Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living (Icons) by Paul Collins Page A
Authors: Paul Collins
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before him. As he worked out the cipher, the mocking words emerged: “ And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, they have no wine . . .”
Dispatch boys scurried through Manhattan streets, bearing sacks of valentines—the post office had hired a hundred extra letter carriers just for the day—and Virginia Poe sat up from her sickbed, picked up a pen, and carefully wrote a romantic acrostic poem to her husband:
E ver with thee I wish to roam—
D earest my life is thine .
G ive me a cottage for my home
A nd a rich old cypress vine ,
R emoved from the world with its sin and care
A nd the tattling of many tongues .
L ove alone shall guide us when we are there—
L ove shall heal my weakened lungs;
A nd Oh, the tranquil hours we’ll spend ,
N ever wishing that others may see!
P erfect ease we’ll enjoy, without thinking to lend
O urselves to the world and its glee—
E ver peaceful and blissful we’ll be .
Saturday, February 14, 1846 .
It is the only surviving note we have from her, and a heartbreakingly earnest and tender one. Amid Edgar’s drinking and the loss of his magazine, Virginia’s “weakened lungs” had continued their decline. The little family that Edgar had built around his wife and aunt drew ever closer around one another.
They had suffered “tattling tongues” of late, too: a few weeks earlier, after historian Elizabeth Ellet came to regret some unreciprocated letters she sent to Edgar, her quick-tempered brotherthreatened to thrash the author. Poe drunkenly blundered into the home of his colleague and sometime friend Thomas Dunn English to borrow a pistol to defend himself. When English refused, the two broke into fisticuffs, with Poe getting the worse of it as English socked him across the face with a signet ring; as they were separated, the bloodied Poe sputtered, “Let him alone. I’ve got him just where I want him.”
It was as well that he didn’t get the pistol; even drunk, Poe was still one of the few men of letters in his generation with army training. But the whole affair left Poe shunned from that year’s Valentine’s Day literary salons, and rather joining his wife in longing to leave the downtown “world and its sin and care.” Aunt Maria owned a small lot in Baltimore, but was so far behind on taxes that the city announced its seizure. Instead, short of money and good will alike, that May the Poe household moved to the sleepy Bronx suburb of Fordham.
Their new neighborhood was no literary hub; its greatest recent fame was for hosting a field-plowing competition. Fittingly, the approach to Poe’s house was, one visitor observed, “half buried with fruit trees.” Author Mary Gove Nicholls visited to find a diminutive farmhouse amid a rolling lawn; the cherry groves attracted birds, and Edgar was outside, trying to train a bobolink that he had caught.
“He had put him in a cage, which he had hung on a nail driven into the trunk of a cherry tree,” Nicholls mused. “The poor bird was as unfit to live in a cage as his captor was to live in the world.”
Yet Poe had left a great many miseries of the city behind, amusing himself with long walks to the woods and to St. John’s College, the future Fordham University. He had certainly not traded urban life for more indoor space; his home had just three rooms for as many inhabitants, with a kitchen, a parlor, and an upstairs bedroom crammed under the eaves. To Nicholls—a reform writer on everything from water cures to free love, notlong back from visiting Fourierist colonies in the Midwest—the home was simplicity itself, if too spartan even for an idealist like herself.
“So neat, so poor, so unfurnished, and yet so charming a dwelling I never saw,” Nicholls recalled. “The sitting-room floor was laid with check matting; four chairs, a light stand, and a hanging bookshelf completed its furniture. There were pretty presentation copies of books on the little shelves, and the Brownings
Dispatch boys scurried through Manhattan streets, bearing sacks of valentines—the post office had hired a hundred extra letter carriers just for the day—and Virginia Poe sat up from her sickbed, picked up a pen, and carefully wrote a romantic acrostic poem to her husband:
E ver with thee I wish to roam—
D earest my life is thine .
G ive me a cottage for my home
A nd a rich old cypress vine ,
R emoved from the world with its sin and care
A nd the tattling of many tongues .
L ove alone shall guide us when we are there—
L ove shall heal my weakened lungs;
A nd Oh, the tranquil hours we’ll spend ,
N ever wishing that others may see!
P erfect ease we’ll enjoy, without thinking to lend
O urselves to the world and its glee—
E ver peaceful and blissful we’ll be .
Saturday, February 14, 1846 .
It is the only surviving note we have from her, and a heartbreakingly earnest and tender one. Amid Edgar’s drinking and the loss of his magazine, Virginia’s “weakened lungs” had continued their decline. The little family that Edgar had built around his wife and aunt drew ever closer around one another.
They had suffered “tattling tongues” of late, too: a few weeks earlier, after historian Elizabeth Ellet came to regret some unreciprocated letters she sent to Edgar, her quick-tempered brotherthreatened to thrash the author. Poe drunkenly blundered into the home of his colleague and sometime friend Thomas Dunn English to borrow a pistol to defend himself. When English refused, the two broke into fisticuffs, with Poe getting the worse of it as English socked him across the face with a signet ring; as they were separated, the bloodied Poe sputtered, “Let him alone. I’ve got him just where I want him.”
It was as well that he didn’t get the pistol; even drunk, Poe was still one of the few men of letters in his generation with army training. But the whole affair left Poe shunned from that year’s Valentine’s Day literary salons, and rather joining his wife in longing to leave the downtown “world and its sin and care.” Aunt Maria owned a small lot in Baltimore, but was so far behind on taxes that the city announced its seizure. Instead, short of money and good will alike, that May the Poe household moved to the sleepy Bronx suburb of Fordham.
Their new neighborhood was no literary hub; its greatest recent fame was for hosting a field-plowing competition. Fittingly, the approach to Poe’s house was, one visitor observed, “half buried with fruit trees.” Author Mary Gove Nicholls visited to find a diminutive farmhouse amid a rolling lawn; the cherry groves attracted birds, and Edgar was outside, trying to train a bobolink that he had caught.
“He had put him in a cage, which he had hung on a nail driven into the trunk of a cherry tree,” Nicholls mused. “The poor bird was as unfit to live in a cage as his captor was to live in the world.”
Yet Poe had left a great many miseries of the city behind, amusing himself with long walks to the woods and to St. John’s College, the future Fordham University. He had certainly not traded urban life for more indoor space; his home had just three rooms for as many inhabitants, with a kitchen, a parlor, and an upstairs bedroom crammed under the eaves. To Nicholls—a reform writer on everything from water cures to free love, notlong back from visiting Fourierist colonies in the Midwest—the home was simplicity itself, if too spartan even for an idealist like herself.
“So neat, so poor, so unfurnished, and yet so charming a dwelling I never saw,” Nicholls recalled. “The sitting-room floor was laid with check matting; four chairs, a light stand, and a hanging bookshelf completed its furniture. There were pretty presentation copies of books on the little shelves, and the Brownings
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