The Pale Blue Eye

Well, as to that, all I'll say is, you can't take out a fellow's heart before he's ready to give it up.

There are times," I declared, "when I believe the dead haunt us because we love them too little.

My next thought was for Lord Suckling’s charming song: ‘I prithee send me back my heart / Since I cannot have thine.

I'm a solitary sort, I get chaffed by too many elbows.

I look back on the poor benighted creature I was before I met her, and I see a dead man. Marching in all the right directions, answering when spoken to, fulfilling all his appointed rounds, but dead all the same. And now this woman has awakened me, and I am alive at last, and at what cost! What pain it is to be among the living!

The first Snow, Landor! Rare bliss it was to awaken and to find every tree and rock overrun with snow; to find the snowflakes still spilling like hoarded coins from the sky’s cloud-purses.

I answered that quite to the contrary, I considered Death—and in particular, the death of a beautiful woman—to be Poetry’s grandest, most exalted theme.

It won’t do, gentlemen. I’m a solitary sort, I get chaffed by too many elbows.

I was given a room overlooking Constitution Island. The shutters kept out nearly all the starlight and moonlight—sleeping was a dive into a pit, and the sound of reveille seemed to come from a distant star. I lay there, watching the red light steal through the bottom of the shutters. The darkness felt delicious. I wondered if maybe I’d missed my true career.

He became, in that instant, pure topography: his belly a highland, tapering down to a head-hamlet, with two hard-blinking eye-ponds. Four servants rushed to his aid. He waved them off with a smile. Made

So as not to be murdered twice over. “Other times,” I continued, “I believe we love them too much. And as a consquence they are never free to depart, because we carry them, our most deeply beloved, within ourselves. Never dead, never silent, never appeased.

There are times,” I declared, “when I believe the dead haunt us because we love them too little. We forget them, you see; we don’t mean to, but we do.

Books, Mr. Landor!” “I do read, yes.” Not much of a library—a scant three rows in all—but mine. Poe’s fingers glided along the bindings.

I looked down at that sleeping head with its thin, rumpled hair, and I realized then that I had come to organize my days around—around Poe, I guess, or at least around these moments. They had become part of my mind’s calendar, and I depended on them, the way you depend on seasons to follow one another or the back door to stick or your cat to grab the same splash of sunlight every aftertoon.

I had come to a new way of thinking about time. It’s not the hard and fixed thing we imagine it to be, no, it’s something soft and pleated, and under extreme pressure, it folds

Why is it, Mr. Poe, that I would sooner spend an hour with you in the”—again she laughed—“in the gloomiest contemplations than spend another minute speaking of dresses and baubles and the things that make most people happy?

I replied that to the contrary, it was my belief that the Highlands, to be apprehended in the full extent of their glory, must be seen immediately after the fall of the leaf, for neither Summer’s verdancy nor Winter’s rime can then conceal the minutest objects from the eye. Vegetation, I told her, does not improve, but rather obstructs, God’s originating design.

Fright being, in its way, as communicable a disorder as leprosy, I soon felt my own heart pound, my own limbs stiffen,

Only when someone becomes vital do we try to give that first encounter the importance it would later have