Poe’s “Fairy-Land” and Bishop’s “Man-Moth”
By Robert Pinsky
Corny or great? Maudlin or masterful? The poetry of Edgar Allan Poe inspires a wide range of judgments.
Translated and admired by Charles Baudelaire, Poe became celebrated as a great writer in France. Like Jack London in Russia, a kind of export-only great American writer. But modernist and contemporary taste has considered poems like “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee” as dated or worse, no more than melodramatic jangle. One variation has been to deprecate the poems while admiring the innovative, compressed stories. But that, too, has been doubted, as in the epigram in Thom Gunn’s “Readings in French”:
Though Edgar Poë writes a lucid prose,
Just and rhetorical without exertion,
It loses all lucidity, God knows,
In the single, poorly-rendered English version.
Gunn’s umlaut apparently indicates the pronunciation of “Poe” preferred in the country where his greatness as a poet is most secure.
At this point, I need to name-drop. In conversation, I once alluded to Poe in conversation with Elizabeth Bishop. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I think it was mildly slighting, in a conventional way. Bishop told me that Poe wrote at least one great poem, “Fairy-Land.” She described the poem, and its impact on her, enough for me to be certain which one she meant of two similar poems with that title:
FAIRY-LAND (Edgar Allan Poe)
Dim vales—and shadowy floods—
And cloudy-looking woods,
Whose forms we can’t discover
For the tears that drip all over:
Huge moons there wax and wane—
Again—again—again—
Every moment of the night—
Forever changing places—
And they put out the star-light
With the breath from their pale faces.
About twelve by the moon-dial,
One more filmy than the rest
(A kind which, upon trial,
They have found to be the best)
Comes down—still down—and down
With its centre on the crown
Of a mountain’s eminence,
While its wide circumference
In easy drapery falls
Over hamlets, over halls,
Wherever they may be—
O’er the strange woods—o’er the sea—
Over spirits on the wing—
Over every drowsy thing—
And buries them up quite
In a labyrinth of light—
And then, how, deep! —O, deep,
Is the passion of their sleep.
In the morning they arise,
And their moony covering
Is soaring in the skies,
With the tempests as they toss,
Like—almost any thing—
Or a yellow Albatross.
They use that moon no more
For the same end as before,
Videlicet, a tent—
Which I think extravagant:
Its atomies, however,
Into a shower dissever,
Of which those butterflies
Of Earth, who seek the skies,
And so come down again
(Never-contented things!)
Have brought a specimen
Upon their quivering wings.
I think (but cannot prove) that this poem inspired or informed Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Man-Moth,” another eerie, persuasive and lunar imagining. Resemblances include the scope of imagination: in Bishop, a hybrid being suggested by a typo climbs a building; in Poe, a realm of multiple, filmy moons, with the filmiest becoming a dissolving, mountain-beshrouding tent. In both poems, tears matter. Beyond similarities of content, the two poems share a smiling, even jaunty tone that emerges at moments, as though to acknowledge—but not dispel—the gorgeously profligate nature of the imagination. Poe’s poem follows “Videlicet, a tent—/ Which I think extravagant.” That deadpan aside, at a droll remove from the bizarre realm that has just been reported, has a tone like Bishop’s to my ear. The reportorial tone for the surreal tale is one of her principles, practiced, I think, not only in “The Man-Moth.” Another example is “12 O’Clock News.”
Putting aside those matters of inspiration or similarity, I think that Bishop recommended a terrific work of art, a poem that long ago led me to revise, and I hope enlarge, my thinking about Poe.
Originally published in the Robert Pinsky Poetry Forum, October 23, 2013.