“Ulalume”: Poe’s Peculiar Poem of Returning, Part 1

First there was the Book of Job.  Then came the Rosetta Stone.

Then there was “Ulalume.”

It takes some chutzpah to try to make sense of one of Poe’s most ethereal poems and even more to do it in public.  A long time ago, the literary scholar Fred Lewis Pattee wrote, “Not long ago a university lecturer, after dwelling upon the nameless atmosphere and the unearthly music of the poem, declared as his opinion that no one would ever be able to discover what the poet had really meant.”  That alone is a pretty daunting statement. Then Pattee added, “He doubted if Poe had known himself what he meant.”

Well, listen up, Poe, and I’ll lay it all out for you.

A Way Behind the Weirdness?

OK, that little boast was meant to be humorous.  Poe was a greater genius than I will ever be—albeit a far more muddled one.  Still, I think I can provide a few insights, perhaps illuminating some aspects of this mysterious poem—and, for the record, I do doubt along with that lecturer that Poe knew exactly what he meant, especially since he was in a very bad place at this stage in his life.

If I’m successful, perhaps you will come away with a better appreciation not only of Poe and his writing, but also of the ways that language and our own brains work.

Now, if you have read a few of Poe’s best-known stories, you know that Poe could write some pretty strange stuff, but even “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” probably didn’t prepare you for “Ulalume.”  It’s set in “the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."  I suspect Poe chose that last word because it rhymes with “sere,” a word he chose to describe the leaves in October, but it’s also just one letter away from a word that perfectly describes this poem: weird.

From its literally unearthly imagery to the almost tedious repetition to the action it describes—a conversation with one’s own soul?—to its abrupt conclusion, this poem stands out even in Poe’s outre oeuvre.  “Ulalume” sounds as if it were written by a Ula-loon.

Was there a method to Poe’s madness, a way behind the weirdness?  Let’s see.

Unearthly Imagery

Technically, the term imagery in literature refers to appeals to any one of the five senses, but let’s focus on visual imagery.  “Ulalume” has several images appealing to our sense of sight—some evocative, some enigmatic, and some just plain weird.

The “ashen” skies and “crisped” leaves help to set the scene: a natural setting in October.  This is a time of death or at least dormancy, and the dry, “dead” leaves that are no longer attached to their living trees are common sights at this time of year.

Such images are perfectly explicable in a poem about loss, but what are we to make of the “miraculous crescent” that “Arose with a duplicate horn”?  Who is Astarte, and what does Poe mean when he refers to her “bediamonded crescent”?

Coincidentally, just the other day—yes, in October—I was walking across campus very early in the morning, and I saw a spectacular sight: a bright crescent moon with what seemed like an even brighter object just above it, sparkling just beyond the dark side of the moon.  One of my colleagues, an astronomer, later informed me that this object was Jupiter, but it would be easy to imagine it as a diamond.  I tried to take a picture with my phone, but the image was so blurry that it’s not even worth sharing.  You can get a vague idea of what I saw by visiting this webpage.  I had already decided to write about “Ulalume” here in Mind Travel, so the coincidence strikes me as eerie—appropriately so, I suppose, given my subject is Poe.  In any case, the image was literally unearthly, since it appeared in the heavens, but then some of the other images here—the “dank tarn of Auber” and the “liquescent / And nebulous lustre”—are so unlike anything we typically experience in our daily lives that they also seem unearthly.

I have to pause here and say a few words about that “duplicate horn.”  Poe was obsessed with doubles.  Even if you are only a casual reader of his work, you probably recognize at least a few of these character pairs in his stories: Montresor and Fortunato, the unnamed narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and his victim (the “old man”), and Dupin and the unnamed narrator of the detective stories.  In some cases, the pairs are particularly close, as in the case of Roderick Usher and his twin sister, Madeline, and, most notably, the doppelgängers in the story “William Wilson.”  I could cite many more examples of paired characters, mirror images, and parallel scenes.  For Poe, two was a magic number.

This might seem like an esoteric matter of interest only to people who obsess over literature (as I do), but doubles pervade all of our lives: life and death, earth and sky, yin and yang, up and down, in and out, left and right, black and white, something and nothing, us and them, beginnings and endings, and on and on and on (and off and off and off).  When Poe was thinking and writing about pairs, he was tapping into a core concept of the human experience and indeed of reality itself.

Because of my extensive study of his life and work, you might say that I have spent more time with Poe than with anyone outside my own family.  After all of this study, I am convinced that there is another dimension to Poe’s fascination with pairs.  As I wrote in an earlier column, Poe seems to have had a vague (or even specific) understanding of the dual nature of the human mind, namely the left and right hemispheres of our brains.

In short, the “duplicate horn” probably held particular significance for a poet obsessed with doubles, but the image accents another significant double in the poem—that is, the dual characters of the speaker and his soul (more on that subject next week).

As for Astarte, she’s a moon goddess.  Dawn B. Sova, author of Edgar Allan Poe, A to Z, suggests that she “represents sexuality, fertility, and the possibility of new happiness.”  An entry in The Poe Encyclopedia, by Frederick S. Frank and Anthony Magistrale, says, “Poe, the despiser of allegory, may well have written in 'Ulalume' the ultimate private allegory of his own conflict of mind after Virginia's death over whether he should seek the love of another woman or remain united to her memory.”  It’s hard to say whether Poe really was considering this dilemma, but it’s certainly possible, especially since we know that he did start courting a couple of women after Virginia’s death.  (Alas, one of them was already married, but Poe is not known for his judgment—unless we mean extraordinarily bad judgment.)

Come Again

It’s impossible to ignore Poe’s insistent rhyme; it’s probably the most noticeable part of the poem.  In the first stanza, for example, there are nine lines, but only two kinds of coda (the rhyming portion of words): the “eer” sound and the “ober” sound.  On close examination, however, we see that several of these codas come at the ends of the same words: “sere,” “October,” “Auber,” and “Weir.”  What we are hearing, in fact, is more repetition than rhyme (which usually involves similar sounds at the ends of different words).

On even closer examination, we see that several entire lines are nearly identical, as is the case with “The leaves they were crisped and sere—“ and “The leaves they were withering and sere.”  All of this repetition reinforces a major theme of the poem—namely return.  When we return to a natural setting like this one, we often see and hear (and perhaps even smell and feel) virtually identical things, since many natural places stay much the same over time.  There are often variations—taller trees, for example—but they are relatively minor.  Nearly identical lines mirror this combination of similarity and small difference.  As we will see next week, when we study the content of the poem—that is, the characters and action—a central theme of “Ulalume” is iteration—the phenomenon of doing something again.

To finish this exploration of “Ulalume,” you have to do something again—namely return to Mind Travel next week.  In the second half of this pair of columns—oh, wouldn’t Poe love this doubling?—we will return to Poe’s poem about returning and consider the phenomenon of iteration in our own lives.