle-cry of Victory!\n\n  The rain came down upon my head\n  Unsheltered--and the heavy wind\n  Rendered me mad and deaf and blind.\n  It was but man, I thought, who shed\n  Laurels upon me: and the rush--\n  The torrent of the chilly air\n  Gurgled within my ear the crush\n  Of empires--with the captive's prayer--\n  The hum of suitors--and the tone\n  Of flattery 'round a sovereign's throne.\n\n  My passions, from that hapless hour,\n  Usurped a tyranny which men\n  Have deemed since I have reached to power,\n  My innate nature--be it so:\n  But, father, there lived one who, then,\n  Then--in my boyhood--when their fire\n  Burned with a still intenser glow\n  (For passion must, with youth, expire)\n  E'en _then_ who knew this iron heart\n  In woman's weakness had a part.\n\n  I have no words--alas!--to tell\n  The loveliness of loving well!\n  Nor would I now attempt to trace\n  The more than beauty of a face\n  Whose lineaments, upon my mind,\n  Are--shadows on th' unstable wind:\n  Thus I remember having dwelt\n  Some page of early lore upon,\n  With loitering eye, till I have felt\n  The letters--with their meaning--melt\n  To fantasies--with none.\n\n  O, she was worthy of all love!\n  Love as in infancy was mine--\n  'Twas such as angel minds above\n  Might envy; her young heart the shrine\n  On which my every hope and thought\n  Were incense--then a goodly gift,\n  For they were childish and upright--\n  Pure--as her young example taught:\n  Why did I leave it, and, adrift,\n  Trust to the fire within, for light?\n\n  We grew in age--and love--together--\n  Roaming the forest, and the wild;\n  My breast her shield in wintry weather--\n  And, when the friendly sunshine smiled.\n  And she would mark the opening skies,\n  _I_ saw no Heaven--but in her eyes.\n  Young Love's first lesson is----the heart:\n  For 'mid that sunshine, and those smiles,\n  When, from our little cares apart,\n  And laughing at her girlish wiles,\n  I'd throw me on her throbbing breast,\n  And pour my spirit out in tears--\n  There was no need to speak the rest--\n  No need to quiet any fears\n  Of her--who asked no reason why,\n  But turned on me her quiet eye!\n\n  Yet _more_ than worthy of the love\n  My spirit struggled with, and strove\n  When, on the mountain peak, alone,\n  Ambition lent it a new tone--\n  I had no being--but in thee:\n  The world, and all it did contain\n  In the earth--the air--the sea--\n  Its joy--its little lot of pain\n  That was new pleasure--the ideal,\n  Dim, vanities of dreams by night--\n  And dimmer nothings which were real--\n  (Shadows--and a more shadowy light!)\n  Parted upon their misty wings,\n  And, so, confusedly, became\n  Thine image and--a name--a name!\n  Two separate--yet most intimate things.\n\n  I was ambitious--have you known\n  The passion, father? You have not:\n  A cottager, I marked a throne\n  Of half the world as all my own,\n  And murmured at such lowly lot--\n  But, just like any other dream,\n  Upon the vapor of the dew\n  My own had past, did not the beam\n  Of beauty which did while it thro'\n  The minute--the hour--the day--oppress\n  My mind with double loveliness.\n\n  We walked together on the crown\n  Of a high mountain which looked down\n  Afar from its proud natural towers\n  Of rock and forest, on the hills--\n  The dwindled hills! begirt with bowers\n  And shouting with a thousand rills.\n\n  I spoke to her of power and pride,\n  But mystically--in such guise\n  That she might deem it nought beside\n  The moment's converse; in her eyes\n  I read, perhaps too carelessly--\n  A mingled feeling with my own--\n  The flush on her bright cheek, to me\n  Seemed to become a queenly throne\n  Too well that I should let it be\n  Light in the wilderness alone.\n\n  I wrapped myself in grandeur then,\n  And donned a visionary crown--\n  Yet it was not that Fantasy\n  Had thrown her mantle over me--\n  But that, among the rabble--men,\n  Lion ambition is chained down--\n  And crouches to a keeper's hand--\n  Not so in deserts where the grand--\n  The wild--the terrible conspire\n  With their own breath to fan his fire.\n\n  Look 'round thee now on Samarcand!--\n  Is she not queen of Earth? her pride\n  Above all cities? in her hand\n  Their destinies? in all beside\n  Of glory which the world hath known\n  Stands she not nobly and alone?\n  Falling--her veriest stepping-stone\n  Shall form the pedestal of a throne--\n  And who her sovereign? Timour--he\n  Whom the astonished people saw\n  Striding o'er empires haughtily\n  A diademed outlaw!\n\n  O, human love! thou spirit given,\n  On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!\n  Which fall'st into the soul like rain\n  Upon the Siroc-withered plain,\n  And, failing in thy power to bless,\n  But leav'st the heart a wilderness!\n  Idea! which bindest life around\n  With music of so strange a sound\n  And beauty of so wild a birth--\n  Farewell! for I have won the Earth.\n\n  When Hope, the eagle that towered, could see\n  No cliff beyond him in the sky,\n  His pinions were bent droopingly--\n  And homeward turned his softened eye.\n  'Twas sunset: When the sun will part\n  There comes a sullenness of heart\n  To him who still would look upon\n  The glory of the summer sun.\n  That soul will hate the ev'ning mist\n  So often lovely, and will list\n  To the sound of the coming darkness (known\n  To those whose spirits hearken) as one\n  Who, in a dream of night, _would_ fly,\n  But _cannot_, from a danger nigh.\n\n  What tho' the moon--tho' the white moon\n  Shed all the splendor of her noon,\n  _Her_ smile is chilly--and _her_ beam,\n  In that time of dreariness, will seem\n  (So like you gather in your breath)\n  A portrait taken after death.\n  And boyhood is a summer sun\n  Whose waning is the dreariest one--\n  For all we live to know is known,\n  And all we seek to keep hath flown--\n  Let life, then, as the day-flower, fall\n  With the noon-day beauty--which is all.\n  I reached my home--my home no more--\n  For all had flown who made it so.\n  I passed from out its mossy door,\n  And, tho' my tread was soft and low,\n  A voice came from the threshold stone\n  Of one whom I had earlier known--\n  O, I defy thee, Hell, to show\n  On beds of fire that burn below,\n  An humbler heart--a deeper woe.\n\n  Father, I firmly do believe--\n  I _know_--for Death who comes for me\n  From regions of the blest afar,\n  Where there is nothing to deceive,\n  Hath left his iron gate ajar.\n  And rays of truth you cannot see\n  Are flashing thro' Eternity----\n  I do believe that Eblis hath\n  A snare in every human path--\n  Else how, when in the holy grove\n  I wandered of the idol, Love,--\n  Who daily scents his snowy wings\n  With incense of burnt-offerings\n  From the most unpolluted things,\n  Whose pleasant bowers are yet so riven\n  Above with trellised rays from Heaven\n  No mote may shun--no tiniest fly--\n  The light'ning of his eagle eye--\n  How was it that Ambition crept,\n  Unseen, amid the revels there,\n  Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt\n  In the tangles of Love's very hair!\n\n\n\n1829.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "To Helen.",
    "body": "  Helen, thy beauty is to me\n    Like those Nicean barks of yore,\n  That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,\n    The weary, wayworn wanderer bore\n    To his own native shore.\n\n  On desperate seas long wont to roam,\n    Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,\n  Thy Naiad airs have brought me home\n    To the glory that was Greece,\n  To the grandeur that was Rome.\n\n  Lo! in yon brilliant window niche,\n    How statue-like I see thee stand,\n    The agate lamp within thy hand!\n  Ah, Psyche, from the regions which\n    Are Holy Land!\n\n1831.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Valley Of Unrest.",
    "body": "  _Once_ it smiled a silent dell\n  Where the people did not dwell;\n  They had gone unto the wars,\n  Trusting to the mild-eyed stars,\n  Nightly, from their azure towers,\n  To keep watch above the flowers,\n  In the midst of which all day\n  The red sun-light lazily lay,\n  _Now_ each visitor shall confess\n  The sad valley's restlessness.\n  Nothing there is motionless--\n  Nothing save the airs that brood\n  Over the magic solitude.\n  Ah, by no wind are stirred those trees\n  That palpitate like the chill seas\n  Around the misty Hebrides!\n  Ah, by no wind those clouds are driven\n  That rustle through the unquiet Heaven\n  Unceasingly, from morn till even,\n  Over the violets there that lie\n  In myriad types of the human eye--\n  Over the lilies that wave\n  And weep above a nameless grave!\n  They wave:--from out their fragrant tops\n  Eternal dews come down in drops.\n  They weep:--from off their delicate stems\n  Perennial tears descend in gems.\n\n\n1831.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Israfel. [1]",
    "body": "  In Heaven a spirit doth dwell\n    \"Whose heart-strings are a lute;\"\n  None sing so wildly well\n  As the angel Israfel,\n  And the giddy Stars (so legends tell),\n  Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell\n    Of his voice, all mute.\n\n  Tottering above\n    In her highest noon,\n    The enamoured Moon\n  Blushes with love,\n    While, to listen, the red levin\n    (With the rapid Pleiads, even,\n    Which were seven),\n    Pauses in Heaven.\n\n  And they say (the starry choir\n    And the other listening things)\n  That Israfeli's fire\n  Is owing to that lyre\n    By which he sits and sings--\n  The trembling living wire\n  Of those unusual strings.\n\n  But the skies that angel trod,\n    Where deep thoughts are a duty--\n  Where Love's a grow-up God--\n    Where the Houri glances are\n  Imbued with all the beauty\n    Which we worship in a star.\n\n  Therefore, thou art not wrong,\n    Israfeli, who despisest\n  An unimpassioned song;\n  To thee the laurels belong,\n    Best bard, because the wisest!\n  Merrily live and long!\n\n  The ecstasies above\n    With thy burning measures suit--\n  Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,\n    With the fervor of thy lute--\n    Well may the stars be mute!\n\n  Yes, Heaven is thine; but this\n    Is a world of sweets and sours;\n    Our flowers are merely--flowers,\n  And the shadow of thy perfect bliss\n    Is the sunshine of ours.\n\n  If I could dwell\n  Where Israfel\n    Hath dwelt, and he where I,\n  He might not sing so wildly well\n    A mortal melody,\n  While a bolder note than this might swell\n    From my lyre within the sky.\n\n\n1836.\n\n\n\n[Footnote 1:\n\n  And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the\n  sweetest voice of all God's creatures.\n\n'Koran'.]\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n\n\n\n\nTO----\n\n\n  I heed not that my earthly lot\n    Hath--little of Earth in it--\n  That years of love have been forgot\n    In the hatred of a minute:--\n  I mourn not that the desolate\n    Are happier, sweet, than I,\n  But that _you_ sorrow for _my_ fate\n    Who am a passer-by.\n\n\n1829.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n\n\n\n\nTO----\n\n\n  The bowers whereat, in dreams, I see\n    The wantonest singing birds,\n\n  Are lips--and all thy melody\n    Of lip-begotten words--\n\n  Thine eyes, in Heaven of heart enshrined\n    Then desolately fall,\n  O God! on my funereal mind\n    Like starlight on a pall--\n\n  Thy heart--_thy_ heart!--I wake and sigh,\n    And sleep to dream till day\n  Of the truth that gold can never buy--\n    Of the baubles that it may.\n\n\n1829.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "To The River",
    "body": "  Fair river! in thy bright, clear flow\n    Of crystal, wandering water,\n  Thou art an emblem of the glow\n        Of beauty--the unhidden heart--\n        The playful maziness of art\n    In old Alberto's daughter;\n\n  But when within thy wave she looks--\n    Which glistens then, and trembles--\n  Why, then, the prettiest of brooks\n    Her worshipper resembles;\n  For in his heart, as in thy stream,\n    Her image deeply lies--\n  His heart which trembles at the beam\n    Of her soul-searching eyes.\n\n\n1829.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Song.",
    "body": "  I saw thee on thy bridal day--\n    When a burning blush came o'er thee,\n  Though happiness around thee lay,\n    The world all love before thee:\n\n  And in thine eye a kindling light\n    (Whatever it might be)\n  Was all on Earth my aching sight\n    Of Loveliness could see.\n\n  That blush, perhaps, was maiden shame--\n    As such it well may pass--\n  Though its glow hath raised a fiercer flame\n    In the breast of him, alas!\n\n  Who saw thee on that bridal day,\n    When that deep blush _would_ come o'er thee,\n  Though happiness around thee lay,\n    The world all love before thee.\n\n\n1827.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Spirits Of The Dead.",
    "body": "  Thy soul shall find itself alone\n  'Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone\n  Not one, of all the crowd, to pry\n  Into thine hour of secrecy.\n  Be silent in that solitude\n    Which is not loneliness--for then\n  The spirits of the dead who stood\n    In life before thee are again\n  In death around thee--and their will\n  Shall overshadow thee: be still.\n  The night--tho' clear--shall frown--\n  And the stars shall not look down\n  From their high thrones in the Heaven,\n  With light like Hope to mortals given--\n  But their red orbs, without beam,\n  To thy weariness shall seem\n  As a burning and a fever\n  Which would cling to thee forever.\n  Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish--\n  Now are visions ne'er to vanish--\n  From thy spirit shall they pass\n  No more--like dew-drops from the grass.\n  The breeze--the breath of God--is still--\n  And the mist upon the hill\n  Shadowy--shadowy--yet unbroken,\n    Is a symbol and a token--\n    How it hangs upon the trees,\n    A mystery of mysteries!\n\n\n1837.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "A Dream.",
    "body": "  In visions of the dark night\n    I have dreamed of joy departed--\n  But a waking dream of life and light\n    Hath left me broken-hearted.\n\n  Ah! what is not a dream by day\n    To him whose eyes are cast\n  On things around him with a ray\n    Turned back upon the past?\n\n  That holy dream--that holy dream,\n    While all the world were chiding,\n  Hath cheered me as a lovely beam,\n    A lonely spirit guiding.\n\n  What though that light, thro' storm and night,\n    So trembled from afar--\n  What could there be more purely bright\n    In Truth's day star?\n\n\n1837.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Romance.",
    "body": "  Romance, who loves to nod and sing,\n  With drowsy head and folded wing,\n  Among the green leaves as they shake\n  Far down within some shadowy lake,\n  To me a painted paroquet\n  Hath been--a most familiar bird--\n  Taught me my alphabet to say--\n  To lisp my very earliest word\n  While in the wild wood I did lie,\n  A child--with a most knowing eye.\n\n  Of late, eternal Condor years\n  So shake the very Heaven on high\n  With tumult as they thunder by,\n  I have no time for idle cares\n  Though gazing on the unquiet sky.\n  And when an hour with calmer wings\n  Its down upon my spirit flings--\n  That little time with lyre and rhyme\n  To while away--forbidden things!\n  My heart would feel to be a crime\n  Unless it trembled with the strings.\n\n\n1829.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Fairyland.",
    "body": "  Dim vales--and shadowy floods--\n  And cloudy-looking woods,\n  Whose forms we can't discover\n  For the tears that drip all over\n  Huge moons there wax and wane--\n  Again--again--again--\n  Every moment of the night--\n  Forever changing places--\n  And they put out the star-light\n  With the breath from their pale faces.\n  About twelve by the moon-dial\n  One more filmy than the rest\n  (A kind which, upon trial,\n  They have found to be the best)\n  Comes down--still down--and down\n  With its centre on the crown\n  Of a mountain's eminence,\n  While its wide circumference\n  In easy drapery falls\n  Over hamlets, over halls,\n  Wherever they may be--\n  O'er the strange woods--o'er the sea--\n  Over spirits on the wing--\n  Over every drowsy thing--\n  And buries them up quite\n  In a labyrinth of light--\n  And then, how deep!--O, deep!\n  Is the passion of their sleep.\n  In the morning they arise,\n  And their moony covering\n  Is soaring in the skies,\n  With the tempests as they toss,\n  Like--almost any thing--\n  Or a yellow Albatross.\n  They use that moon no more\n  For the same end as before--\n  Videlicet a tent--\n  Which I think extravagant:\n  Its atomies, however,\n  Into a shower dissever,\n  Of which those butterflies,\n  Of Earth, who seek the skies,\n  And so come down again\n  (Never-contented thing!)\n  Have brought a specimen\n  Upon their quivering wings.\n\n\n1831\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Lake.",
    "body": "  In spring of youth it was my lot\n  To haunt of the wide world a spot\n  The which I could not love the less--\n  So lovely was the loneliness\n  Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,\n  And the tall pines that towered around.\n\n  But when the Night had thrown her pall\n  Upon the spot, as upon all,\n  And the mystic wind went by\n  Murmuring in melody--\n  Then--ah, then, I would awake\n  To the terror of the lone lake.\n\n  Yet that terror was not fright,\n  But a tremulous delight--\n  A feeling not the jewelled mine\n  Could teach or bribe me to define--\n  Nor Love--although the Love were thine.\n\n  Death was in that poisonous wave,\n  And in its gulf a fitting grave\n  For him who thence could solace bring\n  To his lone imagining--\n  Whose solitary soul could make\n  An Eden of that dim lake.\n\n\n1827.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Evening Star.",
    "body": "  'Twas noontide of summer,\n    And midtime of night,\n  And stars, in their orbits,\n    Shone pale, through the light\n  Of the brighter, cold moon.\n    'Mid planets her slaves,\n  Herself in the Heavens,\n    Her beam on the waves.\n\n    I gazed awhile\n    On her cold smile;\n  Too cold--too cold for me--\n    There passed, as a shroud,\n    A fleecy cloud,\n  And I turned away to thee,\n    Proud Evening Star,\n    In thy glory afar\n  And dearer thy beam shall be;\n    For joy to my heart\n    Is the proud part\n  Thou bearest in Heaven at night,\n    And more I admire\n    Thy distant fire,\n  Than that colder, lowly light.\n\n\n1827.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Imitation.",
    "body": "  A dark unfathomed tide\n  Of interminable pride--\n  A mystery, and a dream,\n  Should my early life seem;\n  I say that dream was fraught\n  With a wild and waking thought\n  Of beings that have been,\n  Which my spirit hath not seen,\n  Had I let them pass me by,\n  With a dreaming eye!\n  Let none of earth inherit\n  That vision on my spirit;\n  Those thoughts I would control,\n  As a spell upon his soul:\n  For that bright hope at last\n  And that light time have past,\n  And my wordly rest hath gone\n  With a sigh as it passed on:\n  I care not though it perish\n  With a thought I then did cherish.\n\n\n1827.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "\"The Happiest Day.\"",
    "body": "     I.       The happiest day--the happiest hour\n                My seared and blighted heart hath known,\n              The highest hope of pride and power,\n                I feel hath flown.\n\n\n     II.      Of power! said I? Yes! such I ween\n                But they have vanished long, alas!\n              The visions of my youth have been--\n                But let them pass.\n\n\n     III.     And pride, what have I now with thee?\n                Another brow may ev'n inherit\n              The venom thou hast poured on me--\n                Be still my spirit!\n\n\n     IV.      The happiest day--the happiest hour\n                Mine eyes shall see--have ever seen\n              The brightest glance of pride and power\n                I feel have been:\n\n\n     V.       But were that hope of pride and power\n                Now offered with the pain\n              Ev'n _then_ I felt--that brightest hour\n                I would not live again:\n\n     VI.      For on its wing was dark alloy\n                And as it fluttered--fell\n              An essence--powerful to destroy\n                A soul that knew it well.\n\n\n1827.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n\n\n\n\nTranslation from the Greek.",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Hymn To Aristogeiton And Harmodius.",
    "body": "  I.      Wreathed in myrtle, my sword I'll conceal,\n            Like those champions devoted and brave,\n          When they plunged in the tyrant their steel,\n            And to Athens deliverance gave.\n\n  II.     Beloved heroes! your deathless souls roam\n            In the joy breathing isles of the blest;\n          Where the mighty of old have their home--\n            Where Achilles and Diomed rest.\n\n  III.    In fresh myrtle my blade I'll entwine,\n            Like Harmodius, the gallant and good,\n          When he made at the tutelar shrine\n            A libation of Tyranny's blood.\n\n  IV.     Ye deliverers of Athens from shame!\n            Ye avengers of Liberty's wrongs!\n          Endless ages shall cherish your fame,\n            Embalmed in their echoing songs!\n\n1827\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Dreams.",
    "body": "  Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream!\n  My spirit not awakening, till the beam\n  Of an Eternity should bring the morrow.\n  Yes! though that long dream were of hopeless sorrow,\n  'Twere better than the cold reality\n  Of waking life, to him whose heart must be,\n  And hath been still, upon the lovely earth,\n  A chaos of deep passion, from his birth.\n  But should it be--that dream eternally\n  Continuing--as dreams have been to me\n  In my young boyhood--should it thus be given,\n  'Twere folly still to hope for higher Heaven.\n  For I have revelled when the sun was bright\n  I' the summer sky, in dreams of living light\n  And loveliness,--have left my very heart\n  Inclines of my imaginary apart [1]\n  From mine own home, with beings that have been\n  Of mine own thought--what more could I have seen?\n  'Twas once--and only once--and the wild hour\n  From my remembrance shall not pass--some power\n  Or spell had bound me--'twas the chilly wind\n  Came o'er me in the night, and left behind\n  Its image on my spirit--or the moon\n  Shone on my slumbers in her lofty noon\n  Too coldly--or the stars--howe'er it was\n  That dream was that that night-wind--let it pass.\n  _I have been_ happy, though in a dream.\n  I have been happy--and I love the theme:\n  Dreams! in their vivid coloring of life\n  As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife\n  Of semblance with reality which brings\n  To the delirious eye, more lovely things\n  Of Paradise and Love--and all my own!--\n  Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.\n\n\n\n[Footnote 1: In climes of mine imagining apart?--Ed.]\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "\"In Youth I Have Known One.\"",
    "body": "          _How often we forget all time, when lone\n          Admiring Nature's universal throne;\n          Her woods--her wilds--her mountains--the intense\n          Reply of Hers to Our intelligence!_\n\n\nI.        In youth I have known one with whom the Earth\n            In secret communing held--as he with it,\n          In daylight, and in beauty, from his birth:\n            Whose fervid, flickering torch of life was lit\n          From the sun and stars, whence he had drawn forth\n            A passionate light such for his spirit was fit--\n          And yet that spirit knew--not in the hour\n            Of its own fervor--what had o'er it power.\n\n\nII.       Perhaps it may be that my mind is wrought\n            To a ferver [1] by the moonbeam that hangs o'er,\n          But I will half believe that wild light fraught\n            With more of sovereignty than ancient lore\n          Hath ever told--or is it of a thought\n            The unembodied essence, and no more\n          That with a quickening spell doth o'er us pass\n            As dew of the night-time, o'er the summer grass?\n\n\nIII.      Doth o'er us pass, when, as th' expanding eye\n            To the loved object--so the tear to the lid\n          Will start, which lately slept in apathy?\n            And yet it need not be--(that object) hid\n          From us in life--but common--which doth lie\n            Each hour before us--but then only bid\n          With a strange sound, as of a harp-string broken\n            T' awake us--'Tis a symbol and a token--\n\n\nIV.       Of what in other worlds shall be--and given\n            In beauty by our God, to those alone\n          Who otherwise would fall from life and Heaven\n            Drawn by their heart's passion, and that tone,\n          That high tone of the spirit which hath striven\n            Though not with Faith--with godliness--whose throne\n          With desperate energy 't hath beaten down;\n            Wearing its own deep feeling as a crown.\n\n\n\n[Footnote 1: Query \"fervor\"?--Ed.]\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *\n\n\n\n\n\nA PÆAN.\n\n\n\nI.        How shall the burial rite be read?\n            The solemn song be sung?\n          The requiem for the loveliest dead,\n            That ever died so young?\n\n\nII.       Her friends are gazing on her,\n            And on her gaudy bier,\n          And weep!--oh! to dishonor\n            Dead beauty with a tear!\n\n\nIII.     They loved her for her wealth--\n           And they hated her for her pride--\n          But she grew in feeble health,\n            And they _love_ her--that she died.\n\n\nIV.      They tell me (while they speak\n           Of her \"costly broider'd pall\")\n         That my voice is growing weak--\n           That I should not sing at all--\n\n\nV.       Or that my tone should be\n           Tun'd to such solemn song\n         So mournfully--so mournfully,\n           That the dead may feel no wrong.\n\n\nVI.      But she is gone above,\n           With young Hope at her side,\n         And I am drunk with love\n           Of the dead, who is my bride.--\n\nVII.     Of the dead--dead who lies\n           All perfum'd there,\n         With the death upon her eyes.\n           And the life upon her hair.\n\n\nVIII.    Thus on the coffin loud and long\n           I strike--the murmur sent\n         Through the gray chambers to my song,\n           Shall be the accompaniment.\n\n\nIX.      Thou diedst in thy life's June--\n           But thou didst not die too fair:\n         Thou didst not die too soon,\n           Nor with too calm an air.\n\n\nX.       From more than friends on earth,\n           Thy life and love are riven,\n         To join the untainted mirth\n           Of more than thrones in heaven.--\n\n\nXI.      Therefore, to thee this night\n           I will no requiem raise,\n         But waft thee on thy flight,\n           With a Pæan of old days.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "Alone.",
    "body": "  From childhood's hour I have not been\n  As others were--I have not seen\n  As others saw--I could not bring\n  My passions from a common spring--\n  From the same source I have not taken\n  My sorrow--I could not awaken\n  My heart to joy at the same tone--\n  And all I loved--_I_ loved alone--\n  _Thou_--in my childhood--in the dawn\n  Of a most stormy life--was drawn\n  From every depth of good and ill\n  The mystery which binds me still--\n  From the torrent, or the fountain--\n  From the red cliff of the mountain--\n  From the sun that round me roll'd\n  In its autumn tint of gold--\n  From the lightning in the sky\n  As it passed me flying by--\n  From the thunder and the storm--\n  And the cloud that took the form\n  (When the rest of Heaven was blue)\n  Of a demon in my view.\n\n\nMarch 17, 1829.\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "To Isadore.",
    "body": "I.       Beneath the vine-clad eaves,\n             Whose shadows fall before\n             Thy lowly cottage door--\n         Under the lilac's tremulous leaves--\n         Within thy snowy clasped hand\n             The purple flowers it bore.\n         Last eve in dreams, I saw thee stand,\n         Like queenly nymph from Fairy-land--\n         Enchantress of the flowery wand,\n             Most beauteous Isadore!\n\n\nII.      And when I bade the dream\n             Upon thy spirit flee,\n             Thy violet eyes to me\n         Upturned, did overflowing seem\n         With the deep, untold delight\n             Of Love's serenity;\n         Thy classic brow, like lilies white\n         And pale as the Imperial Night\n         Upon her throne, with stars bedight,\n             Enthralled my soul to thee!\n\n\nIII.     Ah! ever I behold\n             Thy dreamy, passionate eyes,\n             Blue as the languid skies\n         Hung with the sunset's fringe of gold;\n         Now strangely clear thine image grows,\n             And olden memories\n         Are startled from their long repose\n         Like shadows on the silent snows\n         When suddenly the night-wind blows\n             Where quiet moonlight lies.\n\n\nIV.      Like music heard in dreams,\n             Like strains of harps unknown,\n             Of birds for ever flown,--\n         Audible as the voice of streams\n         That murmur in some leafy dell,\n             I hear thy gentlest tone,\n         And Silence cometh with her spell\n         Like that which on my tongue doth dwell,\n         When tremulous in dreams I tell\n             My love to thee alone!\n\nV.       In every valley heard,\n             Floating from tree to tree,\n             Less beautiful to me,\n         The music of the radiant bird,\n         Than artless accents such as thine\n             Whose echoes never flee!\n         Ah! how for thy sweet voice I pine:--\n         For uttered in thy tones benign\n         (Enchantress!) this rude name of mine\n             Doth seem a melody!\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Village Street.",
    "body": "  In these rapid, restless shadows,\n    Once I walked at eventide,\n  When a gentle, silent maiden,\n    Walked in beauty at my side.\n  She alone there walked beside me\n  All in beauty, like a bride.\n\n  Pallidly the moon was shining\n    On the dewy meadows nigh;\n  On the silvery, silent rivers,\n    On the mountains far and high,--\n  On the ocean's star-lit waters,\n    Where the winds a-weary die.\n\n  Slowly, silently we wandered\n    From the open cottage door,\n  Underneath the elm's long branches\n    To the pavement bending o'er;\n  Underneath the mossy willow\n    And the dying sycamore.\n\n  With the myriad stars in beauty\n    All bedight, the heavens were seen,\n  Radiant hopes were bright around me,\n    Like the light of stars serene;\n  Like the mellow midnight splendor\n    Of the Night's irradiate queen.\n\n  Audibly the elm-leaves whispered\n    Peaceful, pleasant melodies,\n  Like the distant murmured music\n    Of unquiet, lovely seas;\n  While the winds were hushed in slumber\n    In the fragrant flowers and trees.\n\n  Wondrous and unwonted beauty\n    Still adorning all did seem,\n  While I told my love in fables\n    'Neath the willows by the stream;\n  Would the heart have kept unspoken\n    Love that was its rarest dream!\n\n  Instantly away we wandered\n    In the shadowy twilight tide,\n  She, the silent, scornful maiden,\n    Walking calmly at my side,\n  With a step serene and stately,\n    All in beauty, all in pride.\n\n  Vacantly I walked beside her.\n    On the earth mine eyes were cast;\n  Swift and keen there came unto me\n    Bitter memories of the past--\n  On me, like the rain in Autumn\n    On the dead leaves, cold and fast.\n\n  Underneath the elms we parted,\n    By the lowly cottage door;\n  One brief word alone was uttered--\n    Never on our lips before;\n  And away I walked forlornly,\n  Broken-hearted evermore.\n\n  Slowly, silently I loitered,\n    Homeward, in the night, alone;\n  Sudden anguish bound my spirit,\n    That my youth had never known;\n  Wild unrest, like that which cometh\n    When the Night's first dream hath flown.\n\n  Now, to me the elm-leaves whisper\n    Mad, discordant melodies,\n  And keen melodies like shadows\n    Haunt the moaning willow trees,\n  And the sycamores with laughter\n    Mock me in the nightly breeze.\n\n  Sad and pale the Autumn moonlight\n    Through the sighing foliage streams;\n  And each morning, midnight shadow,\n    Shadow of my sorrow seems;\n  Strive, O heart, forget thine idol!\n    And, O soul, forget thy dreams!\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Forest Reverie.",
    "body": "      'Tis said that when\n      The hands of men\n    Tamed this primeval wood,\n  And hoary trees with groans of wo,\n  Like warriors by an unknown foe,\n    Were in their strength subdued,\n      The virgin Earth\n      Gave instant birth\n    To springs that ne'er did flow--\n      That in the sun\n      Did rivulets run,\n  And all around rare flowers did blow--\n      The wild rose pale\n      Perfumed the gale,\n  And the queenly lily adown the dale\n      (Whom the sun and the dew\n      And the winds did woo),\n  With the gourd and the grape luxuriant grew.\n\n      So when in tears\n      The love of years\n    Is wasted like the snow,\n  And the fine fibrils of its life\n  By the rude wrong of instant strife\n    Are broken at a blow--\n      Within the heart\n      Do springs upstart\n    Of which it doth now know,\n      And strange, sweet dreams,\n      Like silent streams\n  That from new fountains overflow,\n      With the earlier tide\n      Of rivers glide\n  Deep in the heart whose hope has died--\n  Quenching the fires its ashes hide,--\n    Its ashes, whence will spring and grow\n      Sweet flowers, ere long,--\n    The rare and radiant flowers of song!\n\n\n\n\n\n       *       *       *       *       *",
    "author": "Edgar Allan Poe",
    "source": "Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe",
    "period": "1827–1849"
  }
]