it was necessary for the purpose of the tale
to focus all of the attention on Ligeia. She must, therefore, be
depicted directly by her husband. Having concluded that he must devote
the entire first half of his story to this description, Poe
employed all his powers to make it adequate and emphatic. The
description must, of course, be largely subjective and suggestive,
and must be pervaded with a sense of something unfathomable about
the person described. In order that (reverting to the language of
Poe's own critical dictum) "his very initial sentence" might "tend
to the outbringing of this effect," the author wrote, "I cannot
for my soul remember how, when, or even precisely where I first
became acquainted with the Lady Ligeia"; and the story was begun.

It was more difficult to handle the second division of the tale,
which was to deal with the period between Ligeia's death and her
resurrection. The main stress of the story now ceased to be laid on
the element of character. The element of action, furthermore, was
subsidiary in the second part of the tale, as it had been already in
the first. All that had to happen was the resurrection of Ligeia;
and this the reader had been forced by the very theme of the
story to foresee. The chief interest in the second part must therefore
lie in determining where and when and how this resurrection was
accomplished. A worthy setting must be found for the culminating
event. Poe could lose no time in preparing a place for his climax;
and therefore he was obliged, as soon as he had laid Ligeia in the
grave, to begin an elaborate description of the stage settings of his
final scene. The place must be wild and weird and arabesque. It must
be worthy to receive a resurrected mortal revisiting the glimpses
of the moon. The place was found, the time--midnight--decided upon:
but the question remained,--_how_ should Ligeia be resurrected?

And here arose almost an insuperable difficulty. Ligeia had been
buried (_must have been_ buried, as we have seen), and her body had
been given to the worms. Yet now she must be revived. And it would not
be sufficient to let her merely walk bodily into the fantastic
apartment where her husband, dream-haunted, was waiting to receive
her; for the point to be emphasized was not so much the mere fact of
her being once more alive, as the fact that she had won her way back
to life by the exertion of her own extraordinary will. The reader must
be shown not only _the