HAS ANYONE READ LENORE AND IF YOU HAVE COULD YOU HELP ME UNDERSTAND IT SOR OF LIKE A REVIEW FOR A TERM PAPER?

-- Anonymous, April 22, 2003

Answers

I e-mailed you a fairly simple article. The annoying Guy DeVere is a reference to another story Poe borrows from. This is a dramatized story setting as with other poems like The Raven, Annabel Lee and Ulalume. Of primary interest is the wild picture of the "mourner" actually a person dissatified with convention, unaccepting of death itself, triumphant, angry and enthralled all the more for the fact his love is gone and her heavenly happiness as much as his hope is darkly uncertain. Lenore is is from an earlier poem reworked(A Paean) and the tone is rebelliously, defiantly joyous. His later attempts show the fall of a shadow upon that statement(The Raven, Annabel Lee) though at the end his defiance stubbornly remains- or he simply cannot escape it.

As such, and as not his best work and least successgful revision, it represents and early stage in what Poe presents as his personal ideal of the death of a young woman enshrined somewhere as his Beatrice or Helen whose only real presence to him in this life is a mute and terrifying shadow. Lenore still has the conventional hope staving off that shadow, as if this whole poem is but the first part of The Raven and his Job-like self-interrogation just begun. It is the debate with the world. He has not entered the closer and more disturbing debate with himself as he will in later poems when much more loss and real bereavements have tested him.

-- Anonymous, April 24, 2003