DEPARTMENT OF TEACHER EDUCATION

Visayas State University – Isabel

Marvel, Isabel, Leyte, PHILIPPINES
Phone: +639157598113
E-mail address: servjes8@gmail.com

Name: Borrinaga, Elsa P Year and Course: BSED II -

ENGLISH

Student ID: 19-1-00242

Assessment

Direction: Read the story of “Silence – A Fable” by Edgar Allan Poe. Interpret and analyze the story.

NOTES:

This story was originally published in 1838 as

"Siope - A Fable".

Interpretation and Analysis of the story “________________”

__SIOPE (SILENCE)

First published with the title “Siope — A Fable,” this companion piece to “Shadow” is generally regarded
as another masterpiece of poetic prose. It is, however, the most cryptic of Poe’s tales, and has baffled
editors of his day, and many modern commentators. But, when one compares it with “Sonnet —
Silence,” and considers the clue in the early motto from “Al Aaraaf,” one need not find the meaning
beyond all conjecture.

Man clings to the rock of reality, however terrible; the true silence, cessation of being, terrifies even a
brave man.* “It is the Demon of the Imagination’s interpretation of the Universe.... The setting is a valley
called Desolation, full of activity. A dignified man sadly contemplates the tumult of Life about him. Then
the [page 193:] valley is called Silence, a type of death, which terrifies the man.”

The principal source is pointed out by A. H. Quinn (Poe, p. 215) as a story by Bulwer in the London New
Monthly, May 1830 — a story Poe named as a good sensational magazine article in a letter of April 30,
1835 to T. W. White and later praised in a review of Bulwer’s Rienzi in the Southern Literary Messenger
for February 1836. Bulwer’s tale, “Monos and Daimonos, A Legend,” is a rambling story of a youth
brought up by a father who abjured all society to live on a rock in a rocky waste. The greatest luxury of
the young Monos was solitude. After his father’s death, having attained his majority and his estate, he
left England and went “into the enormous woods of Africa, where human step never trod” — woods
peopled by “the wandering lion, or the wild ostrich, or that huge serpent.” To quote a typical passage:
“There, too, as beneath the heavy and dense shade I couched in the scorching noon, I heard the
trampling as of an army, and the crash and fall of the strong trees, and beheld through the matted
boughs the behemoth pass on its terrible way, with its eyes burning as a sun, and its white teeth arched
and glistening in the rabid jaw, as pillars of spar glitter in a cavern.”

Deciding to return home, Monos sails on a ship where, to his distress, one man persistently cleaves to
him. Says Monos, “I longed ... to strangle him when he addressed me! ... would have ... hurled him into
the sea to the sharks, which lynx-eyed and eager-jawed, swam night and day around our ship.”

The ship sinks, all are drowned save Monos and his tormentor, who joins him in a cavern. Monos runs
away, but in vain. He murders his companion, whose ghost continues to haunt him, unseen by others.

Here is much that Poe took — Africa, the rock, solitude, caverns, the demon, the wild beasts, even
sentences almost verbatim, like “As the Lord liveth, I believe the tale that I shall tell you will have
sufficient claim on your attention.” So much indeed — but Poe’s genius has transformed the
overwrought grandiloquence of his source into something rich and strange.

The story was one of the eleven Tales of the Folio Club, as the [page 194:] single leaf of its manuscript,
formerly accompanying the introduction, shows (see “The Folio Club,” below). Hence, it was probably in
existence before May 4, 1833, and may have been one of the stories in which John P. Kennedy tried to
interest the publishers Carey and Lea. It is clear that it was to be told by the protagonist who described
the Club’s members.

On September 11, 1835, Poe wrote John P. Kennedy he could not understand why The Gift had not used
“Epimanes” or “Siope.”

In 1837 plans were made for a Baltimore Book for the Christmas and New Year’s trade, on the plan of the
previously issued Boston Book, New York Book, and Philadelphia Book. Poe wrote on February 28 to W.
H. Carpenter, J. S. Norris, and James Brown that he would be glad to send something for their gift book, if
April 1, 1837 would be in time, and suggesting “the theme should be left to my own choice.” The book,
edited by Carpenter and T. S. Arthur, appeared late in 1837, containing “Siope.”

Years later in a letter cited by Woodberry, Poe’s friend N. C. Brooks claimed to have saved “Siope” from
the wastebasket, but his memory was probably of a later submission, in 1838 or 1839, while he was
editor of Fairfield’s North American Quarterly and its short-lived successor, the American Museum of
Science, Literature and the Arts.