Literary Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's Ulalume (1847): Guilt and Allusions

Gothic Aesthetics and Stylistic Features in Edgar Allan Poe's Ulalume. Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Ulalume" (1847) exhibits many of the quintessential qualities that critics and readers seeking to reduce Poe to stereotypes typically assign to his literary corpus. The work is characterized by a haunted, morbid, and gothic atmosphere, a strong compulsion toward emotional extremes, an overwhelming sense of oppressive guilt, and a complex vocabulary paired with an elaborate scheme of allusions that seem deliberately abstruse. In several respects, these precise criticisms could be laid at the feet of one of Poe's more sarcastic commentators, T.S. Eliot. A prominent academic argument suggests that the sheer acoustic qualities and musicality of "Ulalume" provide its primary allure while intentionally obscuring its underlying meaning. To establish a literary framework for this spiritual quest for enlightenment and absolution, one might look to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, which was known to Poe through his extensive readings in continental literature. Similarly, Lord Byron's Manfred takes the reader on an equally exotic mental odyssey, where the protagonist searches for expiation from a nameless crime and unrelieved guilt.

Structural Analysis and the Narrative Allegory of Spiritual Decline. Formally, "Ulalume" is structured in nine stanzas, presenting a narrative trajectory that appears to reveal how the unnamed narrator lost his own soul or, conversely, how he began to comprehend his eternal guilt. By the time the narrator and Psyche (his personified soul) arrive at the tomb of Ulalume, the poem is rife with imagery reminiscent of Poe's own works "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Annabel Lee," alongside classical mythology. The poetic journey begins "in the lonesome October" (line 5), and two stanzas later, the text indicates that the narrator and Psyche "knew not that the month was October, / And we marked not the month of the year— / (Ah, night of all nights of the year!)" (lines 24–26). This temporal marker strongly invites the assumption that the setting corresponds to Halloween. Throughout the initial 31 lines, the dominant imagery centers on spiritual decay and emotional stagnation: "The skies they were ashen and sober; / The leaves they were withered and sere— / The leaves they were withering and sere" (lines 1–3). This weary sentiment directly echoes line choices from William Shakespeare's Macbeth: "My way of life / Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf / And that which should accompany old age" (Act 5, Scene 2, lines 26–28). Furthermore, the dialogue between the narrator and Psyche is described as "palsied and sere— / Our memories were treacherous and sere—" (lines 22–23). The night itself is depicted as "senescent," underscoring the premise that aged human wits and memory cannot be trusted. When combined with imagery such as "the dark tarn of Auber / In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir" (lines 9–10), the narrative prepares the reader for themes of crime, self-deception, and unnatural revelation analogous to Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy.

Mythological Allusions, Astronomical Imagery, and the Psychological Climax. At line 32, a shift occurs as light breaks upon a new day, allegorized as the birth of a Phoenician goddess: "At the end of our path a liquescent / And nebulous luster was born, / Out of which a miraculous crescent / Arose with a duplicate horn— / Astarte's bediamonded crescent / Distinct with its duplicate horn" (lines 34–39). Although Astarte functions as a classical fertility deity, she leads "to the Lethean peace of the skies" (line 47)—referencing Lethe, the mythical river of forgetfulness—promising the narrator oblivion through her guidance. However, Psyche remains deeply suspicious of Astarte and her astrological association with the constellation Leo, exclaiming: "Sadly this star I mistrust— / Oh, hasten!—oh, let us not linger! / Oh, fly! —let us fly! —for we must" (lines 53–56). This panic offers another parallel to Macbeth and the plight of Lady Macduff, who asks "Whither should I fly?" (Act 4, Scene 2, line 81). As Psyche's plumes "trailed in the dust— / Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust" (lines 60–61), the narrative evokes Macbeth's realization that ambition ends in "dusty death" (Act 5, Scene 5, line 26). Dismissing Psyche's instinctual warnings, the narrator "tempted her out of her gloom" (line 74), only to be abruptly "stopped by the door of a tomb" (line 76). Upon Psyche's revelation that the sepulcher belongs to the lost Ulalume, the narrator suddenly recalls that "last year" (line 87) he "brought a dread burden down here" (line 90), presumably referring to the corpse of Ulalume, whom he either murdered or was otherwise complicit in her death. The anguished question, "Ah, what demon has tempted me here?" (line 92), remains an unanswered riddle. Nevertheless, it illuminates why his heart was previously "volcanic / As the scoriac rivers that roll— / As the lavas that restlessly roll / Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek / In the ultimate climes of the pole—" (lines 14–18). Having completed this Dantesque descent, the narrator is forced to confront his repressed guilt, realizing that he sacrificed his beloved in a futile pursuit of "Hope . . . Beauty" (line 66).

Analytical Questions for Discussion and Critical Writing. To further explore the analytical and philosophical dimensions of Poe's "Ulalume," consider the following academic prompts:
- 1st question: Is it possible to identify the underlying basis of the narrator's sacrifice of his cherished Ulalume? Is it plausible that a sane individual would completely forget, within the span of a single year, the death or murder of his beloved?

- 2nd question: Would the narrator of "Ulalume" find psychological or thematic kinsmen in Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories, such as the protagonist of "Artist of the Beautiful" or the husband in "The Birth-mark"? Additionally, consider the line from Edward FitzGerald's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: "I myself am Heaven and Hell." How do these words directly relate to the psychological landscape and self-contained torment depicted in "Ulalume"?

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells": A Journey Through Life and Death

Publication and Structural Framework. "The Bells" appeared in 1849, three months after Poe's death; he had composed it in 1848. Set as an ode in irregular stanza lengths, each longer than its predecessor, the four sections, or "movements," of the piece celebrate a successive stage in the development of human life. Each "bell," or stage of life, has its own metal, a device Plato had employed in his "Allegory of the Metals" in The Republic to differentiate the respective "values" (to the state) of human beings. What has kept readers in thrall to this poem are its kinetic powers of onomatopoeia, its alliterative speed, and the sheer tempo of its linear transmission. Poe has the poetic line expand and retreat, and we recall the dynamics of George Herbert's metaphysical poetry. Clearly Poe intended the poem as a "performance piece," a moment of musical "theater" and verbal/oral virtuosity, worthy of imitators, such as Dylan Thomas, who would follow Poe's model.

Stanza 1: The Vivacity of Life. Stanza 1 celebrates the vivacity of life. The "sledges with the bells— / Silver bells!" (ll. 1–2) convey an image of troikas (horse-drawn sleds) rushing through the snow on a winter night. The order of the world is assured; the sense of childhood faith permeating the landscape becomes spiritualized in "crystalline delight" (l. 8). Time itself, "in a sort of Runic rhyme" (l. 10), peals forth as a musical experience, charming, enchanted.

Stanza 2: The Union of Man and Nature. Stanza 2 captures the union of man and nature in a series of superheated images, liquid fire. We hear the mellow wedding bells / Golden bells! (ll. 15–16). The golden age has returned, the time of original innocence, prelapsarian Adam and Eve. "What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!" (l. 17). The bliss quickly finds consummation: "How they ring out their delight!" (19). In rather overt sexual terms, Poe lets nature take its course: "From the molten-golden notes (20) / . . . What a liquid ditty floats (22) / . . . What a gush of euphony voluminously wells! / How it swells!" (ll. 26–27). Poetic "climax" occurs on the subatomic level: "Oh, from out the sounding cells, / What a gush of euphony" (ll. 25–26). Of course, "cells" (l. 25) could suggest confinement, just as "sledges" (l. 1) could suggest the hammer blows of fate. The tenor of the stanza, however, disregards human limits and rather celebrates power and possibility: "How it dwells / In the Future! how it tells / Of the rapture" (ll. 28–29).

Stanza 3: The Paroxysms of Approaching Death. Stanza 3 expresses the paroxysms of approaching death, the ghastly realization of human mortality. "Hear the loud alarum bells— / Brazen bells" (ll. 34–35). That same Promethean fire that gave birth to man also consumes him. The frenzied pealing of the bells "in a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire, / In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire" (ll. 42–43) proves fruitless. The image is reminiscent of Macbeth's "Out, out, brief candle!" (Macbeth 5.5.26). The "harmony of the world" (in Johannes Kepler's phrase) is no more. The bells "can only shriek, shriek, / Out of tune" (ll. 40–41). Poe invokes another conjunctio, another macabre consummation, but this time it presages evil fruit: "How they clang, and clash, and roar! / What a horror they outpour / On the bosom of the palpitating air!" (ll. 52–54). Where in the second stanza the "turtle-dove . . . gloats / On the moon" (22–23), there is an object of ardor and affection; the moon in stanza 3 has become the symbol of irrational ambition: The bronze bells are heard to leap "higher, higher, higher / With a desperate desire, / And a resolute endeavor, / Now—now to sit or never, / By the side of the pale-faced moon" (ll. 44–48). The jarring battalions of sound heard a mighty disjunction between will and necessity, personal pride and humanity's fate. This third stanza is Poe's equivalent to Dylan Thomas's "rage, rage at the dying of the light."

Stanza 4: The Tolling of the Iron Bells. Stanza 4 commands us to ask not for whom the bell tolls. Both the poet John Donne and the Dies Irae from the Requiem Mass seem close at hand, and it is no accident that the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov set "The Bells" to music as his Opus 35, since he was himself obsessed with the Day of Judgment. "Hear the tolling of the bells— / Iron bells!" (ll. 67–68). The implacable "iron" conveys a world of apathy to humanity's suffering consciousness. We are cast into Dante's Inferno, and "They are Ghouls" (l. 85) who delight in the rolling of a millstone on the human heart, who feel "a glory in so rolling / On the human heart a stone—" (ll. 81–82). Moreover, it appears to be death, or even the devil alone, who grinds humanity into dust and despair: "And their king it is who tolls; / And he rolls, rolls, rolls / Rolls / A pæan from the bells!" (ll. 86–89). We note "his merry bosom swells" (l. 90) with pride and sustenance as he consumes humanity. The ghouls themselves are "neither man nor woman— / They are neither brute nor human" (ll. 83–84), an amorphous race or half-life likewise made flesh by H. G. Wells in his novel The Island of Dr. Moreau. The music of this horror is a "muffled monotone" (l. 80) of "melancholy menace" (l. 72), and its figures inflame the ghoul king as "he dances, and he yells; / Keeping time, time, time, / In a sort of Runic rhyme" (ll. 92–94), a parody of the springtime sentiment of childlike faith conveyed at line 10. Behind all the "hieroglyphs" of nature, in spite of Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their transcendental ilk, stands death, the ultimate, cosmic dancer, and the final "moaning and groaning of the bells" (l. 109) marks the knell of human aspirations.

For Discussion or Writing. The following prompts encourage critical analysis of Poe's thematic and stylistic choices.
1. Consider Poe's specific use of rhythm and meter to suggest a deterioration of bliss and personal control as the various bells signify the onrush of death and destruction. Select specific passages from the poem and explain how rhythm and meter function in them.

2. Do you see a parallel in this poem's presentation of vain ambition with words of the second apparition in Macbeth, who demands of Macbeth that he "be bloody, bold, and resolute. Laugh to scorn the power of man" (Macbeth 4.1.90–91)? What is the tone of Poe's narrator? Is he sympathetic to or disdainful of humanity?