The Women Of Poe
A Poe story which fuses the themes of transcendence and lost love is "Ligeia," Poe's own favorite of his tales. The story's narrator marries a woman of exquisite beauty--a woman named Ligeia. To the narrator (and to Poe, naturally), she is the perfect woman, for she possesses classical beauty, expanded intellect, and spiritual purity. He makes Ligeia his wife. The narrator describes at length the strange attributes of his bride--her raven-black, luxuriant hair; her low, musical voice; her ivory skin, lofty forehead; her delicate nose and radiant smile. However, Ligeia's most striking feature are her black, mysterious eyes, which kindled in the narrator an inscrutable sentiment which would ...
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years of our marriage. With how vast a triumph--with how vivid a delight...did I feel...that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I might at length pass onward to a goal of wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden (Poe Modern Library ed., 657).
But Ligeia grows ill. Even her intense passion for life could not save her from the Conqueror Worm. Her last words were shrieked in despair: "Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will" (659). By this time, the reader has already witnessed in the story foreshadowing that Ligeia's is more than just a feeble will. "And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness...." (656) But Ligeia dies anyway, at least apparently.
The bereaved narrator turns increasingly to opium to relieve ...
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estranges Rowena; she cannot love him. But in the second month of their marriage, Rowena develops a chronic malady which defies identification by her physicians. She becomes more excitable as she declines, hearing rustling sounds which appear to the narrator to be merely natural occurrences. Eventually the narrator, too, becomes aware of the strange circumstances surrounding Rowena. He sees "a shadow--a faint, indefinite shadow of angelic aspect--such as might be fancied for the shadow of a shade" (662-63). He feels some invisible object pass lightly over his body. These fantasies come to the narrator as he reels from an immoderate dose of opium; but as we know, dreams in Poe, no ...
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The Women Of Poe. (2005, March 5). Retrieved April 23, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Women-Of-Poe/23247
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"The Women Of Poe." Essayworld.com. March 5, 2005. Accessed April 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Women-Of-Poe/23247.
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