Loving the ghost

LAST week’s article explored the perhaps unreal hope or expectation that there can, at all, be such a thing as ‘forever love’. It’s hardly possible. When we go, it goes. But what about the gap? What must it be like when one half of the love story has passed on, and the other poor soul is left alone, coping as best as possible with the loss and empty spaces, or wandering the earth broken hearted and desolate. Sounds dramatic? Not at all. What about these words from a tortured soul:

Each time I felt all the agonies of her death – and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly & clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive – nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity...

These are the words of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). And they recount his massive sense of loss following the death of his young wife at the tender age of 24. She, Virginia Eliza Clemm, pictured below, had been his wife since she was 13 years old, – she was also his cousin! At the time of her death, he himself was 38, but was only to survive another two years before succumbing to a death brought on by, cholera, drug-abuse, alcohol, mental-illness, rabies and possibly suicide or tuberculosis, or a combination of all or any of above. Depends on who or what you read. Methinks it might well have been a broken heart.

Poe, often considered, as an author, the inventor of detective fiction, and a major player in earliest science fiction, is perhaps best known for his writing style of mystery and macabre, whether it be short story, poetry or prose. And although a true romantic, there always seemed something slightly sinister about his writing when it dipped into romance. He certainly believed in ghosts, and the inseparable bond between lovers, whether angelic or demonic. So, how he must have struggled with the loss of his one true love. His crutch and strength since he had moved on from the very troubled earlier years of his life.

The poem Annabel Lee was written the year his wife died. and, although not certain, is most likely written about herself. It describes a love which began long ago, when both were very, very young. A love so strong that even watching angels were jealous, jealous enough to take her! But for him, their souls were so in tune and entwined, that they could never become unwrapped.

Nightly, he would lay by her side in her tomb. Sounds grisly, but to the writer it was simply ‘total’. He had a unique skill for bringing a haunting feeling to his work. But whatever else, the words in the final two stanzas below, absolutely ooze with his overwhelming love. Strong enough to bridge several worlds.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

Of those who were older than we— Of many far wiser than we—

And neither the angels in Heaven above Nor the demons down under the sea Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, In her sepulchre there by the sea—

In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Edgar Allan Poe died in October 1849 and is buried at Westminister Hall, Baltimore, Maryland. For over 50 years, a visitor to his grave who became known as “the Poe Toaster”, would leave a bottle of cognac and three red roses each year on the anniversary of his birth, January 19. The last such visit was in 2009, the bicentenary of his birth.