Raven and the Nightingale A Modern Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing . . . --EDGAR ALLAN POE She who had been dead once again stirred . . . ,I read to the freshmen slumped at their desks in standard eight a.m. curved-spine classroom posture.The corpse, I repeat, stirred, and now more vigorously than before. The hues of life flushed up with unwonted energy into the countenance--the limbs relaxed. . . .It was the perfect day for studying the horror tales of Edgar Allan Poe: November, cold and damp, with an ominous threat of snow. My mood matched the weather: cold and dismal with an ominous threat of--whatever; I didn't want to think about it. I read on, adjusting my voice to the desolate rhythms of the story:. . . arising from the bed, tottering with feeble steps-- "The guy was a necrophiliac!" Mike Vitale called from the back of the room. I glanced up, startled. The other students in my Freshman Humanities class tittered. As an English professor at Enfield College, an elite institution of higher education tucked away in the green hills of western New England, I wasn't used to Mike's type of classroom irreverence--most of my students were all-too-serious about their thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year educations. "Sorry, Professor Pelletier." Mike apologized, paused, then blurted, "It's just that I do think he preferred his women dead." His gold hoop earring and crisp, dark curls springing from a tightly pulled-back ponytail gave my student a street-smart appearance. "You know what I mean? He gives these really detailed . . . you know . . . erotic . . . portraits of their corpses. And even when the women are still alive, they look like they have rigor mortis! Listen to this." He glanced down at the page and read, "'She placed her marble hand upon my shoulder.' I mean, marble hand, yeeech!" He glanced around at his classmates, grandstanding, "I don't know about the rest of you guys, but this does not turn me on." I laughed. In twenty pairs of dutiful eyes I could see the question: Was it really okay for Mike to make fun of Great Literature? They stared at me, and I could well imagine what they saw: A woman, if not yet exactly dead, at least on the cusp of old age--thirty-five, maybe--tall, with straight dark hair caught up in a wide silver barrette, dressed in the height of what was probably last year's style, a long cobalt-blue sweater over black leggings and polished black lace-up boots. A woman long past her sell-by date and feeling, this gloomy November morning, every second of it. "Well," I said, "maybe it turned him on. Poe wasn't the most emotionally balanced of men. In one of his essays, he says that the death of a beautiful woman is 'the most poetical topic in the world.' But, you know, he deliberately intended the weird effect. Melancholy--that's what Poe was after--at least in his poems. He believed that melancholy was, what he called, 'the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.'" I related Poe's account of having chosen the wordnevermoreas the refrain for his famous "The Raven" based on what he presented as a near-scientific analysis of the emotional impact of its vowel and consonant sounds. "I think he was melancholy because his heart was broken," supplied a pudgy eighteen-year-old with lank blond hair and a fair complexion, far more loudly than he seemed to have intended. Still, if Tom Lundgren hadn't been sitting in the front row, practically under my feet, I wouldn't have caught the words--he'd practically whispered them. Sharp-eared little Frederica Whitby heard him, though--Freddie always sat front and center. As Tom blushed fiercely upon hearing his words repeated, Freddie informed the class; "Tom says Poe's heart was broken. And he's right. Edgar Poe had lost Ligeia, his one true love," she bemoaned,Dobson, Joanne is the author of 'Raven and the Nightingale A Modern Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe' with ISBN 9780553579994 and ISBN 0553579991.