November Tale, from "Ligeia," by Edagar Allan Poe (1838)

Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe January (Boston, 19, 1809 – Baltimore, October 7, 1849)

 

At high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning me, peremptorily, to her side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed by herself not many days before. I obeyed her. --They were these:

      Lo! 'tis a gala night
      Within the lonesome latter years!
      An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
      In veils, and drowned in tears,
      Sit in a theatre, to see
      A play of hopes and fears,
      While the orchestra breathes fitfully
      The music of the spheres.

      Mimes, in the form of God on high,
      Mutter and mumble low,
      And hither and thither fly --
      Mere puppets they, who come and go
      At bidding of vast formless things
      That shift the scenery to and fro,
      Flapping from out their Condor wings
      Invisible Wo!

      That motley drama! --oh, be sure
      It shall not be forgot!
      With its Phantom chased forever more,
      By a crowd that seize it not,
      Through a circle that ever returneth in
      To the self-same spot,
      And much of Madness and more of Sin
      And Horror the soul of the plot.

      But see, amid the mimic rout,
      A crawling shape intrude!
      A blood-red thing that writhes from out
      The scenic solitude!
      It writhes! --it writhes! --with mortal pangs
      The mimes become its food,
      And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs
      In human gore imbued.

      Out --out are the lights --out all!
      And over each quivering form,
      The curtain, a funeral pall,
      Comes down with the rush of a storm,
      And the angels, all pallid and wan,
      Uprising, unveiling, affirm
      That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
      And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

"O God!" half shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet and extending her arms aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these lines --"O God! O Divine Father! --shall these things be undeviatingly so? --shall this Conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee? Who --who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor? Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will."

From "Ligeia," by Edagar Allan Poe (1838)