by Poe · Cluster: Ode · Nature vs Civilization · Pastoral Retreat
Abstract
Meditative prose-poem on solitude and natural scenery in which a solitary dreamer watches a fairy circle an island, her vanishing shadow allegorizing the cycle of life and death.
Readability (prose)51.2 Flesch ease14.2 FK grade16.7 Fog9% complex32.5 words/sent
Connections
Topoi: Book of Nature, Locus Amoenus, Memento Mori Motifs: Nature, River, Water, Light and Dark, Death, Supernatural, Seasons Themes & Concepts: Mortality, Transience, Sublime, Wonder and Gratitude, Natural Order, Imagination Forms & Genres: Essay, Nonfiction Settings: Enchanted Wood (2)
Testo integrale / Full text
Nullus enim locus sine genio est.—Servius.
“La musique,” says Marmontel, in those “Contes Moraux” (*1) which
in all our translations, we have insisted upon calling “Moral
Tales,” as if in mockery of their spirit—“la musique est le seul
des talents qui jouissent de lui-même; tous les autres veulent
des temoins.” He here confounds the pleasure derivable from sweet
sounds with the capacity for creating them. No more than any
other talent, is that for music susceptible of complete
enjoyment, where there is no second party to appreciate its
exercise. And it is only in common with other talents that it
produces effects which may be fully enjoyed in solitude. The idea
which the raconteur has either failed to entertain clearly, or
has sacrificed in its expression to his national love of point,
is, doubtless, the very tenable one that the higher order of
music is the most thoroughly estimated when we are exclusively
alone. The proposition, in this form, will be admitted at once by
those who love the lyre for its own sake, and for its spiritual
uses. But there is one pleasure still within the reach of fallen
mortality and perhaps only one—which owes even more than does
music to the accessory sentiment of seclusion. I mean the
happiness experienced in the contemplation of natural scenery. In
truth, the man who would behold aright the glory of God upon
earth must in solitude behold that glory. To me, at least, the
presence—not of human life only, but of life in any other form
than that of the green things which grow upon the soil and are
voiceless—is a stain upon the landscape—is at war with the genius
of the scene. I love, indeed, to regard the dark valleys, and the
gray rocks, and the waters that silently smile, and the forests
that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains
that look down upon all,—I love to regard these as themselves but
the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole—a
whole whose form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and
most inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets;
whose meek handmaiden is the moon, whose mediate sovereign is the
sun; whose life is eternity, whose thought is that of a God;
whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in
immensity, whose cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own
cognizance of the animalculae which infest the brain—a being
which we, in consequence, regard as purely inanimate and material
much in the same manner as these animalculae must thus regard us.
Our telescopes and our mathematical investigations assure us on
every hand—notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the
priesthood—that space, and therefore that bulk, is an important
consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles in which
the stars move are those best adapted for the evolution, without
collision, of the greatest possible number of bodies. The forms
of those bodies are accurately such as, within a given surface,
to include the greatest possible amount of matter;—while the
surfaces themselves are so disposed as to accommodate a denser
population than could be accommodated on the same surfaces
otherwise arranged. Nor is it any argument against bulk being an
object with God, that space itself is infinite; for there may be
an infinity of matter to fill it. And since we see clearly that
the endowment of matter with vitality is a principle—indeed, as
far as our judgments extend, the leading principle in the
operations of Deity,—it is scarcely logical to imagine it
confined to the regions of the minute, where we daily trace it,
and not extending to those of the august. As we find cycle within
cycle without end,—yet all revolving around one far-distant
centre which is the God-head, may we not analogically suppose in
the same manner, life within life, the less within the greater,
and all within the Spirit Divine? In short, we are madly erring,
through self-esteem, in believing man, in either his temporal or
future destinies, to be of more moment in the universe than that
vast “clod of the valley” which he tills and contemns, and to
which he denies a soul for no more profound reason than that he
does not behold it in operation. (*2)
These fancies, and such as these, have always given to my
meditations among the mountains and the forests, by the rivers
and the ocean, a tinge of what the everyday world would not fail
to term fantastic. My wanderings amid such scenes have been many,
and far-searching, and often solitary; and the interest with
which I have strayed through many a dim, deep valley, or gazed
into the reflected Heaven of many a bright lake, has been an
interest greatly deepened by the thought that I have strayed and
gazed alone. What flippant Frenchman was it who said in allusion
to the well-known work of Zimmerman, that, “la solitude est une
belle chose; mais il faut quelqu’un pour vous dire que la
solitude est une belle chose?” The epigram cannot be gainsayed;
but the necessity is a thing that does not exist.
It was during one of my lonely journeyings, amid a far distant
region of mountain locked within mountain, and sad rivers and
melancholy tarn writhing or sleeping within all—that I chanced
upon a certain rivulet and island. I came upon them suddenly in
the leafy June, and threw myself upon the turf, beneath the
branches of an unknown odorous shrub, that I might doze as I
contemplated the scene. I felt that thus only should I look upon
it—such was the character of phantasm which it wore.
On all sides—save to the west, where the sun was about
sinking—arose the verdant walls of the forest. The little river
which turned sharply in its course, and was thus immediately lost
to sight, seemed to have no exit from its prison, but to be
absorbed by the deep green foliage of the trees to the east—while
in the opposite quarter (so it appeared to me as I lay at length
and glanced upward) there poured down noiselessly and
continuously into the valley, a rich golden and crimson waterfall
from the sunset fountains of the sky.
About midway in the short vista which my dreamy vision took in,
one small circular island, profusely verdured, reposed upon the
bosom of the stream.
So blended bank and shadow there
That each seemed pendulous in air—
so mirror-like was the glassy water, that it was scarcely
possible to say at what point upon the slope of the emerald turf
its crystal dominion began.
My position enabled me to include in a single view both the
eastern and western extremities of the islet; and I observed a
singularly-marked difference in their aspects. The latter was all
one radiant harem of garden beauties. It glowed and blushed
beneath the eyes of the slant sunlight, and fairly laughed with
flowers. The grass was short, springy, sweet-scented, and
asphodel-interspersed. The trees were lithe, mirthful,
erect—bright, slender, and graceful,—of Eastern figure and
foliage, with bark smooth, glossy, and parti-colored. There
seemed a deep sense of life and joy about all; and although no
airs blew from out the heavens, yet every thing had motion
through the gentle sweepings to and fro of innumerable
butterflies, that might have been mistaken for tulips with wings.
(*4)
The other or eastern end of the isle was whelmed in the blackest
shade. A sombre, yet beautiful and peaceful gloom here pervaded
all things. The trees were dark in color, and mournful in form
and attitude, wreathing themselves into sad, solemn, and spectral
shapes that conveyed ideas of mortal sorrow and untimely death.
The grass wore the deep tint of the cypress, and the heads of its
blades hung droopingly, and hither and thither among it were many
small unsightly hillocks, low and narrow, and not very long, that
had the aspect of graves, but were not; although over and all
about them the rue and the rosemary clambered. The shade of the
trees fell heavily upon the water, and seemed to bury itself
therein, impregnating the depths of the element with darkness. I
fancied that each shadow, as the sun descended lower and lower,
separated itself sullenly from the trunk that gave it birth, and
thus became absorbed by the stream; while other shadows issued
momently from the trees, taking the place of their predecessors
thus entombed.
This idea, having once seized upon my fancy, greatly excited it,
and I lost myself forthwith in revery. “If ever island were
enchanted,” said I to myself, “this is it. This is the haunt of
the few gentle Fays who remain from the wreck of the race. Are
these green tombs theirs?—or do they yield up their sweet lives
as mankind yield up their own? In dying, do they not rather waste
away mournfully, rendering unto God, little by little, their
existence, as these trees render up shadow after shadow,
exhausting their substance unto dissolution? What the wasting
tree is to the water that imbibes its shade, growing thus blacker
by what it preys upon, may not the life of the Fay be to the
death which engulfs it?”
As I thus mused, with half-shut eyes, while the sun sank rapidly
to rest, and eddying currents careered round and round the
island, bearing upon their bosom large, dazzling, white flakes of
the bark of the sycamore—flakes which, in their multiform
positions upon the water, a quick imagination might have
converted into anything it pleased—while I thus mused, it
appeared to me that the form of one of those very Fays about whom
I had been pondering made its way slowly into the darkness from
out the light at the western end of the island. She stood erect
in a singularly fragile canoe, and urged it with the mere phantom
of an oar. While within the influence of the lingering sunbeams,
her attitude seemed indicative of joy—but sorrow deformed it as
she passed within the shade. Slowly she glided along, and at
length rounded the islet and re-entered the region of light. “The
revolution which has just been made by the Fay,” continued I,
musingly, “is the cycle of the brief year of her life. She has
floated through her winter and through her summer. She is a year
nearer unto Death; for I did not fail to see that, as she came
into the shade, her shadow fell from her, and was swallowed up in
the dark water, making its blackness more black.”
And again the boat appeared and the Fay; but about the attitude
of the latter there was more of care and uncertainty and less of
elastic joy. She floated again from out the light and into the
gloom (which deepened momently) and again her shadow fell from
her into the ebony water, and became absorbed into its blackness.
And again and again she made the circuit of the island, (while
the sun rushed down to his slumbers), and at each issuing into
the light there was more sorrow about her person, while it grew
feebler and far fainter and more indistinct, and at each passage
into the gloom there fell from her a darker shade, which became
whelmed in a shadow more black. But at length when the sun had
utterly departed, the Fay, now the mere ghost of her former self,
went disconsolately with her boat into the region of the ebony
flood—and that she issued thence at all I cannot say, for
darkness fell over all things and I beheld her magical figure no
more.