Adam Skjalm-Rasmussen Chick

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Dark Romanticism – Poe and the Beauty of Death

Table of Contents
• The Idea of the Romantic

• The Basis of Dark Romanticism

• Theory – Fact or Hokum?

• Methodology

• Ligeia – Disseminating the Text

• Breaking Down the Poem

• Short Stories and Poems – Is There a Difference in Dark Romanticism?

• The Latter Half of Ligeia

• Conclusion

• Bibliography

The Idea of the Romantic

The Romantic period is a time in literary history that is defined around exploration of the
human emotional spectrum: often it will involve elements of love, desire, sexual needs and
the other emotions relating to this area. Works like Goethe’s Die Leiden des Junges Werthers
pioneered this new genre of literature and took Europe by storm. As with most literary
genres, there are always ‘’responses’’ in the form of counter-genres or criticism, and the
Romantic genre is no exception. However, in this case, it is not a direct counter-genre, but
more specifically a sub-genre that I am referring to: namely that of Dark Romanticism. It is a
genre that explores the range of ‘’negative’’ human emotion and seeks to explain and
understand the mind of a person grief-stricken, sorrowful etc. One of the preliminary
pioneers of this genre was American author Edgar Allan Poe; quite famous for his poem The
Raven, he writes mostly on the topics of melancholy, death and sorrow, and is also

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considered to be the grandfather of the horror genre due to works like The Tell-Tale Heart.
His works were important to contemporary writers like Charles Baudelaire, who translated
some of Poe’s works into French, and it cascaded into an entire movement within the French
literary society. In this essay, I will work with the questions of ’’How do scholars define Dark
Romanticism? How are these traits and the definitions represented in Edgar Allan Poe’s
Ligeia and how can we contrast it to Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry.’’ The way I will work with this
question is to take a deep dive into this text, disseminating it of its content and presenting
evidence of what characteristics of dark romanticism the story shows and how we might
understand it. I shall also use critics like Mario Praz and Roland Barthes to better understand
these characteristics. Finally, I shall do a contrastive analysis between the poetry of dark
romanticism and the short stories of dark romanticism.

The Basis of Dark Romanticism

The act of defining ‘Dark Romanticism’ as a singular term in literary history is a difficult task
to take upon oneself. Mario Praz considers the concept of dark romanticism in his work The
Romantic Agony (1970), in which he states ‘Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror…’ In
these lines pleasure and pain are combined in one single impression. The very objects which
should induce a shudder (…) all these give rise to a new sense of beauty, a beauty imperilled
and contaminated, a new thrill. (p. 26). He also states This glassy-eyed, severed female head,
this horrible, fascinating Medusa, was to be the object of the dark loves of the Romantics and
the Decadents throughout the whole of the century. Here Praz speaks in relation to a poem
that Shelley found fascinating, namely one which is accredited to an unknown Flemish writer.
Additionally, Praz states, in relation to Poe, (…) Poe explicitly admits that ‘the death of a
beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’. The sight of his
mother dying of consumption, when Poe was hardly three years old, could not fail to leave in
the child an indelible impression, which later transposed itself into the figures of Berenice,
Morella, Eleonora, Ligeia. Essentially the point Praz attempts to make with these three
quotes is the idea that Romantics revel in the dark aspects of humanity, the decadence of
our own emotions and the joy we take in gazing upon the horrid and the terrible.

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Interestingly, Praz does not consider dark romanticism as dark romanticism, but discerns
between ‘’Romantics and Decadents’’, and even goes so far as to state The discovery of
Horror as a source of delight and beauty ended by reacting on men’s actual conception of
beauty itself: the Horrid, from being a category of the Beautiful, ended by becoming one of
its essential elements, and the ‘beautifully horrid’ passed by insensible degrees into the
‘horribly beautiful’. What is meant with this statement is that the Horrid and the Beautiful
are two separate things that become intrinsically connected to each other: one cannot exist
without the other. Therefore it is logical that works like Ligeia work in the manner that they
do: a mix of both dark romantic traits and classical romantic traits. Thus Praz states in fact, to
such an extent were Beauty and Death looked upon as sisters by the Romantics that they
became fused into a sort of two-faced herm, filled with corruption and melancholy and fatal
in its beauty – a beauty of which the more bitter the taste, the more abundant the
enjoyment. Later in the paper, we will be applying this extract to our work to better
understand it’s intrinsic value to the works of Poe. In the rest of the chapter, named ‘’The
Beauty of the Medusa’’, Praz mentions the names of Baudelaire, Flaubert and several other
theorists that have spoken on the topic of Poe and the predating topic of dark romanticism,
in which Praz uses several quotes from different works, only in their original language, to
support his arguments for the inherent co-existence of classical romanticism and dark
romanticism. In essence, it is a countermovement to the Romantic concepts of sublimity,
beauty, love and euphoria; in Dark romanticism it is the representation of melancholy,
insanity and crime, and as G.R. Thompson (1974) puts it ‘’adapted images of
anthropomorphized evil in the form of Satan, devils, ghosts, werewolves, vampires and
ghouls as emblematic of human nature’’. As a result, the idea of the occult that has a large
presence in Edgar Allan Poe’s works are innate representations of the human emotional
spectrum and a physical manifestation of those concepts.

Roland Barthes, in his work A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1978), under the chapter
demons, defines the concept of ‘’the amorous subject that he is possessed by a demon of
language which impels him to injure himself and to expel himself’’. Additionally, he creates a
sub-definition where he states ‘’the demon is plural. When a demon is repulsed, when I have
at last imposed silence upon him (by accident or effort), another raises his head close by and

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begins speaking’’. Barthes implies here that the demons that speak to us are a part of
ourselves, a manifestation of the darker side of our minds, metaphorically fighting against
the brighter, perhaps even happier, emotions within our emotional spectrum. Barthes uses
the analogy of a solfatara ‘’huge bubbles (muddy and scorching) burst, one after the other;
when one falls back and dies out, returning to the mass, another forms and swells farther
on’’. It is this idea of a congealed mass of emotion, one bubbling up in one moment, only to
be handled and another emotion to bubble up to the surface.

With these definitions in mind, we can now work on a singular, unified understanding that
will aid in the analysis of Poe’s works: Dark Romanticism represents the spectrum of some
negative human emotions and a vast range of the ‘’depressive’’ human emotions. It
anthropomorphises them and creates a dichotomy between them for the protagonist to
conquer or falter to it. Additionally, it is interconnected with classical aspects of romanticism,
one being unable to exist without the other, namely that of the concept of Beauty. Finally, it
focuses on those negative emotions and elects to display the process a person goes through
whilst experiencing them.

The question now arises: how does this definition present itself in the works of Edgar Allan
Poe? To fully understand his writing, I have elected 1 primary piece and a few secondary
pieces to help contrast and compare the main points. The first piece which we shall consider
is Ligeia. A rather classic and exemplary piece to explore the workings of Dark Romanticism.

Theory – Fact or Hokum?

Theorists like Mario Praz have made an attempt at not only defining romanticism as a whole,
but also dark romanticism. However, it is important to keep in mind what basis these
theorists work from: Barthes works from a contemporary premise, setting precedence for
much later theorists like Praz.

Praz speaks much of what he considers ‘’classical romanticism’’, and states It would not be
safe to assert that the Romantics were the first to feel, as they were certainly the first to
discuss this particular kind of beauty. He makes an assumption based on the notion that the

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Romantics thought they were the first to feel. Praz’ argues against that notion himself by
simply stating Vauvenargues, in the eighteenth century, speaks of a type of libertine who
finds beauty insipid unless it is flavoured ‘d’un air de corruption’; but one may be failr sure
that the libertines of all periods have found it thus. The consideration that Praz makes, whilst
not being incorrect, certainly has a fallacy adhered to it: whilst the Romantics must have
considered themselves the first to feel yet obviously were not, they were the first to write
down what they felt in a manner that made it accessible to the reader to understand the
pains of the narrator, speaker or author. The Romantics put forward their thoughts and
feelings into paper, driving narratives through characters’ emotions and making the reader
understand the decisions that they make. Unlike the epics of Anglo-Saxon England that deal
with heroic acts and its sorts, the Romantics deal with an intricacy of human depth that is as
individual as fingerprints. This makes understanding the narrative of romantic work difficult
on the individual, as understanding one complex emotion can be inherently different from
person to person. As a result of this, literary critics of dark romanticism can never truly create
works that properly criticise, as each understanding of the original work will be so vastly
different. Someone who has never experienced the loss of someone close to them will never
be able to mirror the emotions described. As such, Praz’ work works on that same level: the
criticism he brings forward in The Romantic Agony is jumbled and slightly incoherent, using
quotations from several other scholars but in their original language, meaning understanding
what exactly is being said is difficult if you do not understand French, Italian and German.
Additionally, the 2nd edition of the book was published in 1978, with the original being
published in 1930. This serves us with an additional problem: criticism this old is outdated,
there is likely newer works that are more comprehensive, more in depth and has a larger
basis of other works to lean on for its arguments. The saving grace for Praz’ work in
particular is the fact that he not only uses romantic contemporaries for his theory, it is the
fact that the fundamental romantic literature has remained unchanged for centuries,
meaning that all previous theory will still be viable to use for argumentation.

Methodology

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In order to fully explain the phenomenon of Dark Romanticism within Edgar Allan Poe’s
Ligeia, there are a few methods we must use that, firstly, are unavoidable, but will act as a
framework for my research and will subsequently help prove my hypothesis. I will be using a
method of literary analysis and poetic analysis, which includes close readings of the elected
texts as well as qualitative research methods; choosing few texts and working in depth with
them rather than selecting a variety. There will also be a comparative analysis to help
contrast the poetry I have elected and put it into perspective with the genre as a whole.

The reasoning for picking these methods is, as should be evident, that there are so many of
not only Poe’s texts that would fall under the category of dark romanticism. As such, electing
but a handful of them to support the argument that he was a dark romantic would be
optimal. The downside to this approach, however, is that we can never fully conclude on
whether or not Poe was a dark romantic or not, we can only conclude that Ligeia and the
elected poetry is categorized as dark romanticism. We will never be concluding that Poe was
a dark romantic, merely hypothesising that he was from the basis of Ligeia and his most
famous poetry. By narrowing down the amount of texts we work with, we get a more in
depth result that we can conclude upon, and help us explore what dark romanticism actually
is and what it contains, rather than simply stating whether or not a text falls under the
category of dark romanticism, hence the reasoning for electing a qualitative method and
close reading. The comparative analysis, however, has a slighty different basis of election.
Having a comparative analysis in general helps create some perspective within a given
subject, yet here in this instance I have selected it to help better the understanding dark
romanticism and the scope in which it took hold. Considering poetry a part of dark
romanticism may seem slightly unintuitive, yet with the way that Edgar Allan Poe portrays
the same emotions in his works, and in Ligeia in particular, it proves prudent to include other
poems that show the entirety of the dark romantic emotional spectrum.

Ligeia – Disseminating The Text

The first 2 pages of this short story combines both classical romantic traits and dark romantic
traits, in the sense that Poe manages to bring the sensation of melancholy as well as

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describing inherent beauty. The way he manages this exact phenomenon is through speaking
of the deceased Ligeia with melancholy but remembering the inherently beautiful aspects of
her Or, perhaps, I cannot now bring these points to mind (…) -by Ligeia- that I bring before
mine eyes in fancy the image of her who is no more (p. 256). What this paragraph tells us is
the dual nature of classical romanticism and dark romanticism; a longing for that which is
lost yet cherishing the fickle memory of the lost object of desire. Here, the narrator struggles
to remember the exact circumstances in which he meets Ligeia, and remembers only the
physical aspects of her beauty. Additionally, there is a paragraph where the narrator speaks
of ‘’studies of a nature’’, in which there is spoken of the simple nature of the word ‘’Ligeia’’
and the effect it has on the narrator. Evidently, through simply using the name and calling it
aloud, the narrator can bring the memories of Ligeia to the surface of his mind and
remember her physical beauty, adore it and simply exist in those memories, despite the
mention of ‘’Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much
suffering.’’ Ultimately, the argument of the act of invoking the name of Ligeia in a
melancholic state leading to remembrance of beauty and innate passion can be reversed; so
to say that the act of remembering Ligeia and her beauty lead to the melancholy that the
narrator experiences by invocation of the name. This exact state of the passage, where the
narrator experiences both the elements of classical romanticism and dark romanticism can
be understood that both states can be achieved by use of the other: understanding the
beauty in the object of desire and passion can lead to a melancholic state of the actor and
vice versa.

It is imperative to understand the concept of remembrance, and as the narrator themself

puts it There is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of
mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact – never, I believe, noticed in the schools – that, in
our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon
the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember (p. 258). The
narrator here presents the concept of memory in a way that we can only replicate within our
own mind events past or people lost, and as such can only picture the person we saw in its
natural subjectivity. For the narrator attempts to piece together a memory of Ligeia’s ‘’orbs’’
and the distinctive nature of her perceived beauty, he cannot fully form the picture of Ligeia

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as there is something missing. Here it can be said that the narrator attempts to resurrect
Ligeia within his own mind yet something is missing to complete the process: he cannot fully
picture her ‘’orbs’’ yet distinctly remembers the rest of her physical features and as such he
sets himself, metaphorically, on an ‘’astrological mission’’ to observe them again. This
astrological mission that the narrator sets himself upon is rather morbid, in the sense that he
wishes to gaze upon the eyes of a person now dead, consistently placing in his own mind the
idea of Ligeia that the narrator has. In that sense, the concept of memory becomes
inherently conflicting: is the narrator remembering Ligeia correctly, or is he remembering
Ligeia in a fashion that is suitable to his own state of mind?

The narrator, additionally, speaks of ‘’Ligeia’s beauty passing into his spirit’’. While a common
sentiment when speaking of the dead, in the case of the narrator it appears in a manner of,
for lack of a better term, application. In order to fully understand this concept of ‘’application
of the dead’’, the following quote should help to explain ‘’there dwelling as in a shrine, I
derived, from many existences in the material world, a sentiment such as I felt always
aroused within me by her large and luminous orbs’’ (p. 258). Here we might reconsider what
is meant by the term ‘’orb’’, as it could take on a very different meaning: that of either
breasts or eyes. In either case, the narrator applies the memory of the dead to how he
perceives the world around him, as can be seen in the examples I recognized it, let me
repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidly-growing vine – in the contemplation of a moth, a
butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water. By use of the memory he has of Ligeia, and
the lack of being able to fully perceive the memory, the narrator manages to still understand
the world as Ligeia did, or atleast sees aspects of her in his observations, here mostly as an
element of nature. Additionally, as with both understandings of what ‘’orbs’’ are, this
passage again takes on this dual nature of classic romanticism and dark romanticism, in the
sense that the narrator, in the same state of melancholy, sees beauty in nature through
channeling the memory of Ligeia. As an aside, this passage can also take on a more sexual
nature, albeit in an abstract manner. The growing vine may represent the male genitalia, the
butterfly and moth the female genitalia, although from behind the woman, and the stream
of running water is self-explanatory. While this explanation is a bit of a stretch, it still has an

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interesting twist to the narrative and the understanding of our narrator’s emotional state
regarding the loss of Ligeia.

The observations made all relate to the narrator’s melancholy, a rather classic element to
Poe’s works yet also to the story of Ligeia. The narrator perfectly summarises the first few
pages of the story in the quotation How poignant, then, must have been the grief with which,
after some years, I beheld my well-grounded expectations wake wings to themselves and fly
away! Without Ligeia I was but a child groping benighted. Her presence, her readings alone,
rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were
immersed (p. 259). Following this quotation, we can conclude on the melancholic state of the
narrator, as his thought process takes the form of someone who remembers a person and as
a result becomes saddened with the lack if being within the memory. He loses a part of
himself the moment he loses Ligeia, and like a child loses his way in life. Immediately
following this passage, the narrator goes on to describe how Ligeia falls ill, which takes the
tone of interest most morbid: the use of the word grave, descriptions of ‘’transparent waxen
hue’’ and ‘’blue veins upon the lofty forehead swelled’’, as well as the mention of the Angel
of Death Azrael. (p. 259-260). Following this extract is where the short story takes a turn
from the mix of romantic traits and becomes almost exclusively dark romantic. It twists away
from the melancholic nature to grim fascination of death ‘’There had been much in her stern
nature to impress me with the belief that, to her, (…) with which she wrestled with the
Shadow’’ (p. 260). The Shadow is an allegory for death, here represented as an
anthropomorphism of the concept of death, one of the traits of Dark Romanticism that we
defined earlier.

Walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. A quote taken from the bible (Psalm 23:4),
which can aptly be applied to Ligeia as of page 260. The narrator spends the latter half of this
page describing the way that Ligeia loved him, and how he was ‘’cursed with the removal of
my beloved in the hour of her making them’’ (p. 260). This bible quotation fits perfectly
when we consider the ‘’ramblings’’ of a dying Ligeia, as seen in the poem on pages 260-261
At high noon of the night on which she departed, beckoning me, peremptorily (…) I obeyed
her – they were these: -. To speak on the structure of the poem firstly, it consists of 5 stanzas

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of 8 lines each. Very fittingly, Poe elected not to put the poem in the sonnet structures whilst
keeping it in a regular structure. The poem being only 5 stanzas of 8 lines gives the sensation
of immediacy, and the content reflects well the act of ‘’walking in the valley of the shadow of
death’’.

Breaking down the Poem

The first stanza speaks of angels in mournful veils, shedding tears for the dying, watching a
morbid play of death filled with hope and fear, and finally the music of the ‘’spheres’’. Here
we might interpret, first, spheres as the stars in the night. Secondly, this poem can be
interpreted on a handful of different levels: we can interpret it on the metaphorical level, the
metonymical level and on an abstract level. For now, we shall adhere to the metonymical
level of analysis, then progress to the metaphorical, and finally the abstract. The rest of the
first stanza refers to the final stages of someone dying whilst still being awake, almost as if it
were a lucid dream. Ligeia sees icons of faith and images of death coming to her, although in
an alternate manner. On the metaphorical level, most of this imagery is, of course, markers
of the divine presence that one, allegedly, only experiences when one dies. In much popular
media, I.E., clickbait articles from Buzzfeed etc., they will often have interviews with people
who have gone through ‘’near death experiences.’’ Some of these people describe seeing the
gates of heaven, others describe long corridors and some even describe seeing nothing. An
article from NCBI, written in 2014, attempts to describe and define a near death experience1.
While the article is very technical in medical terms, it provides some good context for the
state that Ligeia is in at the twilight of her life. The primary difference is, however, that the
article describes only people who are in a state where they are unable to speak, here
comatose, unconscious, or clinically dead. In essence, this first stanza represents the act of
seeing idols of faith in the final moments of life, seeing that which the spirit desires the most,
knowing that it will pass from one realm to another.

1
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172100/

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The second stanza speaks only of sight if God, or the form of God with a slight indistinct level
of sound, which breaks the purpose of mimicry. This stanza almost describes a scene change
in a play; puppets wandering around changing scenery, almost welcoming Ligeia into their
‘’universe’’. We can be considered the stanza of the poem that essentially welcomes Ligeia
into the arms of death, the stage of the poem where she attempts to accept her coming
death and we welcomed into heaven, a form of resurrection in more abstract terms.

The third and fourth stanzas are interconnected with each other. They tell the tale of a figure,
or as it is described in the third stanza as a phantom, chasing Ligeia, and as is described as
‘’And much of Madness, and more of Sin, and Horror the soul of the plot.’’ This phantom is
subsequently described as ‘’a crawling shape’’ ‘’a blood-red thing that writhes from out.’’
Both stanzas focus on the panic of Ligeia and the ‘’mimics’’ and the distress they experience
upon seeing this creature. Considering the use of words like ‘’sin’’ ‘’madness’’ and ‘’horror’’,
we can draw the conclusion that this creature is the manifestation of Ligeia’s sins and
deepest fears, the anthropomorphic creation of her own mind, and as such she has to
‘’battle’’ this creature to free herself of her guilt, her sins etc. it is these two stanzas that
contain the most complex aspects of not only Ligeia’s state of mind before her death, but
also contains the most traits and aspects of dark romanticism, despite it being a poem.

Short-stories and Poems – Is There a Difference in Dark Romanticism?

Before fully analysing Ligeia to its end, we must first, from this point on, understand how
dark romanticism can still take effect in poetry, and not just in short stories or novels. to
present my arguments, I have elected two different poems, written by Edgar Allan Poe, that
touch upon the same exact concepts as we have touched upon in our analysis of Ligeia.
These poems are: Lenore and To One in Paradise.
As an aside, I will skip the formal aspects of the poem, I.E., structure, form,
rhyme scheme etc. and focus purely on the content and its interpretations and traits it
contains.

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Starting with Lenore, the poem speaks of someone who has died, and the speaker laments to
those at the funeral that they did not truly cherish this person who now has departed the
realm of the living. The general dark romantic traits that this poem contains is melancholy
and sorrow. We see these traits through the use of words like requiem, peccavimus (Latin for
sin or transgress, here in the first-person plural perfect active indicative) weep and the likes,
as well as lines like Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and ye hated her for her pride;. The
effect the usage of these words and this line has on the reader implies that the speaker feels
a great deal of sorrow toward the departed, yet angers himself at those who did not
appreciate the deceased the same way that the speaker did. The speaker reaches out to
everyone around them at the time of the funeral in a haze of despair, which we can infer
from the formulation of the poem; much as if they have yet to fully come to terms with this
death, speaking even to the divine and of the divine, in an attempt to find consolation to the
speaker’s anguish. The difference between this poem and the poem in Ligeia, however, is
that this poem is not from the deceased but from someone else, and does not carry an
anthropomorphised version of sin as was presented in the poem in Ligeia. We might
speculate that the crowd is a figure of fear or anguish in the speaker, or maybe even a figure
of the speaker’s imagination so that they have someplace to release their intense emotions.
The poem, additionally, contains some rather explicit names of places related to death,
namely the Stygian River, which of course is the river that the dead travel down on their way
to the Underworld in Greek mythology. One of the final words mentioned in the poem is the
Paean, which in Greece during antiquity was a form of poem expressing triumph or
thanksgiving, usually performed by the chorus. What makes this an interesting choice of
word is how the poem can be understood: if we are to understand what a Paean is from the
ancient Greek, it could be interpreted that the poem is a form of Dialogue between this ‘’Guy
De Vere’’ and the ‘’chorus’’ or the crowd. The crowd appears to antagonise Guy De Vere as is
stated in the line And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear? – weep now, or never more! Where of
course the following 3 stanzas are Guy De Vere’s response to the crowd. The question now
arises: what does this poem actually show about dark romanticism? It speaks of death of a
loved one and the emotion that is related to such an event: sorrow, anguish, despair, anger. It
expresses them in a manner where the speaker can vent their intense emotions to the world

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around him, perhaps even blame the world around him for his loss. In the latter case, we can
argue that the speaker feels a loss of control of the world and in an attempt to both regain
control but also searching for an outlet for these emotions, much like Ligeia did in her poem
before she dies. The last stanza of the poem we can consider as a conclusion, a sort of
‘’facing evil’’ situation. The first line itself is the beginning of a metaphorical fight Avaunt! –
avaunt! to friends from fiends the indignant ghost is riven, here we see Guy De Vere bite back
at the crowd that criticised him for showing no emotion at a funeral. Guy De Vere essentially
calls out the crowd for disturbing the sanctity of the dead, for them showing up only out of
societal pressure to do so. Guy De Vere seeks no rest until his love has been seen to the
other side, and he will spend the time he must in order to accomplish his task. As with most
of Poe’s poetry, the intricacy in which he presents information can make it difficult to discern
what is meant. However, an attempt must be made to understand the poem in its whole,
paralleling the poem in Ligeia with Lenore: both poems speak of some form of loss of life,
here the difference being that Ligeia speaks of her own death and Lenore speaks of the
death of a loved one. It parses and explains the same emotional state, yet the expression of
each emotion varies, as when facing death and seeing the divine in its most natural state
Ligeia expresses sorrow with seeing her sins made manifest, and Lenore speaks of sending
the loved one to the kingdom of heaven with guidance from the speaker. Essentially the
poems are somewhat similar in theme and use of dark romantic emotions although
expresses them in different manners and from different perspectives.

The second poem I will work with is To One In Paradise. This poem is slightly more cryptic
comparable to Lenore and the one in Ligeia. It is slightly unclear, from a first glance, as to
who is the one dying in the poem. Again, it is another poem that speaks of the death of
someone and the emotions that goes with that form of loss. Though in this poem, it seems
to appear in a shape speaks more of lamenting rather than the other two which function in a
form of sorrowful dialogue/monologue. It appears as an ode to the lost, much in the same
manner that the first half of Ligeia. The first stanza takes the traits of classic romanticism,
albeit spoken in the past tense: speaking of the beauty of the person and how the speaker’s
soul felt complete in the presence of the departed. Thou wast all that to me, love, for which
my soul did pine, here we see just a beginning implication of the affection, the need and the

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raw desire that the speaker feels toward the departed. It speaks of a time where the speaker
and the deceased were intertwined with each other, mentioning All wreathed with fairy
fruits and flowers, And all the flowers were mine. Normally when someone speaks of ‘’having
someone’’ in a manner like this, they refer either to being involved with them romantically or
perhaps even in a more literal sense, here it is meant to speak more of the memories they
created, the time they spent together and each other’s love given to the other. The stanza
uses water metaphors, almost as if to represent the ebb and flow of love given and love
received and how it fluctuates. Here we see, from the quote A green isle in the sea, love, A
fountain and a shrine, all related to endless ‘’supplies’’ of water, a fountain reusing the same
water for its beautiful displays and an ocean vast and endless. The idea we can see here is
the isle being the couple, and the metaphors are all permutations of their affection for each
other. Considering the use of the word ‘’shrine’’ as well, we can say that the speaker
considers the departed, and their love for each other, as something worth worshipping and
keeping on display for the world to see.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and as the first line of the second stanza states
Ah, dream too bright to last! It is here that the poem switches away from the aspects of
classic romanticism and twists into dark romanticism; the melancholy of loss, the despair,
sorrow and anguish that we have become familiar with. In the case with this poem it appears
that the speaker is not directing his thoughts at someone, rather and more accurately
speaking to himself or herself. The effect this has on the reader can best be compared to
feeling it ourselves: when we go through something do we not think and speak to ourselves
about the situation, and in the case of something as severe as loss, do we not lament to
ourselves of the sorrow we process? We relate to the speaker and understand their thoughts
and feelings, for we ourselves would do the same in their stead. The last stanza expertly
shows us this pattern of emotional processing: And all my days are trances, And all my
nightly dreams, Are where thy grey eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams – In what
ethereal dances, By what eternal streams. It is this level of internal self-reflection that we all
do when someone passes on to the realm of death, considering our own mental and
emotional state upon desperate loss that makes the poem able to touch our souls. We
understand and feel the pain of the speaker because of the inherent nature of how they

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describe their emotions. We might categorise this exact pattern of thought a part of the dark
romantic category, as it works not with the positive, light-hearted love as with classic
romanticism, yet operates with the dark melancholy of death. The added layer of self-
reflection makes this poem in particular an interesting study in comparison to Ligeia: the
same stage of self-reflection of the narrator to look back at what they each had before they
lost it. Then comes the stage of melancholy, so typical of the genre and of Poe’s works, in
which the narrator connects to their darkest emotions and lives in them, thrives in them
even. Much like the old adage goes: Misery loves company, the same idea can be applied to
both Ligeia and To One In Paradise. Both narrators seem to thrive in their melancholy, almost
as if it were necessary for them to exist in their sorrow.

The 2nd stanza of To One In Paradise has 2 voices speaking to each other, interestingly
enough. It is A voice from out the Future cries, ‘’On! on!’’ – but o’er the Past, (Dim gulf!) my
spirit hovering lies, Mute, motionless, aghast! Quite obviously the secondary voice is one
from the future, and it tells the present speaker to, quite literally, move on from the loss. We
can consider this the anthropomorphising of the speaker’s logic and reason, presented in a
way that creates a dichotomy of the speaker’s personality and emotion; the ‘’future’’ trying
to control the raw emotion, and then the ‘’present’’ attempting to merely exist in the
emotion. Here, the future personality attempts to seize control and remove melancholy from
the speaker. This manifestation of logic and reason is quite contradictory to every other case
we have looked at, but brings an interesting question to the board: can we consider
manifestation as emotion purely based on the negative or do we consider these
manifestations as any state that man can comprehend? If we are to consider this idea, we
must also reconsider the dynamic between the manifestation and the speaker. It also means
we have to change our understanding of protagonist and antagonist in both poetry and
literature. Pondering upon these new questions, we are led back to the dichotomy of
personality within the speaker and the question of which personality is the manifestation
and which personality is the speaker. Considering the nature of the voices, one being in the
present the other from the future, it is obvious that the present voice is the speaker, with the
future one being the manifestation, yet the precedent that the considerations previously
mentioned is still important to note and consider for the future.

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The last thing to mention about this poem is the 3rd stanza, which brings forth an important
discussion: who has died? It is a matter of figuring out whether it is the speaker who has died
or someone else entirely. The first two lines of the 3rd stanza raises the question For, alas!
alas! with me, The light of Life is o’er! The critical wording comes in the with me part, and it
makes it seem as if the speaker is the one who has died, which would fit the narrative of
lamentation that we have previously presented, and still fits the idea of love now lost as
presented in the 2nd stanza. Finally, it still fits the same core concepts of dark romanticism.
On the other hand, there are factors that are unaligned with the notion of the speaker being
the one having died. The 4th stanza mentions an ethereal ‘’thy’’, giving us the idea that there
was, in fact, a 3rd person and not the speaker who had died. Additionally, there is mention of
future days in the first 2 lines of the 4th stanza. As a result of these observations, there are
arguments for both the speaker and a 3rd person having died. For the sake of comparing this
poem to Ligeia, we will operate under the assumption that it is a 3rd person that has died.

With analysis complete on the traits and aspects of dark romanticism in To One In Paradise,
we can now put it into perspective with Ligeia and the poem therein. The similar traits that
both contain are, again, the deep melancholy of loss and the process of understanding
death. They stick to the same method of lamentation and immediate despair. The primary
difference between the two of them is the lack of manifestation, or at least the lack of
obvious and unarbitrary manifestation of melancholy. The secondary difference is, again, a
matter of perspective of the speaker. If we worked under the assumption of the speaker
having died and creating a post-mortem narrative it would not be quite the same, yet the
premise of processing their own deaths would make for a closer similarity between both
poetic speakers. Finally, they adhere to most of the primary aspects of dark romanticism; the
matter of processing and handling the darker side of our emotional spectrum, as well as
expressing them in a manner that allows us to reflect ourselves in the narrative and how the
character perceives their own emotions.

With the analysis completed, the question of this entire section needs answering. As we can
see from the poem in Ligeia and the two selected poems, they tackle similar areas of the
emotional spectrum. Incidentally, they handle the same emotions as the literature of dark

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romanticism does, namely melancholy and sorrow. Additionally, it holds the same trait of
anthropomorphising those emotions into physical, or more accurately psychological, entities.
As such, we can conclude that dark romantic poetry and dark romantic literature adhere to
the same definitions, the same traits and works with the same themes.

The Latter Half of Ligeia

After the poem being recited, Ligeia exclaims her horror toward the divine entity, questioning
not only herself and her sins, but also questions the reality of her situation ‘’O God!’’ half
shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet and extending her arms aloft with a spasmodic
movement, as I made an end of these lines – ‘’O God, O Divine Father! – shall these things be
undeviatingly so? – shall this Conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel
in Thee? Who – who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor? Man doth not yield him
to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.’’ (p.
262). Ligeia questions divinity itself, speaking up as if it is the Divine’s job to protect her from
her own demons, the fragments of her mind that fight against her and apparently can never
be defeated. In this resignation of fragility and the reality of her situation, Ligeia concedes
herself to her fate, metaphorically losing hope of her own survival and the surety of reaching
the gates of Divine sanctity, conceding herself to the death at the hands of the
anthropomorphised evil that she described in the poem. In this sense, she gives up on the
spiritual level and on the physical level, as immediately after her shrieking she collapses upon
her own death bed again, finalising her concession to death. Interestingly, Ligeia quotes an
English philosopher from the 17th century, Joseph Glanvill, as her final words. Glanvill was a
puritan Christian and produced work related to the supernatural, such as Saducismus
Triumphatus. Very fittingly, the quote used fits alongside the poem, in the sense that Ligeia
yields herself to the angels and unto death, with a feeble mind. Feeble is an interesting
choice of word, yet for the context of the situation it would be logical to assume that it is
related to Ligeia’s weakness of mind, being in a state of near death whilst citing her poem
and her little shriek of fear. On top of that, she is, of course, also feeble in body. Usually
though, feeble has a slight negative connotation to it, often being used as an insult.

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Ligeia dies. Seeing someone you care for die is a hard enough task to handle. Having them
die right in front of you, watching their death throes and hearing their lamentations, their
fear, and their panic all at the same time. The way Poe describes the grief-stricken narrator is
quite exemplary for the genre, which we see immediately after the panic Ligeia experiences:
She died: and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could no longer endure the lonely
desolation of my dwelling in the dim and decaying city by the Rhine. I had no lack of what the
world calls wealth, Ligeia had brought me far more, very far more than ordinarily falls to the
lot of mortals. After a few months, therefore, of weary and aimless wandering, I purchased
and put in some repair, an abbey, which I shall not name, in one of the wildest and least
frequented portions of fair England. This rather lengthy quotation shows exactly how the
process of grief is handled by the narrator. Use of words like dim and decaying show us
exactly how the narrator understands the world around him after Ligeia’s death, and ties in
nicely with the concept of death. The word use in the first few lines is exceptional in
describing the raw, negative emotion that the narrator goes through. The narrator becoming
one with the dust of his abode, speaking of the desolation of his dwelling, it appears evident
of how extremely destroyed the narrator is related to his emotions. The word desolation
shows us how the narrator feels like his house was involuntarily abandoned by both Ligeia
and him, as he can no longer see himself living amongst dead memories and abandoned
corridors. He feels as if his home is no longer welcoming to him. Additionally, we might
interpret this situation as if the narrator put his entire life into the hands of Ligeia, that she
was his entire personality and he is nothing without her. This idea would make sense, since
the narrator leaves his home behind, everything he was, to start a new life, free of his old self
and all the old memories. There is a secondary layer to this interpretation, namely the fact
that the narrator moves into an abbey. We can understand this as a transition from death
unto the afterlife. With the death of Ligeia, and subsequently himself in a spiritual and
mental way, he goes to a holy site and spends his time there, in a metaphorical sense his own
funeral. The loss of Ligeia, evidently, has inherently caused the narrator to lose every part of
himself.

Even after marrying someone else, the narrator can never relinquish the thoughts and
memories of Ligeia. Even after fleeing his old home and his old life, he cannot manage to get

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rid of these memories. We see this on page 264: My memory flew back (oh, with what
intensity of regret!) to Ligeia, my beloved, the august, the beautiful, the entombed. I reveled
in recollections of her purity, of her wisdom, of her lofty – her ethereal nature, of her
passionate, her idolatrous love. Now, then, did my spirit fully and freely burn with more than
all the fires of her own. In the excitement of my opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in
the shackles of the drug, I would call aloud upon her name, during the silence of the night, or
among the sheltered recesses of the glens by day, as if, through the wild eagerness, the
solemn passion, the consuming ardor of my longing for the departed, I could restore her to
the pathway she had abandoned – ah, could it be forever? – upon the earth. Despite the
narrator being an avid consumer of opioids, he still imagines all the memories and aspects of
her that he enjoyed when they were together. The description of idolatrous love, with a
slight Christian connotation here, is something that he evidently needs and he does not get
from his new wife, Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine. He re-imagines every aspect of their
time together, and everything he misses from his current situation. To explain the Christian
connotation, Idolatry is defined as ‘’too much love or praise for somebody/something’’ or
‘’the practice of worshipping statues as gods’’ by the Oxford Dictionary. Galatians 5:19-21
states Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry
(…). The Christians speak of not worshipping false idols, to stay faithful to their god. As such,
we can interpret the exact use of idolatrous as the Ligeia worshipping the love they had for
each other, overcomplicating their affections. As a result, their dynamic takes the form and
aspects classic romanticism in an ocean of melancholy. We might even consider it a lush and
beautiful isle in the midst of a vast sea, as show in To One In Paradise. It is this exact
melancholy and sorrow for the loss of Ligeia and the shared affection that proves exactly
how dark romanticism is supposed to work, and how expertly that Poe uses these traits.

The narrator’s wife, Rowena, falls ill within two months of their marriage. She eventually dies
as well, because of two different illnesses. We see a description of her death and what goes
on with the narrator on page 265: I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the
goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three or four large
drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid (…) and on the fourth, I sat alone, with her shrouded
body, in that fantastic chamber which had received her as my bride. The description of this

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paragraph makes it appear as if it were the liquid that finalised Rowena’s death. Going
through the loss of one loved one is hard enough as is, going through a second death is
heart-wrenching and soul crushing. Later in the paragraph, we see evidence of this, as the
narrator sits in silence, staring at the corners of the room as if searching for something. Still
on his high from opium, he sees visions fluttering before him and memories of Ligeia in
turbulent violence of a flood, the whole of that unutterable wo with which I had regarded her
thus enshrouded. The memories he experiences transfer themselves into his reality, melding
into the corpse before him, transforming into his first lost love: Ligeia (p. 268).

There is one final, critical point to be made in terms of interpretation: there has been a
severe lack of manifestation of the narrator’s sorrow and melancholy, we only have evidence
of a manifestation in Ligeia’s poem, something of her own mind that presents itself to her
and she fails to overcome it. The interpretation to be made here is of the narrator’s
manifestation of sorrow: Ligeia herself. As previously mentioned, the narrator is fond of
consuming opium for himself, and as such most of this interpretation could, theoretically, be
completely disregarded as merely an opioid high. Despite that, however, I would argue that
the revival of Ligeia in the very end of the short story is actually a manifestation of every
emotion the narrator has experienced as a result of her initial death. He lacks closure of
losing Ligeia initially, and all his sorrow, his wont, his need and deepest desire to be with
Ligeia forever manifests itself in Ligeia being revived before the narrator’s very eyes. He
appears to not truly believe it until the very last moment: ‘’Here then, at least,’’ I shrieked
aloud, ‘’can I never – can I never be mistaken – these are the full, and the black, and the wild
eyes – of my lost love – of the lady – of the LADY LIGEIA.’’ Here we see how he stutters, and
through this sits in disbelief of the situation. Ligeia’s revival is a reaction and response to
losing yet another partner, and as his original lover it would be natural that it was her that
was resurrected. All his sorrow, his grief and his lack of closure brings her back for him to face
it again: either to finally accept that Ligeia is gone, or to be lost amongst his memories and
his heart’s desire. Subsequently, we see elements of both classical and dark romanticism,
expertly woven together to create an incredibly unique feeling: the pure bliss and passion of
seeing her again and the sorrowful melancholy that she should still be dead.

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Conclusion

With an in-depth analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia, we can evidently see how intricate and
delicate the area of dark romanticism is. The way that Poe puts his narrator through severe
stress and trauma through the loss of a loved one, describing the deep sorrow and
melancholy of living in his memory and the way he understands them is exemplary for the
genre. The work operates on several layers of emotional understanding from the narrator’s
perspective, which we see in part in the comparative analysis of the poem within Ligeia and
the poems Lenore and To One In Paradise. We see how simply and elegantly the themes
remain the same, despite working within three different narrative settings, as well as how
the traits of dark romanticism play an important role in the poetry of the time. Finally, we
can conclude that both poetry and literature of dark romanticism contain the same themes,
traits and patterns and operate well with each other and both play an important role in
defining the genre and the literary period.

Bibliography

Books

• Barthes, Roland. 1978. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. New York: Hill and Wang
• Poe, Edgar Allan. 2015. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York:
Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
• Praz, Mario. 1970. The Romantic Agony 2nd edition. Oxford University Press.

Journal Articles

• Long, Jeffrey. 2014. ‘’Near-Death Experiences Evidence for Their Reality.’’ Missouri
Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172100/

Websites

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• Wikipedia. n.d. ’’Dark Romanticism’’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Romanticism, accessed 29/05/2023

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