An Immortal Love Letter

No man ever loved as he loved, and no human being ever suffered as he suffered — and so his poems, his tales, and his letters on love and on pain were among the most magnificent things the literatures of the nations have recorded.

His relations with woman were his most sublime poems, and his life the strangest of his tales. Had he not loved and suffered, he would not have written — and we should have had no Poe.

Woman was to him a wine that intoxicates, not a drug that destroys. He was one of those poets known for the closeness of their attachment to woman, whose art has always leaned upon her. How should he not be one of them — he who was forever enamored of beauty, sanctifying it and immortalizing it in his verse? How not — he who was forever dreaming (and woman is a dream more than she is a waking), and whom reality struck whenever he returned to it? How not — he who believed that poetry has no aim but beauty, and beauty stripped of woman is an idea not yet made flesh?

Poe loved woman because he needed her: this is the most important thing in the story of his relations with woman. He lived his life like a small boy, needing someone to support and help him. He was a minor who could not settle his own affairs by himself. Had there not been women around him, who cared for him all his days, pitied him, inspired him, and made him feel love and tenderness, he would not have lived the years he lived, nor written what he wrote. Proof of his helplessness is that he never dared go out of his house in the dark, and could not stay alone at night; his wife's mother would take on the office of sentinel, passing her hand again and again over his broad, smooth forehead while he wandered lost in his radiant fancies — and if she drew her hand away he would cry out to her like a child: No, not yet!

Nor did Poe's need of woman spring only from his inability to manage his own affairs; it sprang also from a factor of the soul: his loss of a mother's tenderness in childhood. His mother died when he was two years old, and he grew up not knowing the taste of that greatest of blessings — yet knowing the worth of its taste; so his yearning for it grew, his need of it deepened, and he came to search for it in every woman. So we do not wonder at his tremendous love for his wife's mother, nor at his love, all his days, for married women years older than himself — nor indeed at his attachment, while yet a boy, to the mother of a friend of his, in whose smile he glimpsed a mother's tenderness that he held sacred until his death, a tenderness that coursed through every channel of his thought and feeling, so that years after her death he wrote for her the sweetest of his short pieces — "To Helen." We do not wonder at this from the man who held that when one angel whispers to his companion in heaven, they find among all the burning words of love no word more holy than: "Mother!"

From his boyhood Poe was a lover, and his tie with woman was not broken for a single day until his death. That was because of his need of her, as we have said, and because his love was marked by this: it was a love of woman's love, not a love of the woman herself. This came of the depth of his immersion in illusion and fancy, so that he would imagine he was in love when he was not in love at all, but rather admiring the beloved for her poetry, or, at another time, acknowledging her kindness, or, at a third, hoping she would scatter the clouds of sorrow that enfolded him. We do not brand him with fickleness; we say rather that he was enamored of woman as woman, and so loved every woman who lit the pitch-dark horizon of his life.

So long as there are in the universe people who love and who suffer, the name of Edgar A. Poe will go on being recited while lips tremble.

As for Mrs. Helen Whitman, one of his letters to whom we translate below, she was the woman nearest to him after his wife. He loved her before he knew her, and composed verses to her after he came to know her. He asked her hand after he was widowed, and she refused, because of his ill repute in polite circles. A coolness arose between them, such as never failed to visit Poe's love for all his women friends. But she came back to him and sought to win him over in one of her poems; he, however, turned from her and did not answer. She has on him one mighty line of verse:

"One day he will know whether I loved him or not,
but he will never know how much I loved him."

Poe wrote to one of his women friends: "Ah, how wretched is my fortune! Unless a true, tender love saves me — the pure love of a woman — I shall not live a single year more!" And he knew more than one love; so he lived, and wrote, and endures.

T. S.

From Edgar Allan Poe to Mrs. Whitman

Could I press you to my breast, close by my heart, and whisper into your ears all the strange secrets of the history of my feeling, you would know that no person other than you has power to work upon me this deep influence which you have wrought... or to shed upon me this electric radiance and encircle me with it, so that it lights the corners of my soul and fills my spirit with glory, and wonder, and dread. Do you remember our walk in the cemetery, when I said to you, my eyes brimming with hot tears: "I love, Helen — now, only now, and for the first time." I said that not in the hope that you would believe me; but I could not keep from feeling the vast gulf between the wealth of our two hearts, which each of us could offer the other: for I, for the first time, was offering my whole self, at one stroke, forever — while the words of your poem still rang in my ears...

And now let me paint for you, in the simple words that come to me, the effect your presence in person produced. For the first time in my life I felt — when you crossed the threshold of the room, pale of face, hesitant of step, mournful, your heart bleeding, and fixed your eyes upon mine for one brief moment — I felt the existence of spiritual influences which reason cannot reach and over which it has no dominion. I looked, and I saw Helen — my Helen — the Helen of a thousand dreams... this woman whom God created to be mine — mine and mine alone — if not now and in this earthly life, then in the paradise of eternity, where life endures forever and bliss abides. You murmured words you were hardly conscious of. As for me, no speech reached my hearing; I heard only a soft voice which I felt was no stranger to me — a voice my ear knew better than it knew my own...

And I took your soft hand in mine, and felt rapture and delight creep through my body. Were it not for my fear of disturbing you or wounding you, I would have bowed down then, humbly, at your feet, as men kneel before the idol or the god they worship.

While you paced the room, on those two successive evenings, to and fro — now sitting beside me, now keeping far from me, or standing with your hand upon a chair, so that the trembling and the emotion pierced the wood and reached the depths of my heart — while you moved thus about the room, as though deep sorrow or great joy contended within you — I was your captive; all my senses were suspended; I did not see you, I did not hear or grasp what you were saying. Nothing was aware of you then but my keenly feeling soul.

Let me quote a passage from your letter to me: "With all my great esteem for your understanding, and my admiration for your genius — which make me feel small and insignificant as a child in your presence — I do not think you know that I am older than you..." Suppose, for argument's sake, that this were the truth: do you not feel, in the innermost core of your heart, that the "love of the soul," of which everyone speaks, is, at this moment at least, the truest love — nay, the absolute true love? Has the soul an age, Helen? Has time any part in eternity? What are the meager years worth in the eyes of the immortal soul, which has no beginning and knows no end? Ah, my patience is almost spent, and a fierce anger against you takes hold of me, for what you cast at the truth of my sacred passion, wounding it.

... Did I not see you, Helen? Did I not hear the ring of your sweet, musical voice? Did not my heart begin its beating at your magical smile? Did I not take your hand in mine and gaze into the depths of your soul through your beautiful crystalline eyes? Did I not do all this! Was I awake, or in a dream? Or am I possessed?

... You are ever the life of my life, Helen! I can do nothing but love you and worship you!.. Who ever uttered your name with his lips without being moved, and singing your praise? Who ever set eyes upon you without your taking the fairest place in his soul?

Were I a man of means, able to secure you a serene and happy life, I should be the proudest of men to ask love of you... Ah, Helen! My soul! What is this I have said to you? And what have I asked you to do? If I appear before you, my dearest, in the guise of a selfish man, I beg you to believe that I love you truly, and that this love is spiritual, even if it issues from the depths of an infatuated heart. For God's sake, Helen, think — for my sake and for yours...

Be not slow in writing to me, and make your letters short. Do not trouble yourself, nor lay upon yourself, for my sake, more than you can bear. Repeat in my ears those words which turn the earth into the paradise of eternity.