Assignment 3:Edgar Allen Poe...try (Do you see what i did there?)

Edgar Allen Poe has many themes present in his poetry, but the three most prominent are death, love and nature.

Death is a theme that is not just apparent in Poes’ poems, but in his short stories also. In almost all his poems his characters have some kind of interaction with death.

THE CITY IN THE SEA

“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.”

The death theme is quite apparent in that poem, but it also more subliminal in other poems.

The Haunted Place

                “But evil things, in robes of sorrow

                                Assailed the monarch’s high estate.

                (Ah let us mourn!-for never morrow

                                Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)

 Even in the few poems that Poe wrote that weren’t about death seemed to have a kind of deadly undertone to them.

The next biggest theme in Poe’s poetry is love. His characters all seem to be longing for somebody they can’t have, usually because they have been departed from them in this life.

[“Deep In Earth”]

                Deep in earth my love is lying

                                And I must weep alone.

His characters seem to always be separated from the ones they love. In the poem “The Raven” the narrator is depressed because the raven tells him that he will never again see the one he loves- in this life or the next.

The Raven

                “’Prophet!’ said I, ‘thing of evil!-prophet still, if bird or devil!

                By that Heaven that bends above us-by that God we both adore-

                Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,

                It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore-

                Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”

                                Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

Nature is the last most prominent theme. Poe is apparently a big fan of it. His characters seem to receive something (usually mental insight) from nature when they are surrounded by it and he also seems to slightly reprimand humans for what they are doing to nature with all their expansion.

Sonnet-To Science

                “Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood

            The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

             The summer dream from beneath the tamarind tree?”

                

The three most prominent themes in Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry were death, love and nature. Death and love were usually tied together, usually with the character of the poem being departed with the one he loved. Nature was often used to describe things and was usually connected a character to something in their life.