Poe's Cottage at Fordham

More Poe-inspired poetry. I'm just in that sort of mood.

Beginning during his own lifetime, and continuing down to the present day, Poe has been the subject of a remarkable number of poems (it is puzzling that, so far as I know, no one has ever published a full compilation of them.) One of the best-known is the following poem by John Henry Boner, "Poe's Cottage at Fordham," which was first published in 1889. As this is the anniversary of Virginia Poe's funeral at Fordham's Old Dutch Reformed Church--a day, I believe, that marked the beginning of the end for her husband--these lines seemed somehow appropriate. It also exemplifies the peculiar mythology Poe inspired. Boner's work was written a mere forty years after Poe's death, but it does not describe a flesh-and-blood man, but a creature out of legend.

Here lived the soul enchanted
By melody of song;
Here dwelt the spirit haunted

By a demoniac throng;

Here sang the lips elated;

Here grief and death were sated;

Here loved and here unmated

Was he, so frail, so strong.

Here wintry winds and cheerless

The dying firelight blew,

While he whose song was peerless

Dreamed the drear midnight through,

And from dull embers chilling

Crept shadows darkly filling

The silent place, and thrilling

His fancy as they grew.

Here with brows bared to heaven,

In starry night he stood,

With the lost star of seven

Feeling sad brotherhood.

Here in the sobbing showers

Of dark autumnal hours

He heard suspected powers

Shriek through the stormy wood.

From visions of Apollo

And of Astarte's bliss,

He gazed into the hollow

And hopeless vale of Dis,

And though earth were surrounded

By heaven, it still was mounded

With graves. His soul had sounded

The dolorous abyss.

Poor, mad, but not defiant,

He touched at heaven and hell.

Fate found a rare soul pliant

And wrung her changes well.

Alternately his lyre,

Stranded with strings of fire,

Led earth's most happy choir,

Or flashed with Israfel.

No singer of old story

Luting accustomed lays,

No harper for new glory,

No mendicant for praise,

He struck high chords and splendid,

Wherein were finely blended

Tones that unfinished ended

With his unfinished days.

Here through this lonely portal,

Made sacred by his name,

Unheralded immortal

The mortal went and came.

And fate that then denied him,

And envy that decried him,

And malice that belied him,

Here cenotaphed his fame.


(Header Image: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Footer: NYPL Digital Gallery)