EDGAR ALLEN POE
273
verses, no Prince escapes the spell, and the rescumg figure is
powerless to disenchant the scene:
Far in the forest, dim
and
old,
For her
may
some tall vault unfold
Against wlwse sounding door she Ju:uh thrown,
In childlwod, many an idle stone-
Some tomb, which oft Ju:uh flung its black
And vampire-winged panels back,
Flutt'ring triumphant o'er the palls
Of her old family funerals.
Poe's enchanted Princesses are of the same ancient lineage
that speaks in Van den Machandel-Boom:
Min Moder
de
mi
slacht't
Min Vader de mi
att,
Min Swester de Marleeniken
Sacht alle mine Beeniken,
Un bindt se in een syden Dook,
Legts unner den Machandel-boom.
Kywitt! Kywitt! ach watt een schon Vagel bin ick!
It is when one is certain that Poe freed himself from the
conscious skills that he practiced so diligently in
The Raven
ana in
The
Bells
that one hears the accents that have assured him of an
immortality; in
To One in Paradise,
the vision is restored of
what Grimms' soldier saw as he witnessed, wrapped in his cloak
of invisibility, the secret places where the twelve dancing Princesses
held a midnight festival:
And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thty grey eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams–
In wlu:u ethereal dances,
By wlu:u eternal streams.
To this order of Poe's imagination I also attribute the first
of
his poems bearing the title
To Helen
and
The City in the Sea;
they
are of a quality that one discovers in an imagination that
s)ances the roots of human evil and superhuman joy and reveals
!heir
existence among the fears and desires of childhood origin.
The "truth" of which Poe spoke so often in his critical asides
