l,
the poet's desire is to make of the girl he celebrates a sort of Classic
Odalisque, round whose palpable contours and lines he may hang
the solemn ornaments of the Dead--of the Dead to whom his soul
turns, even while embracing the living! Far, far off, from where the
real Helen waits, so "statue-like"--the "agate lamp" in her hands--wavers
the face of that other Helen, the face "that launched a thousand
ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium."

The longer poem under the same title, and apparently addressed to
the same sorceress, is more entirely "in his mood." Those shadowy,
moon-lit "parterres," those living roses--Beardsley has planted them
since in another "enchanted garden"--and those "eyes," that grow so
luminously, so impossibly large, until it is almost pain to be "saved"
by them--these things are in Poe's true manner; for it is not "Helen"
that he has ever loved, but her body, her corpse, her ghost, her
memory, her sepulchre, her look of dead reproach! And these things
none can take from him. The maniacal egoism of a love of this kind--its
frozen inhumanity--can be seen even in those poems which
stretch yearning hands towards Heaven. In "Annabel Lee," for
instance, in that sea-kingdom where the maiden lived who had no
thought--who _must_ have no thought--"but to love and be loved by
me"--what madness of implacable possession, in that "so all the
night-tide I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling, my life
and my bride, in her sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the
sounding sea!"

The same remorseless "laying on of hands" upon what God himself
cannot save from us may be discerned in that exquisite little poem
which begins:

"Thou wast all to me, love,
For which my soul did pine;
A green isle in the Sea, love,
A Fountain and a Shrine
All wreathed with Fairy fruits and flowers;
And all the flowers were mine!"

That "dim-gulf" o'er which "the spirit lies, mute, motionless,
aghast"--how well, in Poe's world, we know that! For still, in those
days of his which are "trances," and in those "nightly dreams" which
are all he lives for, he is with her; with her still, with her always;

"In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams!"

The essence of "immorality" does not lie in mad Byronic passion, or
in terrible Herodian lust. It lies in a certain deliberate "petrifaction"
of the human soul in us; a certain glacial detachment fro