Look Upon This Verse

Sonnet 71

By William Shakespeare

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it, for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O! if, I say, you look upon this verse,
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;
But let your love even with my life decay;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.

Was Edgar Allen Poe life as unconventional as his poetry and writing or has time allowed for Poe to be re-imagined in his own words?  Poe’s life certainly would not fit into the conventions of today.  He married his first cousin when she was 13 and he was 27.  I think we would call that a pedophile today, not an eligible bachelor.  She died eleven years later from tuberculosis.  Poe died only two years after following her death under somewhat murky circumstances.  In 1849, Poe went missing for five days and was found incoherent and delirious.  He was taken to a Baltimore hospital where he died soon after at the age of 40.   Typical of the time, No autopsy was performed and the cause of death was listed as a vague “congestion of the brain” and he was buried two days later.  This rather unusual description opened the door for crack pots and scholars, (or are those the same thing?) to propose everything from murder, to carbon monoxide poisoning as the reason for his death.  It doesn’t really matter, dead is dead.   Poe doesn’t get enough credit for the quality of his writing and the varied contributions he made to literature.  Poe grew up in desperate poverty and he wrote in true fashion as his vocation and made a living at it.   I think he deserves more credit than he sometimes receives as a poet and writer.

Death

by Edgar Allan Poe

It is not death, that some time in a sigh
This eloquent breath shall take its speechless flight;
That some time the live stars, which now reply
In sunlight to the sun, shall set in night;
That this warm conscious flesh shall perish quite,
And all life’s ruddy springs forget to flow; —
That verse shall cease, and the immortal spright
Be lapp’d in alien clay, and laid below: —
It is not death to know this, but to know
That pious thoughts, which visit at new graves,
In tender pilgrimage will cease to go
So duly and so oft, and when grass waves
Over the past-away, there may be then
No resurrections in the minds of men!