Blog, Tales From The Dark Book Of Poe, Oct 23rd,1977
as was written, after midnight clock struck its blackest hour.
Night Of Shadow, Poe, House Of Usher's Bloody Dust
Midnight hour when horrendous silence therein struck
magical its great power, in it I was stuck
cast into a dream, one with whispering delays
set aloft on a beam, passing clouds dark and gray
into a realm with clear message given to me
stroll in without fear, and grab the bright golden key!
Down a dark word path, I so courageously trod
facing hellish wrath, along its trail I did plod
into the land of black, great markers of the dead
time I lost track, divergence in my aching head
then came that recall, a faithful mission commanded
to get it all, and dare not leave empty-handed!
From the distant bell, came church music to my ears
I was not feeling well, as heartfelt its deep fears
next, a shadow came and begged to tag along
inquiring my name and then sang a mourning song
led me past stones, of those fallen in darkest sin
snakes crawling on their bones, all had a wicked grin!
Then I horror thus I knew, this a nightmare black
within its course, I must pursue, grab and get back
you will find your treasure beyond those rusty gates
bravery's measure, there the golden tomb awaits
hold on there my good friend, shadow screamed with a shout
near the end, duty-bound, one dares not turn about!
Tho' I may die, I entered that darl ancient crypt
aghast was I, as all its contents had been stripped
yet dried blood on the gloomy red walls showed a fight
from outside I heard wailing calls, you die tonight
seeking to flee, I knew to grab new life I must
fear grabbing me, I left with only bloody dust!
As I fled, screamed my fears, hearing those distant words
faster I went switching gears, I flew like a bird
far away on a distant hill, I heard a call
its words sent a cold chill, it cried soon you will fall
your are captive in a garden plot and will stay
Poe lives here, tho' House of Usher is in decay!
Morning call rang out, rooster sounded its alarm
I woke praise God with a shout, thanking God no harm
rising from bed, I saw a shadow fly away
its eyes glowing red, wailing "soon, soon you will pay"
I screamed with all my might, God's help is now a must
more fright, for at bed's foot was, piles of bloody dust!
R.J. Lindley, Oct23rd, 1977
Dark Rhyme, ( When The Raven Sent A Vivid Dream And Chilling Message )
Syllables Per Line:
0 12 12 12 12 12 12 0 12 12 12 12 12 12
0 12 12 12 12 12 12 0 12 12 12 12 12 12
0 12 12 12 12 12 12 0 12 12 12 12 12 12
0 12 12 12 12 12 12
Total # Syllables:504
Total # Words: 406
******
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_the_House_of_Usher
The Fall of the House of Usher
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigationJump to search
For other uses, see The Fall of the House of Usher (disambiguation).
"The Fall of the House of Usher"
House-of-Usher-1839.jpg
First appearance in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (September 1839)
Author Edgar Allan Poe
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Horror, Gothic, Detective Fiction
Published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine
Publication date September 1839
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, then included in the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. The short story, a work of Gothic fiction, includes themes of madness, family, isolation, and metaphysical identities.
Contents
1 Plot
2 Character descriptions
2.1 Narrator
2.2 Roderick Usher
2.3 Madeline Usher
3 Publication history
4 Sources of inspiration
5 Analysis
5.1 Allusions and references
6 Literary significance and criticism
7 In other media
8 References
9 Further reading
10 External links
Plot
The story begins with the unnamed narrator arriving at the house of his friend, Roderick Usher, having received a letter from him in a distant part of the country complaining of an illness and asking for his help. As he arrives, the narrator notes a thin crack extending from the roof, down the front of the building and into the adjacent lake.
It is revealed that Roderick's twin sister, Madeline, is also ill and falls into cataleptic, deathlike trances. Roderick and Madeline are the only remaining members of the Usher family.
The narrator is impressed with Roderick's paintings and attempts to cheer him by reading with him and listening to his improvised musical compositions on the guitar. Roderick sings "The Haunted Palace", then tells the narrator that he believes the house he lives in to be alive, and that this sentience arises from the arrangement of the masonry and vegetation surrounding it. Further, Roderick believes that his fate is connected to the family mansion.
Roderick later informs the narrator that his sister has died and insists that she be entombed for two weeks in the family tomb located in the house before being permanently buried. The narrator helps Roderick put the body in the tomb, and notes that Madeline has rosy cheeks, as some do after death. They inter her, but over the next week both Roderick and the narrator find themselves becoming increasingly agitated for no apparent reason. A storm begins. Roderick comes to the narrator's bedroom, which is situated directly above the vault, and throws open his window to the storm. He notices that the tarn surrounding the house seems to glow in the dark as it glowed in Roderick Usher's paintings, but there is no lightning.
The narrator attempts to calm Roderick by reading aloud The Mad Trist, a novel involving a knight named Ethelred who breaks into a hermit's dwelling in an attempt to escape an approaching storm, only to find a palace of gold guarded by a dragon. He also finds, hanging on the wall, a shield of shining brass on which is written a legend:
Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin;
Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win;[1]
With a stroke of his mace, Ethelred kills the dragon, who dies with a piercing shriek, and proceeds to take the shield, which falls to the floor with an unnerving clatter.
As the narrator reads of the knight's forcible entry into the dwelling, cracking and ripping sounds are heard somewhere in the house. When the dragon is described as shrieking as it dies, a shriek is heard, again within the house. As he relates the shield falling from off the wall, a reverberation, metallic and hollow, can be heard. Roderick becomes increasingly hysterical, and eventually exclaims that these sounds are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she was entombed.
Additionally, Roderick somehow knew that she was alive. The bedroom door is then blown open to reveal Madeline standing there. She falls on her brother and both land on the floor as corpses. The narrator then flees the house, and, as he does so, notices a flash of moonlight behind him which causes him to turn back, in time to see the moon shining through the suddenly widened crack. As he watches, the House of Usher splits in two and the fragments sink into the tarn.
Character descriptions
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "The Fall of the House of Usher" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
Narrator
In "The Fall of the House of Usher", Poe's unnamed narrator is called to visit the House of Usher by Roderick Usher. As his "best and only friend",[2] Roderick tells of his illness and asks that he visit. He is persuaded by Roderick's desperation for companionship. Though sympathetic and helpful, the narrator continually is made to be an outsider. From his perspective, the cautionary tale unfolds. The narrator also exists as Roderick's audience as the men are not very well-acquainted, and Roderick is convinced of his impending demise. The narrator gradually is drawn into Roderick's belief after being brought forth to witness the horrors and hauntings of the House of Usher.[3]
From his arrival, he notes the family's isolationist tendencies as well as the cryptic and special connection between Madeline and Roderick. Throughout the tale and her varying states of consciousness, Madeline ignores the Narrator's presence. After Roderick Usher claims that Madeline has died, he helps Usher place her in the underground vault despite noticing Madeline's flushed appearance.
During one sleepless night, the Narrator reads aloud to Usher as sounds are heard throughout the mansion. He witnesses Madeline's reemergence and the subsequent death of the twins, Madeline and Roderick. The narrator is the only character to escape the House of Usher, which he views as it cracks and sinks into the tarn or mountain lake.
Roderick Usher
Roderick Usher is the twin of Madeline Usher and one of the last living Ushers. Usher writes to the narrator, his boyhood friend, about his illness.[2] When the narrator arrives, he is startled to see Roderick's appearance is eerie and off-putting. He is described by the narrator:
gray-white skin; eyes large and full of light; lips not bright in color, but of a beautiful shape; a well-shaped nose; hair of great softness — a face that was not easy to forget. And now the increase in this strangeness of his face had caused so great a change that I almost did not know him. The horrible white of his skin, and the strange light in his eyes, surprised me and even made me afraid. His hair had been allowed to grow, and in its softness it did not fall around his face but seemed to lie upon the air. I could not, even with an effort, see in my friend the appearance of a simple human being.[4]
Roderick Usher is a recluse.[2] He is unwell both physically and mentally. In addition to his constant fear and trepidation, Madeline's catalepsy is a cause of his decay. He is tormented by the sorrow of watching his sibling die. The narrator states: "He admitted [that] much of the peculiar gloom which thus affected him could be traced [to] the evidently approaching dissolution [of] his sole companion".[2] According to Terry W. Thompson, he meticulously plans for her burial to prevent "resurrection men" from stealing his beloved sister's corpse for experimentation as was common in the 18th and 19th centuries for medical schools and physicians in need of cadavers.[5]
As his twin, the two share an incommunicable connection that critics conclude may be either incestuous or metaphysical,[6] as two individuals in an extra-sensory relationship embodying a single entity. To that end, Roderick's deteriorating condition speeds up his own torment and eventual death. Like his sister, Roderick Usher is connected to the mansion. He believes the mansion is sentient and responsible, in part, for his deteriorating mental health and melancholy. Despite this admission, Usher remains in the mansion and composes art containing the Usher mansion or similar haunted mansions. His mental health deteriorates faster as he begins to hear Madeline's attempts to escape the underground vault she was buried in, and he eventually meets his death out of fear in a manner similar to the House of Usher's cracking and sinking.
Madeline Usher
Madeline Usher is the twin sister and doppelgänger of Roderick Usher. She is deathly ill and cataleptic. She appears before the narrator, but never acknowledges his presence. She returns to her bedroom where Roderick claims she has died. She is entombed despite her flushed appearance. In the tale's conclusion, Madeline escapes her tomb and returns to Roderick, only to scare him to death.
According to Poe's detective methodology in literature, Madeline Usher may be the physical embodiment of the supernatural and metaphysical worlds. Her limited presence is explained as a personification of Roderick's torment and fear. Madeline does not appear until she is summoned through her brother's fear, foreshadowed in the epigraph, with a quote from French poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger: "Son cœur est un luth suspendu; / Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne", meaning "His heart is a tightened lute; as soon as one touches it, it echoes".[1]
Publication history
"The Fall of the House of Usher" was first published in September 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. It was revised slightly in 1840 for the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. It contains Poe's poem "The Haunted Palace", which earlierwas published separately in the April 1839 issue of Baltimore Museum.
In 1928, Éditions Narcisse, predecessor to the Black Sun Press, published a limited edition of 300 numbered copies with illustrations by Alastair.
Sources of inspiration
Home of Hezekiah Usher's son, Hezekiah
Poe's inspiration for the story may be based upon events of the Hezekiah Usher House, which was located on the Usher estate that is now a three-block area in modern Boston, Massachusetts adjacent to Boston Common and bound by Tremont Street to the northwest, Washington Street to the southeast, Avery Street to the south and Winter Street to the north. The house was constructed in 1684 and either torn down or relocated in 1830.[7] Other sources indicate that a sailor and the young wife of the older owner were caught and entombed in their trysting spot by her husband. When the Usher House was torn down in 1830, two bodies were found embraced in a cavity in the cellar.[8]
Another source of inspiration may be from an actual couple by the name Mr. and Mrs. Luke Usher, the friends and fellow actors of his mother Eliza Poe.[9] The couple took care of Eliza's three children (including Poe) during her time of illness and eventual death.[citation needed]
German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, who was a role model and inspiration for Poe, published the story "Das Majorat" in 1819. There are many similarities between the two stories, like the breaking in two of a house, eerie sounds in the night, the story within a story and the house owner's being called Roderich. Because Poe was familiar with Hoffmann's works, he knew the story and cleverly drew from it using the elements for his own purposes.[10]
Another German author, Heinrich Clauren's, 1812 story The Robber's Castle, as translated into English by John Hardman and published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1828 as "The Robber's Tower", may have served as an inspiration according to Arno Schmidt and Thomas Hansen.[11] As well as common elements, such as a young woman with a fear of premature burial interred in a sepulchre directly beneath the protagonist's chamber, stringed instruments and the living twin of the buried girl, Diane Hoeveler identifies textual evidence of Poe's use of the story, and concludes that the inclusion of Vigiliae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae (Vigils for the Dead according to the Use of the Church of Mainz) is drawn from the use of a similarly obscure book in "The Robber's Tower".[12][13]
The theme of the crumbling, haunted castle is a key feature of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), which largely contributed in defining the Gothic genre. [14]
Analysis
1894 illustration by Aubrey Beardsley
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is considered the best example of Poe's "totality", wherein every element and detail is related and relevant.[15]
The presence of a capacious, disintegrating house symbolizing the destruction of the human body is a characteristic element in Poe's later work.[16]
"The Fall of the House of Usher" shows Poe's ability to create an emotional tone in his work, specifically feelings of fear, doom, and guilt.[17] These emotions center on Roderick Usher, who, like many Poe characters, suffers from an unnamed disease. Like the narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart", his disease inflames his hyperactive senses. The illness manifests physically but is based in Roderick's mental or even moral state. He is sick, it is suggested, because he expects to be sick based on his family's history of illness and is, therefore, essentially a hypochondriac.[18] Similarly, he buries his sister alive because he expects to bury her alive, creating his own self-fulfilling prophecy.[citation needed]
The House of Usher, itself doubly referring both to the actual structure and the family, plays a significant role in the story. It is the first "character" that the narrator introduces to the reader, presented with a humanized description: Its windows are described as "eye-like" twice in the first paragraph. The fissure that develops in its side is symbolic of the decay of the Usher family and the house "dies" along with the two Usher siblings. This connection was emphasized in Roderick's poem "The Haunted Palace", which seems to be a direct reference to the house that foreshadows doom.[19]
L. Sprague de Camp in his Lovecraft: A Biography wrote that "[a]ccording to the late [Poe expert] Thomas O. Mabbott, [[H.P. Lovecraft], in 'Supernatural Horror', solved a problem in the interpretation of Poe" by arguing that "Roderick Usher, his sister Madeline, and the house all shared one common soul".[20]
The plot of this tale has prompted many critics to analyze it as a description of the human psyche, comparing, for instance, the House to the unconscious, and its central crack to a split personality. An incestuous relationship between Roderick and Madeline never is explicitly stated, but seems implied by the strange attachment between the two.[21]
Opium, which Poe mentions several times in both his prose and poems, is mentioned twice in the tale. The gloomy sensation occasioned by the dreary landscape around the Usher mansion is compared by the narrator to the sickness caused by the withdrawal symptoms of an opiate-addict. The narrator also describes Roderick Usher's appearance as that of an "irreclaimable eater of opium."[22]
Allusions and references
The opening epigraph quotes "Le Refus" (1831) by the French songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger, translated to English as "his heart is a suspended lute, as soon as it is touched, it resounds". Béranger's original text reads "Mon cœur" (my heart) and not "Son cœur" (his/her heart).
The narrator describes one of Usher's musical compositions as a "singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber". Poe here refers to a popular piano work of his time — which, though going by the title "Weber's Last Waltz" was actually composed by Carl Gottlieb Reissiger.[23] A manuscript copy of the music was found among Weber's papers upon his death in 1826 and the work was mistakenly attributed to him.
Usher's painting reminds the narrator of the Swiss-born British painter Henry Fuseli.
Literary significance and criticism
"The Fall of the House of Usher" first appeared in Burton's.
Along with "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Black Cat" and "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Fall of the House of Usher" is considered among Poe's more famous works of prose.[24]
This highly unsettling macabre work is recognized as a masterpiece of American Gothic literature. Indeed, as in many of his tales, Poe borrows much from the already developed Gothic tradition. Still, as G.R. Thomson writes in his introduction to Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe, "the tale has long been hailed as a masterpiece of Gothic horror; it is also a masterpiece of dramatic irony and structural symbolism."[25]
"The Fall of the House of Usher" has been criticized for being too formulaic. Poe was criticized for following his own patterns established in works like "Morella" and "Ligeia", using stock characters in stock scenes and stock situations. Repetitive themes like an unidentifiable disease, madness and resurrection are also criticized.[26] Washington Irving explained to Poe in a letter dated November 6, 1839: "You have been too anxious to present your pictures vividly to the eye, or too distrustful of your effect, and had laid on too much colouring. It is erring on the best side – the side of luxuriance."[27]
John McAleer maintained that Herman Melville's idea for "objectifying Ahab's flawed character" in Moby-Dick came from the "evocative force" of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher". In both Ahab and the house of Usher, the appearance of fundamental soundness is visibly flawed – by Ahab's livid scar, and by the fissure in the masonry of Usher.[28]