Poems for Poe, No. 2

At the Grave of Poe

by William James Price
Composed in June 1911. Published in The Baltimore Sun, December 25, 1911. 

Here, with a few forgotten one, reposes

A bard whose fame our long neglect defies

To him the selfish world gave thorns for roses.

And nations wonder where his body lies.

 

His haunting melodies, too few in number,

In alien hearts beyond the ocean live,

While we his virtues doom to endless slumber,

Condemn his faults, and no reward will give.

 

Ere Time's relentless tread at last has crumbled

These hallowed stones into the silent dust,

Will Pride awake, Ingratitude be humbled,

And Truth compel our spirits to be just?

Ah, grant him now a nobleman's estate,
Lest all the dead arise to prove him great!

* * *

Please note: I have inserted breaks where I believe the poet intended to but which the newspaper may have removed for the sake of conserving space in print. Note that Price's poem is in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, which is broken into stanzas as I have done here.

Posted by Terence E. Hanley on the anniversary of Poe's death, October 7, 2025.

Poems for Poe, No. 1

To Edgar Allan Poe

By Howard Elsmere Fuller

Originally in Contemporary American Poets, edited by Horace C. Baker (Boston, 1928). From the website Poetry Explorer.

Thou art a thing of Death--
Born of the love of Life,
Born of the love of Life-in-Death . . . .

Denizen of a world which hath no name,
Which hath no being out of Mind--
Far-flung, with the mad ecstasy of youth,
To the Attic hills where Pan first sang
To a dew-drenched world
The amorous strains of Creation.
Above, in the star-tossed main,
Thou must have sat,
In the cool grey dawn of things
And watched with knowing Messianic eye
The swirling mists of chaos
Stiffen into a world profane.

With a haunting, dreamy sadness
Is bared thy cryptic soul;
With a rhythmic rune of madness,
Thy melancholy soul.

Sea things with seaweed hair
And faces blanched with pale-eyed Death
Sleep on the motley sands--
The crested wave of the sobbing sea
Hath lapped their blood like wine.
Draped in whispering robes of satin,
There dream in weird, fantastic chambers,
Maidens with waxen faces, fragile fingers,
Drained of life by hectic living
In mansions, grim and sunless.

World-old newness exotic
To this sordid clime
Sprang to thy lips erotic
And flowed like ruby wine.

Sweet gamboler in the dewy gardens
Of jeweled Paradise,
Where ruddy roses ebb and flow
In the cheeks of sylph-like children.
Elves, in their amours sweet with thee
Fresh with the matin dews of time,
Whisper to thee things unknown
To the sodden soul of man.

Demons, ghastly, foul and gory
Infest the Stygian gloom,
Spectres, grim and grey and hoary
Come shrieking from the tomb--

Come shrieking from mouldering mausolea,
Whence vague shadows of the uneasy dead,
Eluding Cerberus, the red-eyed watcher,
Fare forth on the sable wings of night
Peopling the sentient blackness
With ghoulish wraiths of terror.

Tears unceasing, bitter sorrow
Hath seared thy lonely years--
The leprous touch of sorrow,
The agony of tears.

The love of woman was to thee
Divinest torture of the soul.
Radiant life was but to thee
The sad betokening of death.

Soft as the sighs of Eros
Is the music of thy pain,
Sweet as the breath of Zephyr,
Fresh as the cooling rain.

Pilgrims journey far to mourn thee
As they would a thing divine,
And they that sought to scorn thee
Pay thee homage at thy shrine.

* * *

 Posted by Terence E. Hanley, 2025.

The Haunted Palace by Edgar Allan Poe

The last poem printed in Weird Tales in 1925 was "The Haunted Palace" by Edgar Allan Poe. It first appeared in a magazine published in Baltimore by Nathan C. Brooks (1809-1898). The original title of the magazine was The North American Quarterly. In or about 1838, Brooks renamed his new charge The American Museum of Science, Literature and the Arts, or The American Museum for short. Evidently, the magazine was also referred to as the Baltimore Museum. That's a lot to go through, but it seems like there is a lack of clarity and precision out there on the Internet as to the original source of "The Haunted Palace." The date of publication by the way was April 1839.

Poe soon incorporated "The Haunted Palace" into his short story "The Fall of the House of Usher," first published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in September 1839. "The Haunted Palace" is a poem in six stanzas of eight lines each. In "The Fall of the House of Usher," the stanzas are numbered. In Weird Tales, they are not. Without going through these two versions, I can't say whether they are word for word the same.

I have written before about "The Haunted Palace." First I listed it in Poe's works reprinted in Weird Tales. In writing about Charles Beaumont (1929-1967), I listed some of that author's screen adaptations of other works. These included the screenplay for The Haunted Palace (1963), which is actually an adaptation of "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H.P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, May-July 1941).

In 2021, I wrote about Les Baxter (1922-1996). Baxter wrote the scores for many Hollywood movies, including The Dunwich Horror, from 1970. Inasmuch as The Haunted Palace was the first film adapted from a work by Lovecraft, the composer of that score, Ronald Stein (1930-1988), should probably get credit for the first recorded musical adaptation of a work by Lovecraft, assuming a movie score is a kind of program music and therefore an adaptation. Prior to that, I had written about what I called "The Other Forms of Lovecraft," listing The Haunted Palace as the first adaptation on film of a work by Lovecraft.

That's a lot about Lovecraft and less about Poe. I'll close by letting you know that, according to Wikipedia, "The Haunted Palace" has been adapted to music four times, first in 1904 by French composer Florent Schmitt (1870-1958).

The cover of an album of musical works based on two stories and a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, including Florent Schmitt's symphonic poem Le Palais hanté, Op. 49, based on "The Haunted Palace" by Poe. I have this image from a very thorough blog entry called "Florent Schmitt and the French Fascination with Edgar Allan Poe: Le Palais hanté (1904)" by Phillip Nones, posted on December 10, 2012, here. Thank you to Mr. Nones and the conductor(s) of that blog. This is the kind of thing the Internet was supposed to be instead of what it is.

 

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley