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Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crispèd and sere,-
As the leaves that were withering and sere:
And I cried, "It was surely October,--
On this very night of last year,

That I journeyed-I journeyed down here,-
On this night, of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon has tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber,—
This misty mid-region of Weir,-

Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,-
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."

-Edgar Allan Poe.

The first three stanzas portray the state of his mind-his heart is like the eruption of a volcano, and everything is as gloomy as a ghoul-haunted cypress woodland when the skies are ashen and gray. The names are invented-Auber, Weir, Yaanek-and their very sound harmonizes with the scene.

Astarte-another name for Venus, the goddess of love. This star with its nebulous lustre represents the faint new love against which his inner voice is protesting.. Immemorial-unforgetable.

Tarn a little lake.

Senescent-growing old.

Arose with a duplicate horn-doubtless referring to its newness, to indicate the new love. It is the new moon and not the full moon which is in the form of a crescent with two horns.

Stars of the Lion-a constellation of stars called Leo or The Lion.

Dian-Diana (the goddess of the hunt) who scorned love. Lethean-causing forgetfulness.

Sybilic-prophetic.

Stopped by the door of a tomb-suddenly remembered the anniversary of Ulalume's burial. It recalled him to his former state of mind, and with intensified grief he is plunged once more into the "ghoul-haunted woodland" of his soul.

It should be said that an entirely different interpretation of Ulalume is made by some critics. At the editor's request, Dr. Edward Everett Hale, Jr., Professor of English in Union College, Schenectady, N. Y., has kindly given the meaning of the poem as he interprets it. Dr. Hale says:

"Who was this lost love mourned in so many poems? Those who believe it to have been some living, breathing woman (or women) create the curious condition of a man at once mourning the dead and devoted to the living, for Virginia Poe (who has been thought to be the object of Annabel Lee) was still living at the time of The Raven. Could Poe have suffered bitter regret for one love when he was absolutely happy with another? Certainly Poe needed no real woman to mourn; there were other things he might have mourned if he had chosen, under the type of a beautiful woman. He might have mourned his lost ideal of classic beauty. He was a romanticist, and his ideal of classic beauty was utterly lost to him forever. Poe looked back upon classic beauty and realized that he could never again possess it in the perfect form in which he had known it once. That, I take it, was at the bottom of the mood which created his greater poems, and particularly Ulalume. The poet has had his ideal of beauty and it is gone, and is buried by himself in a fantastic region of romance. But because that ideai is gone forever, his mind does not cease to act. He still wanders with Psyche his soul. And in one wandering he fancies

that he has found something that will lead him once more to that peace with beauty that he knew. In spite of the warning of Psyche he follows until he suddenly realizes that he is but going on a path he has trodden before, he will but end at the door which keeps him ever separate from his ideal.

"Let it not seem absurd that we should imagine a man to grieve over the loss of an ideal of beauty as keenly as we might grieve over the loss of some beautiful love. When a poet cares as much for ideals as Poe did, and so little for real people, the wonder is that any one should have ever thought otherwise."

PROSPICE

Prospice means look forward. The poem is a defiance of death, the "Arch Fear." It would be hard to find anything more intensely dramatic or anything nobler on the subject. He approaches "the post of the foe"Death-with eyes unbandaged and with a heroism truly sublime. It is the supreme test of the spirit's mastery, and the spirit stands the test like a strong man, and gains "the reward of it all." He estimates death at its fullest import, when "the worst turns the best to the brave."

The poem was written a short time after Mrs. Browning's death—a fact which explains the closing lines and adds beauty and pathos to them.

Every line is crowded with meaning and should be studied closely. As here interpreted, death is "the climax and fruition of life."

PROSPICE

Fear death?-to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,

When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,

The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;

Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go;

For the journey is done and the summit attained
And the barriers fall,

Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.

I was ever a fighter, so-one fight more,

The best and the last!

I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, And bade me creep past.

No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,

The heroes of old,

Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.

For sudden the worse turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,

And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,

Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,

O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!

-Robert Browning.

CROSSING THE BAR

Of this poem Tennyson's son says:

"It was written in my father's eighty-first year, on a day in October when we came from Aldworth to Farringford. Before reaching Farringford he had the 'moaning of the bar' in his mind, and after dinner he showed me this poem written out. I said, 'This is the crown of your life's work.' He answered, 'It came in a moment.' He explained the 'Pilot' as "That Divine and Unseen who is always guiding us.' A few days before my father's death he said to me: 'Mind you put Crossing the Bar at the end of all editions of my poems.'"

Farringford is on the Isle of Wight, where Tennyson lived, and the strait between the mainland and the island is the one they were crossing when the poem came to Tennyson's mind.

Crossing the Bar is a good example of the imaginative treatment of a few familiar facts of nature and life, converting them thereby into a great piece of art. The materials of the poem are the sunset, the twilight, the evening bell and the evening star, the tide moaning on the sandy bar and the tide full and calm and deep, the

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