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Lo! ’tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
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Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly—
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe! |
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That motley drama—oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot. |
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But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued. |
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Out—out are the lights—out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero the Conqueror Worm. |
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| Afterword |
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Poe first published “The Conqueror Worm” about the time of his 34th birthday in Godey’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine. It would be published again, two years later, embedded in the story “Ligeia.” But as it stood first on its own, it is to be judged foremost on its own merits.
It is not a quiet poem by any means. It hosts a superabundance of imagery expressed in an exaggerated tone and of utterances whose references are not obvious. It takes place “within the lonesome latter years,” but the latter years of what? And what phantom is it that men are supposed to chase? One may suppose that it is the illusion of victory over death—the image bears similarity to the closing scene of “Masque of the Red Death.”
There are contradictions. How can it be a gala night when the angels have such matter as this on hand? Should the word be read as the dark sarcasm of the narrator or as the indifference of the angels? And if death is wholly victorious, then what meaning is there in the mention of sin? What meaning can transgression have where all alike are consumed?
“The Conqueror Worm” is often among a reader’s earliest experiences of poetry. And at that time the poem is likely to be read in a less philosophically scrutinizing attitude than that of the erstwhile editor of 34 who now writes. In my younger years, I regarded the dramatic effect above all, and the sensations aroused by this crowd of imagery, violent utterance and latent paradox seemed only exciting and full of life—a thing of feeling, not of thought.
I was not then, nor am I now, too good for a poem about death; it is among the most obvious of all subjects—obvious for the very reason of its omniprevalence, finality and human interest. Nevertheless, I regard an author’s bill-of-goods more narrowly than I did when I first read this poem. And I am inclined to read the poem now, not so much in great admiration of it, as in fond memory of a time when writers were not so obviously worthy of suspicion and I was able to give even an impure text a pure, if less scrutinizing, reading. |
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| —Jack Faber |
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