Resurrected Love: an Analysis of Edgar Allen Poe's Ligeia Essay

Usually, fairy tales are in connection to big and illustrious happy endings. But in Edgar Allan Poe’s case, it is evident that they do not exist, for his stories more often than not bear a grotesque demeanor. His life was surrounded by death. All of the women in his life died young, including his mother, sister, and wife. By the age of three, he had experienced what most would not experience until nearly the middle or end of their lives. Living in such an atmosphere allowed Poe to reach deep into his emotions when writing. Edgar Allan Poe was known for his macabre metaphors. These metaphors challenged the reader to endeavor themselves into his simple words; coming to find the gothic elements portrayed. He most commonly portrayed love and death in his poems. Poe is even credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. Edgar Allan Poe utilizes symbolism and portrays an envious love tale, ending in tragedy to expose the speaker’s emotional state in the poem “Annabel Lee.”

Edgar Allan Poe is an American Gothic author from the 19th century. It is well known that Edgar Allan Poe was a master of suspense. The word ‘suspense’ is defined by the Oxford Dictionary to be ‘A state or feeling of excited or anxious uncertainty about what may happen.’ Two of Poe’s works are ‘Ligeia’ and ‘The Fall of the House Usher’. ‘Ligeia’ is the story of an unnamed narrator in love with his wife Lady Ligeia and how he copes with her death. ‘The fall of the House of Usher’ is the story of an unnamed narrator visiting his friend Roderick Usher at his house. Both of them are full of suspense and this is the main topic this essay will be focusing on. This essay will attempt to illustrate how Poe builds suspense in his short stories

The Romantic Period is characterized as an artistic and intellectually stimulating literary movement. Writers of this genre and time are considered to be those who fused the elements of romance in their writings to enhance the human experience. Edgar Allan Poe, known as the father of the modern short story, epitomizes this notion in his writings. In “Annabel Lee,” and “The Oval Portrait,” Edgar Allan Poe uses romance to illustrate the essence of death and misery and to illustrate elements in which the reader can actually feel that was is happening in the story is happening to them.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” it leaves them curious of the narrator’s mental health and if the fear is deep rooted in the author. The narrator’s loved one, Lenore, passed and the thought of her haunts him. “-sorrow for the lost Lenore- For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore-“. This leaves the readers curious as to what happened to Lenore. In the “Windigo”, written by Louise Erdrich, the reader is also left curious as to what happens to the child and the narrator. “I would darken and spill all night

Poe shows how the narrator is completely falling apart when she died as he says, “She died; — and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could no longer endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim and decaying city by the Rhine. I had no lack of what the world calls wealth. Ligeia had brought me far more, very far more than ordinarily falls to the lot of mortals” (Poe). This is just a representation of a biblical sin that when we put all of our energy into a mortal person instead of Jesus Christ then we will hit rock bottom as soon as they are

While Poe’s poem is a lengthy venture into love and loss, Bradstreet’s poem is quite a short offering at first glance. The poet, however, immediately grasps the reader’s attention with the very first line in the poem, writing, “If ever two were one, then surely we” (1). Immediately, the reader can envision a union that is not made up of two separate individuals, but of the two that become one because of the love they share. Poe, on the other hand, uses another tactic in piquing the interest of the reader. He begins his poem in a manner that is very reminiscent of a fairy tale: “It was many and many a year ago / In a kingdom by the sea” (1-2). It is not until the last two lines of the first stanza that the narrator declares a love, very much like the one Bradstreet described, by stating, “And this maiden she lived with no other thought / Than to love and be loved by me” (5-6). The reader can already sense the profound love that envelops the men and women in the poems.

In Poe’s short story “Ligeia”, Ligeia’s coming back to life leads the reader to believe she was engineered because of Poe’s supposedly dark ways, when in reality the narrator’s strange visions are induced by opium and his perpetual

He was not always convinced that simplicity was a desirable aesthetic and did not believe that you could find elegance in it. He still liked reading simple writings and appreciated all styles from the viewpoint of a writer. The death of Poe’s wife put resentment in Poe’s heart. In “Annabel Lee,” he writes of a love so deep that even “the angels not half as happy in heaven went envying her and me.” (Pollin 288) The only way he knew how to ease his pain was to put it into words. Annabel Lee became the expression of his very soul. Poe wrote that everything in the natural world reminded him of his beloved wife. The final stanza shows the true feelings of Edgar Allen Poe. He pours his entire soul into this single stanza.

Since Romanticism often places emphasis on the importance of emotion, Romantics may use dream imagery to display the overflow of abundant feelings. Such is the case with Edgar Allen Poe’s “Ligeia”. While Poe’s themes are usually Romantic, “Ligeia” uses dreams to “[dramatize] the romantic's disenchantment with a world drained of its power to arouse joy and a sense of elevated being” (Gargano 338). The fine line of fantasy vs reality is blurred and bestows multiple versions of reality as the narrator slowly descends into madness. Poe’s use of dream imagery is prominent during the descriptions of the house, the narrators reminiscences of his first wife Ligeia, and his opium induced hallucinations. The use of this literary device demonstrates how the loss of Ligeia messes with the narrator's sanity and sense of fulfillment in his life. These dreams enable him to revisit Ligeia“out of [his] own self-consciousness” (Lawrence).

Young, beautiful, and doomed; In several, if not all, works of Edgar Allan Poe, there is a not so subtle theme that is found. One of the death and beauty. How is the death of a young woman romanticized within selected works of Edgar Allan Poe? In such works as “Lenore”, “Ulalume”, popular “Annabel Lee”, “The Raven”, and short story “The Oval Painter” ,the “death of a beautiful woman” theme is prevalent and strongly noted within context, word choice, and imagery. In the eyes of Edgar Allan poe, death, especially that of a woman, to be lamented and mourned by a “bereaved lover”, is the most valued tool to have and utilize when writing. In his own life, Poe was able to relate to the subject matter, as many of his heroins are believed to be based upon his wife Virginia, who had died at a young age. Unraveling the methods to how Poe romanticized death of young women in his literature might give insight to not only Poe’s life, but humanity in general..

This man suffers, as many have, from the pangs of a pierced heart. He has been left alone after the death of his only true infatuation and has undoubtedly found that, contrary to the old adage, it is not better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. The “rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore” (95)- in fact a type and shadow of Poe’s own young bride, who at the time of this poem’s publication was suffering from fatal attack of tuberculosis- was no longer at his side, and our story-teller wonders if, however impossibly, he would ever clasp her to himself again.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1839, can be compared to Poe’s later work “The Tell-Tale Heart”, published in 1843. In both gothic stories, there are physical deformities, mental illness, and despicable crimes. In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Roderick Usher, the main character, and one of the last of the Usher blood line, had a twin sister, Madeline, who suffered from a mysterious illness. After believing she had died, Roderick learned that was not the case --Madeline was still alive-- yet he buried her anyway. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, an unnamed narrator lived with an old man, whom he was plotting to murder because he wanted to help rid the world of the old man’s evil eye. In both Poe’s stories death is a very prominent theme (Davis).

Edgar Allan Poe was a prominent writer during the era of Romanticism, but Poe’s poems focused primarily on the Dark Romanticism, developed under Romanticism. The era of Romanticism was commonly described as showing raw emotion, but there was still a conflict in the story. The purpose of Romanticism was for the writer to feel free; there were no rules when it came to this form of writing. Dark Romanticism was looking at the gothic side of stories rather than the heroism stories, which focused more on death, and the flaws of humans. Dark Romanticism also focused on the evil aspect of writings rather than the heroic part to stories. Edgar Allan Poe’s poems are shown more in this type of writing rather than the typical Romantic writings. When looking more into Dark Romanticism readers are able to see how Poe could have connected his personal turmoil to his poems. The University of Delaware’s library says, “Suffering for offenses against God, man and Nature, the hero-villains wander the earth, alone and misunderstood. Their personal torment in a vast universe is emphasized by desolate settings of icebound seas, jagged mountains and bottomless abysses: imagery that would inspire artistic, literary, and musical compositions,” (Dark Romanticism). This quote shows readers that writers during the Dark Romanticism era used their own sufferings in order to make the stories seem more dramatic and almost human. Looking into the poems “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven”, readers are able to see

“[He] attended a lot of funerals. When he wasn’t going to funerals, he wrote stories about dead people (or soon-to-be-dead people) living in torture chambers, haunted houses, and other creepy locales with zero chance of escape….” an author writes in Edgar Allan Poe's biography. Poe is an author who has experienced multiple catastrophic events could have done this. With much experience in death, Edgar Allan Poe had a brutal, devastating, and depressing life. Authors often write what they feel and experience in life. Surrounded by death most his stories too were about death. In the story The Tell-Tale Heart Poe writes about a man is killed because he has a hideous eye. One of his bestsellers, the Raven, is about a man who believes that a bird

Edgar Allan Poe was a fictional writer that astonished readers with his many mysterious poems and his tales of horror such as “The Raven”, “Annabelle Lee”, and “The Fall of the house of Usher”.