LITR 4232 American Renaissance 2008
Text-Objective Presentation

Tuesday, 28 October: Edgar Allan Poe 1528: Introduction; “Sonnet—To Science”; "To Helen" 1534-6: “The City in the Sea”; 1542: “Annabel Lee.”

Text-Objective Discussion: Josh Hughey (poem[s] besides "Annabel Lee")

Objective 2: To study the movement of "Romanticism," the narrative genre of "romance," and the related styles of the "gothic" and "the sublime."

Objective 3: To use literature as a basis for discussing representative problems and subjects of American culture (Historicism), such as equality (race, gender, class); modernization and tradition; the individual, family; and community; nature; the role of writers in an anti-intellectual society.

          “Sonnet—To Science”           Page 1532

Science! meet daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?

And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

The gentle Naiad from her fountain-flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the shrubbery?

What is gothic, sublime, or in general romantic about this poem?

What is Poe trying to say?

          "To Helen"                   Pages 1532-33

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicean barks of yore,

That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,

The weary, wayworn wanderer bore

to his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

Thy Naiad airs have broght me home

To glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window niche

How statuelike I see thee stand,

The agate lamp within thy hand!

Ah, Psyche, from the regions which

Are Holy Land!

What is gothic, sublime, or in general romantic about this poem?

What is Poe trying to say?

          “The City in the Sea”             Pages 1534-35

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim West,

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

Have gone to their eternal rest.

There shrines and palaces and towers

(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)

Resemble nothing that is ours.

Around, by lifting winds forgot,

Resignedly beneath the sky

The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy heaven come down

On the long night-time of that town;

But light from out the lurid sea

Streams up the turrets silently —

Gleams up the pinnacles far and free —

Up domes — up spires — up kingly halls —

Up fanes — up Babylon-like walls —

Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers

Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers —

Up many and many a marvelous shrine

Whose wreathéd friezes intertwine

The viol, the violet, and the vine.

So blend the turrets and shadows there

That all seem pendulous in the air,

While from a proud tower in the town

Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves

Yawn level with the luminous waves;

But not the riches there that lie

In each idol's diamond eye —

Not the gaily-jeweled dead

Tempt the waters from their bed;

For no ripples curl, alas!

Along that wilderness of glass —

No swellings tell that winds may be

Upon some far-off happier sea —

No heavings hint that winds have been

On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!

The wave — there is a movement there!

As if the towers had thrust aside,

In slightly sinking, the dull tide —

As if their tops had feebly given

A void within the filmy Heaven.

The waves have now a redder glow —

The hours are breathing faint and low —

And when, amid no earthly moans,

Down, down that town shall settle hence,

Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,

Shall do it reverence.

What is gothic, sublime, or in general romantic about this poem?

What is Poe trying to say?