“Ulalume”: Poe’s Peculiar Poem of Returning, Part 2

If the world is full of possibilities, why do we keep returning to the same experiences, the same situations, and the same problems?

“There’s a light at each end of this tunnel, you shout,” Anna Nalick sings in her song “Breathe,” “’Cause you’re just as far in as you’ll ever be out, / And these mistakes you’ve made, you’ll just make them again / If you only try turning around.”

Poe knew something about repetition, and he certainly knew something about mistakes.  He wrote about both in “Ulalume,” and what he had to say is relevant to all of us.

Math for English

When I was teaching literature years ago, I borrowed a simple idea from math, presenting literary interpretation as a kind of equation: form (roughly the choices the author makes about diction, imagery, rhyme, point of view, etc.—in short, the way the work is crafted) plus content (the subject matter) equal meaning.

In last week’s column, I offered some thoughts on a few aspects of the form of “Ulalume.” The “duplicate horn” and the repetition of phrases, for example, help convey the notion of pairs, but why?

All of this doubling starts to come into focus when we consider the poem’s content.

Two for One

The opening lines of “Ulalume” are not all that strange—not if you are accustomed to Poe’s poems and tales of gloom and doom anyway.  The narrator tells us he has been traveling through a gloomy scene, one featuring “ashen” skies, “withering and sere” leaves, a “dank tarn,” and a “ghoul-haunted woodland.”

So far, so bad, but then things get weird, even by Poe’s standards. It turns out he is not traveling by himself, but rather with a companion, namely his Psyche, or Soul. Then again, I guess he is alone, alone with himself—but another part of himself. One is two. Here, then, is another pair, akin to the “duplicate horn” of the crescent moon in the sky. The narrator says:

Here once, through an alley Titanic, Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul— Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.

Like this guy, I have a soul.  We all do, right?  It’s just that I don’t treat it as a separate person. The narrator clearly does because he claims he’s been, uh, chatting with his soul.  “Our talk,” he says, “had been serious and sober . . .”  In a later stanza, we even get to hear from Psyche herself:

But Psyche, uplifting her finger, Said—‘Sadly this star I mistrust— Her pallor I strangely mistrust:— Oh, hasten!  oh, let us not linger! Oh, fly!—let us fly!—for we must.’

I didn’t know Psyche had a finger, but then I have not had the pleasure (or horror) of meeting my Psyche and carrying on a conversation with her in the “ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.”  Come to think of it, I have never even been to Weir.

There is a Weir, by the way—-multiple Weirs, in fact: some in Kansas, Mississippi, and Texas, although it’s hard for me to imagine that Poe was thinking of, say, Weir, Kansas. The setting of “Ulalume” is exactly the kind of place that would make us say, along with Dorothy, that we definitely are not in Kansas. Poe may have been thinking of a Weir in Lancashire, but it’s more likely, I think, that he was imagining an eerie place not found on any map. He often liked to set his stories, such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” in places that are hard to pinpoint, and this one has an otherworldly aura to it.

Weir is weird.

Arguing with Oneself

Let’s get back to the narrator and Psyche, his soul. The idea of a conversation between the two also seems weird, but, as is often the case for Poe, where there’s weird, there’s a way. Note that the narrator and his soul disagree. For his part, the narrator is enchanted by Astarte, the figure he sees in the moon in the sky, and determines that she seeks to lead him to peace. Psyche, on the other hand, does not trust Astarte and warns the narrator they they should “fly”—that is, turn on their heels (if a soul has a heel) and get out of there.

If you have ever argued with yourself—and who hasn’t?—this idea of an internal debate doesn’t seem that crazy after all.

“Mmm, shortbread cookies . . .” “Uh, Mark, you said you wanted to get leaner.” “Soul, dude, Lisa made these cookies.” “Ah, right, get one for me, too.”

Maybe I should write more poetry. Anyway, you get the idea. Most of us—not just the troubled or downright deranged narrators in Poe’s poems and tales—have felt divided, so to speak, about what we should or should not do. Poe has simply dramatized a common internal conflict as a debate between two figures.

Here We Go Again

There’s something else going here, though. (In Poe’s work, there’s always something else going on; count on it.) Let’s see where the rest of the poem goes.

Despite his soul’s warning, the narrator insists they keep going:

I replied — “This is nothing but dreaming: Let us on by this tremulous light! Let us bathe in this crystalline light! Its Sybillic splendor is beaming With Hope and in Beauty to-night: — See! — it flickers up the sky through the night! Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming, And be sure it will lead us aright — We safely may trust to a gleaming That cannot but guide us aright, Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night.

Winning the argument, the narrator continues on with his soul, and they come to—what else?—a tomb.

I imagine the narrator delivering the next line with an ironically calm, perhaps even glib demeanor and tone: “What is written, sweet sister, / On the door of this legended tomb?”

Well, what do you know, a tomb. Hmm, what does it say? I’m just curious, you know, as a tourist would naturally be.

Then his soul delivers the devastating blow: “Ulalume—Ulalume— / ’Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!”

The narrator, by insisting they continue on their way despite his soul’s admonitions, has led them to the tomb of his lost love.

Oops.

The realization turns the narrator’s heart “ashen and sober,” and he is forced back to the horrible memory of coming here with the body of his love:

And I cried—"It was surely October On this very night of last year That I journeyed—I journeyed down here— That I brought a dread burden down here— On this night of all nights in the year, Oh, 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— In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

The scene has come back to him and with it a new burden, the burden of a memory of his love’s death.

This is the most painful of returns, and it didn’t have to be. His soul warned him, just as some part of ourselves often cautions us against doing something bad for us, but he insisted, and now here he is, faced with the dreadful impact of his decision.

Ironically, the narrator asks, “Oh, what demon has tempted me here?” His soul has faded into the background at this point, but it very well may be mumbling, “Uh, that would be you. You’re your own worst enemy, and you dragged me down with you.”

The Imp of the Perverse

This theme of self-sabotage was not new to Poe. He wrote about it in numerous works, including “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Raven,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Imp of the Perverse.” This last work provides a name for this inclination, which Poe characterized as a “tendency to do wrong for the wrong's sake.” Poe knew this tendency well because it tormented him in his own life. (That’s a subject for another column.)

Often this self-destruction is especially baffling because it takes the form of a return. We do not merely sense that what we are going to do will be wrong for us, but we are certain of it because we already have done it, perhaps many times, and yet here we are again. “And these mistakes you’ve made,” as Nalick sings, “you’ll just make them again . . .”

Or will you?

All of us have our demons, ranging from substance abuse to destructive relationships to shortbread cookies. Some of us manage to resist ours—or at least minimize the damage—while others just keep returning to them.

What do you do?

If you feel plagued by your own Imp of the Perverse, seek help. For the little things—cookies, caffeine, cat videos—some simple self-help strategies may be enough. (I invite you to start with my “Better with Ben” series, inspired by the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin.) More serious self-destructive behavior may call for professional assistance. In any case, I believe (and I think many psychologists would agree with me) that you don’t have to keep making the same mistakes.

You don’t have to return. You can move on.