LITR 4232: American Renaissance
University of Houston-Clear Lake, spring 2003
Sample Student Research Project

Robert S. Andresakis
American Renaissance
Dr. White 

The Hidden Meaning: A comparison of Hamlet and

“The Conqueror Worm”.

Introduction

            As a reader of Edgar Allan Poe, the question of why the poem “The Conquer Worm” had been inserted, post production, into the short story Ligeia arose. The poem itself was published nearly two years before the first production of the story, and for nearly a year after that the short story existed without containing the poem. In the final reproduction, Poe combined the poem and the short story together to form the current version of Ligeia. When reviewing this short story, the question of why this poem had been added comes to the mind. It was difficult to understand why the poem was added because the presence of the poem within the short story seemed very cumbersome. It seemed as if it was put within the story in some attempt at one last cryptic message. The answer may be present in the poem and the actions that the poem relates. 

            As I continued to read through the poem, I steadily started to draw a parallel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This exploration of the two works lead up to a hypothesis: the poem was an allegory of a stage and, more specifically a stage production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. One must explore the poem as a separate piece from the story. Besides, “The Conqueror Worm” stood alone as a piece of work and should be viewed and evaluated independently from Ligeia.

            A factor that became incredibly confusing was the lack of critique on the subject. As one author said, “it was a task that many just do not want to challenge.” (Helmey) The question was why? What was so daunting? Was it that the knowledge of the interpretation was so simple that no one ever wanted to expound upon it? It became quite an adventure to answer the question that asked what exactly the poem meant and why had it been phrased in the specific manner to which it was written. It could just simply be a misinterpretation. However, the concept that the poem was an analogy of a stage can be supported by at least two other critics. Poe would have never published a work that contained works that were not complete. There had to have been more to the play then just simply the stage of man kind. There had to have been a play within the theater and that play had to be Hamlet.

Essential Breakdown

Most critics have correctly said that the Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Conquer Worm” contains vivid images of death and decay. Like Ligeia, the poem elicited grizzly images of death, as well as an abundance of imagery that contained worms feasting on a dead corpse. However, beyond the images that lingered in the foreground of the story, deeper and cryptic meaning, associated to the works of Shakespeare, could be found. Contained within “The Conquer Worm” was an enigmatic allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and through careful interpretation this allusion was revealed.

            The first passage of the poem, lines one through eight, created the mood and set the scene for the rest of the story. Throngs, or crowds, of winged angles shrouded in wet veils gathered to see a “play of hopes and fears” (Poe 2394), while the orchestra breathed heavenly music. The angles became the audience that witnessed the play Hamlet.  Either the music from the orchestra pit played sporadically as they tuned their instruments and prepared for the show, or the musicians played music for the crowds as they gathered. It was not hard to imagine a crowd gathered in the balconies of an 1840’s Victorian theater, wet from the “tear drops” of rain that fell from the sky, sitting in anticipation, while they listened to an orchestra play melodies. There was little doubt that “The Conqueror Worm” was indeed allegorical of a theater.

            The second stanza, lines 9 through 16, described the men that managed the stage scenery. Mimes, or stagehands, mumbled low to them themselves, as they ran across the rafters and flew from one side to the other moving the backgrounds and stage lights when needed. The last line, “Invisible Wo!”(Poe, 2394), stated the fact that these stagehands were not supposed to be seen, but were in fact visible. The audience of the theater was not supposed to see the men who changed the props and stage scenery, although sometimes that could not be helped. The “condor wings” represented the giant folds of curtains that draped and hid the side of the stage, which gave room for actors and stage hands to move freely about without being seen.

            Stanza three explained the play within “The Conqueror Worm”. This was the play that the theaters goers came to see. This play was Hamlet. It was the play that the first stanza described as being full of hopes and dreams. However, the third stanza changed the mood of the play, only slightly, by calling it motley, or composed of various elements. Poe makes the statement that this play “…shall not be forgotten.”(Poe, 2394) It would be safe to assume that Shakespeare was never forgotten and Hamlet was, most undoubtedly, a motley play. The next lines (19-20) stated that, “With its Phantom chased forever more,/ By a crowd that seized it not.”(Poe, 2394) Hamlet and his three friends waited on the castle parapet for a ghost that they could not catch. The next line “Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self- same spot” (Poe, 2394) gave the distinct visualization of actors running in circles. On a Victorian stage any chase scene, due to space constraints, would, almost always, have been run in circles to simulate the pursuit. As the three actors chased the ghost around the stage, they came back to the center to finish the dialog. Thus, to the same spot they returned. Line 23 summed up the plot of Hamlet, almost exactly, when Poe stated “And much of Madness and more of Sin And Horror the soul of the plot.” Hamlets themes revolved around the sin of murder, whether Hamlet was crazy or not, and the horror of the fast union between Hamlet’s uncle and mother.   It would not be unfounded then, to suggest the comparison between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm”.

Stanza 4 introduced the villain to Poe’s poetic play. However, a correspondence between Poe’s play and that of Hamlet could be seen.

“But seem amid the mimic rout,

A crawling shape intrude!

A blood-red thing that writhes from out

The scenic solitude!”

The mimic rout implied the actors on the stage. The crawling blood red shape was an analogy of vengeance. Vengeance was indicated by the color red and writhed from amidst the crowd of characters. Vengeance then consumed the characters through death, “The mimes become its food, /And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs /In human gore imbued.” (Poe, 2395) The vermin fangs characterized the foils that were used to kill the characters. Long and thin, these foils looked uncannily like the fangs of a rat. The seraphs became an allusion to the “angel throng” that Poe mentioned in the beginning. Within these two stanzas, the contents of the play were revealed. The reference to Hamlet could be seen.

            The final stanza brought both the theater and the poem to a conclusion. The curtain came down and the play ended. The crowds, pale and wan, rose and applauded, and they affirmed that “That the play was the tragedy, ‘man’ And its hero the Conqueror Worm.” Hamlet was indeed a tragedy, leaving nothing at the end but dead bodies. In summation of the poem, the worm of death was the only surviving hero.

            There was little doubt that the “Conqueror Worm” was nothing but an allusion to the play. Brad Howard ascertained the same thing when he said, “[‘The Conqueror Worm’] …is said to emphasize a five-act structure and a controlling theater image.”(Hemley) Notably, Hamlet, as well, was a five act play. It was not a giant stride forward to believe that this play could be in relation to Hamlet.

Overall, the story contained a play within a poem within a story: Hamlet, within “The Conqueror Worm”, within Ligeia. This same technique was utilized by Shakespeare, within Hamlet, who used the concept of the play within a play. In typical fashion, Poe took this concept one step further. Other structural factors were revealed when the two works were compared. “‘The Conqueror Worm’ was published in 1845. It was free verse mostly composed of iambic an anapestic rhythm” (OCAL, 159). Hamlet, and many of Shakespeare’s other plays, was written in iambic meter. 

            There are too many similarities between “The Conqueror Worm” and Shakespeare’s Hamlet to be completely coincidental. According to Readers Encyclopedia of American Literature, “Poe may have derived the ‘Conqueror Worm’ from a poem called ‘The Proud Layde’ by Spencer Wallis Cone which was previewed in Burtons Gentleman Magazine in June 1840. It was a tragedy of mankind conquered by a worm or a serpent which represents the spirit of evil.”(EAL, 203) The “Proud Layde” contained a line that referred to the conqueror worm. It was possible that the idea for “The Conqueror Worm” was inspired by this poem. However, one could see that “The Conqueror Worm” had a much deeper meaning than the version of the death worm mentioned in the “Proud Layde”. “The Conqueror Worm” defiantly alluded to a play within a theater, whether or not the play was Hamlet was left up to interpretation.

Biography – Edgar Allan Poe  

Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809 in Boston Massachusetts. At two years old, Poe’s mother and father, David and Elizabeth Poe, died.  With the death of his parents, young Edgar moved into the home of Richmond merchant John Allan. The wealthy Allan family offered their young godson the best life had to offer.

From 1815-1820, Edgar received a classical education in England. In England, Poe developed his fascination with the English Gothic that pervaded his themes in future productions. After returning home, Poe continued his education at The University of Virginia, in Richmond. After accumulating large amount of gambling debts, Poe sought refuge in Boston, where he began the publication of his first series of works, Tamerlane and Other Poems. Shortly after he published his first works, Poe enlisted in the US Army under the pseudonym Edgar A. Perry, presumably to escape the aforementioned gambling debts.

 In 1829, Poe’s surrogate mother died. As a result, Poe left the army, and, with influence from his surrogate father Allan, was given an appointment to West Point. While he awaited the appointment, Poe published his second works in 1829, two years after his first publishing. After a year of West Point studies, Poe deliberately acted to get himself thrown out of West Point by disobeying orders.

 In 1831, Poe published a group of poems on request of his former fellow cadets in West Point. Four years latter, the starving Poe began to publish other works in an almost constant succession, within the magazine Southern Literary Messenger. It was during this time that Poe married his 13 year old cousin, Virginia.

In 1837, Poe was forced off the magazine due to an excessive amount of drinking, as well as personnel disagreements with the editor. In 1839, after a series of financial downfalls, Poe was employed as the editor of Burton’s Genteman’s Magazine, where he published his collected works, The Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. One year later, Poe was fired again. This time, he unsuccessfully tried to get financing for a magazine of his own. When the endeavor failed, Poe returned to the working field as an editor for Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine.

 In 1842, Poe’s wife Virginia came close to death from a blood vessel popping during singing, and Edgar’s own health began to decline, which forced his retirement as the editor for the magazine. After a prolonged series of failed attempts at publishing his works, Poe succeeded by publishing the Golden Bug, as well as other anonymous works, within the magazine called the Mirror. Poe’s life took a turn for the better with the printing of “The Raven”. Although he entered into the literary world with the “Raven”, Poe was still more commonly known for his hatchet like criticism of other people’s works. Fame soon turned to infamy, as Poe landed in one situation after another that left him, once again, in debt.

In 1847, Virginia, his wife and cousin, died. Only a few years later, Poe died of what doctors called congestion of the brain. He managed to publish, before he died, what some would call his best works, Eureka.

Web Site Review

http://www.llp.armstrong.edu/watermarks2/elh.html 

"Ligeia": A Triumph Over Patriarchy by Erin Leigh Helmey, was a broad overview essay, where Ms. Helmey delved into different critical opinions of other authors. This piece of work was more beneficial for the references that were incorporated into it, than the paper itself. She did not come to her own conclusions.  Rather instead, she relied on the conclusion of the other critics. The paper was a collage of five essays on Ligeia. Only one of those essays addressed the poem “The Conqueror Worm”, and the specific way the “The Conqueror Worm” is used in Ligeia. Brad Howard, the critic that shouldered the task, took a formalist approach to both the short story and the poem within it. He commented that the separate publications of the two works of arts are proof that they were meant to be taken as individuals. Howard deconstructed the poem and came to the conclusion that the poem was an allegory to a play. Through my research, both on the internet and in the library, critical opinion was not forthcoming when it concerned the poem “The Conqueror Worm”

http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/essays/poe.htm

            This web site contained the published article, Poe's 'Ligeia' and the Pleasures of Terror by Terry Heller, within a periodical called Gothic. Once again, I chose this piece for the references more than the actual content. The work was a comparison between several different authors revolving around the theme of the gothic terror that was within the poems of Poe. This essay analyzed different critic’s points of view and contrasted them with each other to produce an informative work. I borrowed her references and compared them to the previous essay by Helmey to find literary sources that might benefit the topic I chose. Out of over 40 separate sources only 10 were available and, out of those ten, only one contained information that could be quoted.

Secondary Reference

David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton: Princeton UP,1973) (UHCL # PS2638.h3)

            Out of the 10 or so books that I perused based off the references of others works detailing Ligeia, Halliburton’s book was closest to the subject matter chosen. “In the variation of the topos of the world-theater, everything happens in a perpetual present [time]…” Halliburton agrees, in his formalist view, that “The Conqueror Worm” was indeed a version of a play. However, he wants to continue the statement by looking at the tenses in the poem. He stated that the entirety of the poem, expect the third stanza, was in present tense. Halliburton explained that indeed the poem was centered on the final worm of death and the world play was about man as actors. This became a very common interpretation. It was interesting to note that most of the authors of various critiques on Ligeia seemed to skip over “The Conqueror Worm”, choosing instead to justify it with the last lines of the poem and forgetting all together that the poem was an addition to the short story. It was almost as if they did not want to tackle the beast that was “The Conqueror Worm”!

Conclusion  

            It would be presumptuous to assume that an author such as Poe wrote something without reason behind it. Poe was very methodical, constantly editing his works over and over, Ligeia even more so because it had been his favorite. It was also fact that Poe poured over English critical literature. This fact was irrelevant in the context of this argument except only to further prove that Poe was knowledgeable about English poets and playwrights. Through the analysis of the lines within the poem “The Conqueror Worm”, the analogy of the play Hamlet could be seen, or, at the very least, the core theme of the play, death, was reflected in the poem to such an extent that they seem almost one in the same. However, there may be two main flaws in this interpretation of “The Conqueror Worm” presented today: the final verse and the critic’s interpretation.

            The last line of the poem presented the one question in the allusion to Hamlet that needed to be addressed. It was also the one aspect that all the critics have agreed on. The last line sums up and defines the poem. “That the play was the tragedy, “Man,” And its hero the Conqueror Worm” (Poe, 2395). The few critics that have decided to address the poem have agreed that the worm itself was the symbol of death and that death was the final outcome for mankind. The play then becomes nothing more than a reference to the “…topos of world-theater…” where “life was but a stage, and we are the players” (Shakespeare) and death was the final outcome of everything. The question then becomes whether or not those critics, that almost unanimously agree, are incomplete in their interpretation. Could it be that I am? It would be easier to believe, in the course of these many years of people evaluating Poe under the microscope of literary interpretation, that these critics would have stumbled upon the concepts I have presented. However, the information that I have shown was very overwhelming towards the conclusion that Poe did indeed intend the play within the poem to have multiple meanings. The last line of the play then becomes the critical point of argument for both the critics and this paper.

            Poe, within the line “And its hero the Conqueror Worm” (Poe, 2377), stated that the hero of the world stage was death, at least this was the argument posed by the critics who evaluated the play. In the allusion to Hamlet, who would be the hero of the play? Could death be the hero? The key to the statement was the worm itself. Poe states explicitly that the hero was the conqueror worm. In the final scene of Hamlet, Fortinbras, the young Norwegian prince, marched into the castle and claimed demark as his own. We see Fortinbras conqueror Denmark without a fight. Through the play, we can also see that Fortinbras had been young, arrogant, ambitious, and ready to fight by any means to revenge the death of his father. In essence, the picture that was painted of Fortinbras was nothing more than that of a worm, a conquering worm.

Could it be as simple as that? It was possible that Poe painted a picture within a picture. If this was the case, then indeed both the standard critics and I could be correct. The poem was assuredly about the conqueror worm death. It was the same conqueror worm that was presented in “The Proud Layde” by Spencer Wallis Cone. Yet, Poe, even though constantly criticized for plagiarism, never stole any one idea but instead took a concept and added his own style. It was not beyond reason to believe that Poe liked to hide meaning within meaning.  As a last thought, it becomes even more interesting when we add a final piece to the puzzle. Poe was fond of the works of Francis Bacon. One theory was that Francis Bacon was William Shakespeare, and Bacon was also known for cryptic poems and hidden messages. With this last piece of the circumstantial evidence revealed, the theory that “The Conqueror Worm” was an insinuation to the play Hamlet is uncurtained.

Work Cited

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Conqueror Worm. 1845. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Edit. Lauter, Paul. Bouston: Houghton Mifflin. 2002. 2394-2395

Hallburton, David. Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973. 119-122

Herzberg, Max J.. Readers Encyclopedia of American Literature.  New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. 1962. 203

Hart, James. D. The Oxford Companion to American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press 1995: 159

Watermarks. Ed. Erin Leigh Helmey. 2003. Armstrong University.  <http://www.llp.armstrong.edu/watermarks2/elh.html>.

Poe's 'Ligeia'. Ed. Terry Heller. 2003. Colorado University. http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/essays/poe.htm