Poe’s Plate Articles

     An often impecunious writer who depended on publication for his income, Edgar Allen Poe sometimes wrote with a quick payment in mind. Amid the great poems and stories in the Collected Works the reader will see four “plate articles.” These were short essays describing engraved plates the publisher had already obtained. Apart from being expected to come up with something with broad popular appeal, the writer had a free hand. Thus these pieces, written to order like poems produced on a prompt at a workshop and tied essentially to the image they accompanied, could sometimes create the opportunity for an almost improvisatory composition, a sort of laboratory for creativity.
     They do not always fulfill this potential, though. The earliest of Poe’s plate articles, “Some Account of Stonehenge, the Giant’s Dance,” provides nothing but a factual description of the monument, including quotations from other writers both ancient and modern. His scheme allows very little space for the expression of Poe’s own sensibility. The flatness of the essay is evident in its banal concluding sentence: “The whole number of stones now visible, amounts to one hundred and nine.” The author was palpably anxious to finish up, turn it in, and get paid.
     By the time Poe was assigned another engraving, the result of the exercise was altogether different. The precious archaism of the word “fay” suggests the more self-indulgent style of Poe’s second such article, “The Island of the Fay.” Poe allowed himself a dramatic rush of words expressing a far more passionate and specific vision. His torrent of rhetoric however, is preceded by a sort of overture that might be considered its theoretical justification -- Poe’s sonnet beginning “Science, true daughter of old Time . . .” which indicts science for killing myth.
     He begins by quoting Marmontel to the effect that music is unique in that it may be best enjoyed alone, and proceeds to the quite simple next step of suggesting that to him the pleasures of admiring nature are likewise best pursued by a lone individual. Yet on the way to that point he tosses off a series of provocative propositions unrelated to what follows. In the very first sentence, in the middle in fact of Marmontel’s words, he throws into question the notion he has not even completed stating, saying that Marmontel speaks “with the same odd confusion of thought and language which leads him to give his decidedly equivocal narratives the title of ‘Contes Moraux.’” It may be called an “odd confusion,” but surely thought and language are always entangled. If they are entirely apart, would that not result in gibberish? If the French author is so “equivocal,” why cite him as an authority? But Poe’s American reader, concentrating perhaps on the French, is likely to slide forward past these diversions toward what seems likely to be the chief theme of the essay: the delectation of natural beauty.
     By the end of the article’s first paragraph the love of nature has gone far beyond a conventional picturesque sketch. It becomes a vision of the ancient rocks and mountains, the world itself, and the cosmos beyond as a vast organism upon which humans dwell as “animalculae” do upon our own bodies, and we are as ignorant of these great beings as the microbe – not on our skin in Poe’s imagining – but “those which infest the brain ” -- is of our own reality.
     He is only just warming up. Like a Hindu cosmographer, he goes on to conceive of “cycle within cycle without end – yet all revolving around one far-distant center which is the Godhead.” There is very little here of the scenic and pretty, no reference whatever to the engraving accompanying the piece, yet the reader does find the most effective demonstration possible of the heights to which an inspired solitary observer might rise. The true center of the essay seems to be the thrill of extravagant speculation.
     The remainder of the piece is devoted to natural description, albeit heavily colored with subjectivity, of a ramble among “melancholy tarns” of the area. There he says he felt like falling into a “doze” beneath an almost narcotic “unknown odorous shrub,” thinking that only by dreaming might he actually look upon the scene before him, “such was the character if the phantasm which it wore.” This comment, of course, leads the reader to question even the concrete details of passages like “The grass was short, springy, sweet-scented, and Asphodel-interspersed.”
     Whether the writer is awake or asleep, as night falls he glimpses the apparition of a fairy in a boat. Poe had notoriously maintained in “The Philosophy of Composition” that “the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.” Thus the poor “fays” must not only be seen in the process of dying, but dying repeatedly: “rendering unto God their existence little by little” until the apparition is gone, or night has fallen or the dreamer has awakened.
     The castigation of science, then, with which the essay opens becomes profoundly ambiguous since, in an aestheticized analogue of Christ’s crucifixion, the decease of the divine is the moment of its greatest beauty. Just as with the beloved woman, it is the lover’s longing that is loveliest, not the object of his affection at all, and to bring that pathos to the greatest height, the fay must die.
     “The Island of the Fay” is an island in the mind. Far from the mundane appreciation of the natural beauty of trees, mountains, and lakes, Poe is looking for a meditation that will accommodate him to life on earth by fancifully transmuting what he sees. The first third of the article consists of ambitious mental exercises specifically designed to free the consciousness from mere observed reality and the remainder provides a vision of the divine at the moment of its vanishing, simultaneously indulging and denying the writer’s desire.
     In his third plate article “Morning on the Wisshiccon” Poe constructs a light burlesque of a similar theme of ambivalence and the veil of illusion. Beginning quite soberly, Poe suggests that foreign visitors to America miss the most beautiful sights because “the real Edens of the land lie far away from the track of our own most deliberate tourists,” in the wild back-country. He relates a journey of his own to such a remote region during which he “sank into a half slumber” dreaming of “ancient days.” In this condition he sees the noble elk featured in the plate posing atop a cliff. Yet the animal alone is not as beautiful as the animal with a sense of inevitable loss. “I fancied the elk repined . . .at the manifest alteration for the worse, wrought upon the brook and its vicinage, even within the last few years, by then stern hand of the utilitarian.” Imminent extinction lends the elk a patina of loveliness similar to the grace that descends on the dying woman.
     From this meditation, not so very different from the vision of the fay, he is suddenly roused by the appearance of a servant who feeds the animal which, it seems, though suggestive of an emblem of the aboriginal untouched wilderness, was a pet, a domestic animal. After the opening which declared that English tourists never see the real wild America, it seems this vestige of aboriginal fauna is kept by “an English family.” Thus the knot of contradiction is tightly tied. The joke is on the writer until the reader reflects that Poe had been in on it all along and the reader is the one he successfully strung along.
     For the last of his plate articles Poe was presented with an illustration of “Byron and Miss Chaworth.” The relationship of these two makes for him a model of noble true love. He opens with a quotation from George Sand (the name he uses is Mme. Dudevant) who, rather like Marmontel, he finds to mix “many an admirable sentiment” with “a chaos of the most shameless and altogether objectionable fiction.” She speaks of the purity of young love, and, according to Poe, Byron, who was, of course, notoriously promiscuous with men and women of all sorts, maintained the beauty of this relationship specifically because he and Miss Chatworth were never intimate after their youngest days. “It is better,” he says, “for the mere romance of the love-passages between the two [emphasis added], that their intercourse was broken up in early life.”
     Poe’s notion of love from afar as the highest love differs from its form in Jaufre Rudel, since for Poe the experience is deeply solipsistic. “It was born of the hour, and of the youthful necessity to love . . .It had no particular regard to the person, or the character, or the reciprocating affection of Mary Chatworth.” In fact, Poe enjoys thinking that to her Byron was “a somewhat portionless, somewhat eccentric and rather lame young man,” while to him she was “the Egeria of his dreams – the Venus Aphrodite that sprang, in full and supernal loveliness, from the bright foam upon the storm-tormented ocean of his thoughts.” Their love derives its power from the fact that it cannot be realized.
     While the piece on Stonehenge illustrates how, even for a writer as idiosyncratic as Poe, a restrictive journalistic assignment might produce routine hackwork, the other three articles prove that professional restrictions might also allow the writer the opportunity for rich rhetoric and soaring concepts. These essays elaborate in pathetic and comic strains Poe’s central themes: the superiority of imagination over reality, and in particular the supreme value of a sublime love as a wholly mental phenomenon for which an unreal object serves better than a real, and for which the impossibility of satisfaction is a paradoxically essential factor. In the end, as in his stories in general, his true focus is the nervous subjectivity of the restless creative mind, enjoying itself in the cosmic flights of the “island of the Fay,” deceiving itself in the cause of the Romantic in “Morning on the Wisshiccon,” and glorifying ethereal unrealized love in “Byron and Miss Chaworth.”