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The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 5 cover

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 5

Chapter 59: SPIRITS OF THE DEAD
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About This Book

This collection assembles essays, short stories, and lyric and narrative poems that shift between aesthetic critique, dark satire, and the uncanny. The essays offer arguments about taste and poetic principle, the stories range from macabre and grotesque sketches to psychological portraits of obsession and disguise, and the poems employ varied formal experiments to explore loss, mortality, and yearning. Recurring threads include the tension between beauty and decay, reflections on artistic method, and the emotional force of melancholic imagination across multiple genres.

SPIRITS OF THE DEAD

                                 1

     Thy soul shall find itself alone
     ‘Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone—
     Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
     Into thine hour of secrecy:

                                 2

     Be silent in that solitude
         Which is not loneliness—for then
     The spirits of the dead who stood
         In life before thee are again
     In death around thee—and their will
     Shall then overshadow thee: be still.

                                3

     For the night—tho’ clear—shall frown—
     And the stars shall look not down,
     From their high thrones in the Heaven,
     With light like Hope to mortals given—
     But their red orbs, without beam,
     To thy weariness shall seem
     As a burning and a fever
     Which would cling to thee for ever:

                               4

     Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish—
     Now are visions ne’er to vanish—
     From thy spirit shall they pass
     No more—like dew-drop from the grass:

                              5

     The breeze—the breath of God—is still—
     And the mist upon the hill
     Shadowy—shadowy—yet unbroken,
     Is a symbol and a token—
     How it hangs upon the trees,
     A mystery of mysteries!—

1827.