Poe's 'Sonnet—Silence': Dualism, Death, and the Nameless Shadow

Composition, Spenserian Form, and Manichean Duality. Poe composed his Sonnet "Silence" in 1840, revising it in 1845. Poe chooses a 15-line version of the sonnet form, a throwback to the work of Edmund Spenser. The poem asserts the double, dual character of humanity, a notion that extends from sources in the Persian, Manichean notion that the forces of darkness and light perpetually battle for supremacy. Poe chooses to characterize the tension as between the "incorporate" (l. 1) and the "corporate" (l. 10).

The eternal struggle of light and dark, humanity's "double life" (l. 2), had always been a persistent theme in literature, for example, in Shakespeare's Macbeth, but the Romantics made it their special fixation, culminating in works like Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. In the world of music, for instance, the romantic composer Robert Schumann (1810–56) divided his own soul into two personalities, Florestan and Eusebius, the former his aggressive, masculine side, and the latter his feminine, poetic self. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein betrays aspects of this same theme of dualism in human nature, and Poe might well allude to that novel's austere setting in the arctic regions when he claims that a shadow (l. 13) of the dead "haunteth the lone regions where hath trod / No foot of man" (ll. 14–15). When Poe calls this distressing figure an "elf" (l. 13), he invokes his own invention, "the imp of the perverse," by which he indicts Man for his capacity for mischief in this world.

Archaic Diction and the Unity of Effect. Poe's language in this poem is deliberately old and arcane, with words like hath (ll. 11, 14), thee (l. 13), haunted (l. 14), and thyself (l. 15) the most obvious. But the entire tenor of the poem is slow and melancholy, a funeral dirge that mirrors its theme of a basic enmity between competing primal forces. Poe achieves what he always sought in his compositions, a unity of effect, a focusing of all elements of the work on a single central theme, observation, or emotion. Poe's use of the term shade (l. 4) suggests Homer, Dante, and Milton, all poets who envision the land of the dead.

Poe claims the corporeal dead evince no terror and asserts that the dead man's silence is final: His name is "No more" (l. 9). The connection to the "Nevermore" of Poe's "The Raven" seems quite close. The problem lies in Poe's version, or vision, of the "incorporate" (l. 1), which constitutes "that twin entity" (l. 3), the "two-fold Silence" (l. 5). Rather than explain his assertion, Poe offers metaphors—"solid and shade" (l. 4), "sea and shore" (l. 5), "Body and Soul" (l. 6)—as manifestations of a division that "springs" (l. 3) from another schism, that of "matter and light" (l. 4).

Graves, Mourning, and the Terrorless Dead. Poe does offer one contrast, or consolation: that one of these beings inhabits "lonely places, / Nor newly with grass overgrown" (ll. 6–7), an indication of graves that the silent grass has freshly covered. The departed is rendered "terrorless" (l. 9) by the application of "some solemn graces, / Some human memories and tearful lore" (ll. 7–8), all of which provide the departed with a name, a history, an epitaph, and a sense of loss among those who mourn them. These "conventions" and ceremonies of death—or death's rituals—involve sound, not silence. The sounds of mourning would appear to render the Dead harmless; his death falls within the scheme of life, and so we should "dread him not" (l. 10). His capacity for evil appears neutralized.

The Nameless Shadow and the Perverse. Then Poe casts doubt on the finality of death in the last quatrain: Some clement, some "shadow" (l. 13) remains unsatisfied—dare we assume that some "silence" is responsible? We know that the "elf" (l. 13) is "nameless" (l. 13), so perhaps its very anonymity is the source of its evil power. Here we might recall those three witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth who perform "a deed without a name" (3, 4, 50). The original sin has no "first" name. The word untimely (l. 12) relates well to that play, since it is rife with words and phrases beset by the prefix un. Poe ends his poem with a veiled threat: Should you encounter this fearsome, nameless shadow figure, by dint of "some urgent fate" (l. 12), then "commend thyself to God!" (l. 15).

For Discussion or Writing.
1. Identify points in the poem that demonstrate Poe's efforts to create a "unity of effect." Explain what his aim is and how his particular selection of terms supports that aim.

2. How might you compare Poe's vision of "sea and shore" (l. 5) as connected by silence to that of Matthew Arnold in "Dover Beach," which offers an image of calm as its first impression?

3. Find other sources of dualism in romantic literature; for example, the doppelgänger idea in Goethe and its echoes in works like The Double by Dostoyevsky and "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant.