Poe, the Ragged Mountains, and a Raven

While reading about Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Island of the Fay” (for yesterday’s post), I wondered about the source for the story’s setting. According to a Wikipedia article, another Poe story (“A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”) is “the only one of Poe’s stories to take place in Virginia.” I doubt very much that this is true.

“A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” might be the only Poe story set explicitly in Virginia, but considering Poe’s biography and where he lived at different times in his rather brief life (only 40 years), these low but rugged mountains emerge as a compelling candidate for the wild landscape that may have influenced several of his writings.

A well-researched article on Poe’s one year at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville reports that “in the afternoons, Poe was reputed to take long solitary walks through the nearby hills ...” In “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”, Poe gives this habit to his main character. He would

set forth alone, or attended only by a dog, upon a long ramble among the chain of wild and dreary hills that lie westward and southward of Charlottesville, and are there dignified by the title of the Ragged Mountains.

Poe later has his character say that “when I left Charlottesville ... I bent my steps immediately to the mountains” – this is probably what Poe himself was once in the habit of doing.

In “The Island of the Fay,” the place where the narrator walks is described in a manner very reminiscent of his account of the Ragged Mountains.

It was during one of my lonely journeyings, amid a far distant region of mountain locked within mountain, and sad rivers and melancholy tarn writhing or sleeping within all – that I chanced upon a certain rivulet and island.

Poe’s ‘fancy’ could take something very small and seemingly insignificant – like a piece of sycamore bark floating by – and blow it up into something central to a story. There is every possibility that the ‘river’ where “Fay” is based indeed was nothing more than a ‘rivulet’, and the island perhaps not much more than a typical small feature of a Virginia creek, no more than a few meters from end to end. Setting off from the university “southward and westward” as he says, and following the Ragged Mountains, Poe would encounter the main branch of Moore’s Creek, which today feeds a reservoir near the university. Traveling further south, he’d reach the Hardware River; either stream would have been quite suitable as the basis for “The Island of the Fay.”

Based on the other places where Poe spent his adult life – Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore, with a military assignment to Charleston, South Carolina – it seems likely he would have become familiar with territory like that in “The Island of the Fay” (and perhaps even the setting of “The Fall of the House of Usher”) in the Ragged Mountains. Another possibility might be the area near West Point, where he spent about eight months trying mightily, and finally succeeding, to get himself kicked out of the U.S. Military Academy. And of course there’s the fact that he was brought up during part of his childhood in Scotland and England, and was always perfectly capable of simply making up his own worlds. But I suspect the Ragged Mountains provided a reserve of impressions that he drew upon for ‘wild’ scenery.

An aside: Having just recently written about the possible meaning of ‘Indian Summer’ and also the prevalence during that time of a combination of “sun, dust, smoke and shadow – a medium that contains and conducts autumn” – I enjoyed encountering Poe’s reference, in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” to 

a dim, warm, misty day, toward the close of November ... during the strange interregnum of the seasons which in America is termed the Indian Summer

and his description of

the thick and peculiar mist, or smoke, which distinguishes the Indian Summer ... this pleasant fog

Of course, some people, influenced by malicious, largely untrue tales disseminated about Poe during his lifetime, may think I’m seeking corroboration from an addicted madman. Well, Happy Halloween to them.

Finally, even further aside. I’ve written quite a bit (here, here, here and here) about my uncle, the late photographer and commercial filmmaker Del Ankers. Getting a gift for my uncle Del was the closest thing we knew to trying to find something for the fabled ‘man who has everything’. The D.C. studio/home of Del and my aunt Elizabeth was a marvel to my siblings and me, filled with exotic things like glass-topped tables, curved, leather-covered sofas, fresh fruit set out in bowls (and you were actually encouraged to eat it), sumptuous atlases and coffee table books on the aforementioned tables, not to mention all the photo stuff in the studios. The best things were the crazy toys on Del’s desk – not toys for us, souvenirs and amusements for him. 

I only ever managed to find two or three things worth giving Del for his collection. One of them dates from just a few years ago, a toothpick dispenser I also just had to get for myself. Works great. And it can close our chapter on Edgar Allan Poe.

Quoth the Raven, “Need one more?”

Edgar Allan Poe’s Island of the Fay (and A Sunset of the Seventh Ray)

Just as Edgar Allan Poe begins his beautiful fantasy “The Island of the Fay” as if it’s a critical essay, I will begin my own little fantasia as if it’s a critical essay ... on “The Island of the Fay.”

What goes around comes around.

Poe’s story is quite short (out of five or six places where you can read it online, the best presentation seems to be here), but, as is often the case with Poe, it includes elaborate arguments or conceits that aren’t absolutely necessary to the main action, and which Poe himself may not even have believed. I think at times he may have simply enjoyed exercising his fantastic intellectual and creative powers for their own sake – dazzling us with a song and dance, for fun, not to mention for the purpose of completing a story and getting closer to another payday.

Anyway, after the preliminaries – which, by the way, do relate to his story – Poe tells us:

It was during one of my lonely journeyings, amid a far distant region of mountain locked within mountain, and sad rivers and melancholy tarn writhing or sleeping within all – that I chanced upon a certain rivulet and island.

The time of day – sunset.

Poe lies down in grassy woods watching the light fall along this little river. On the shadow side, the river, or rivulet, bends out of sight into deep green foliage. On the sun side,

there poured down noiselessly and continuously ... a rich golden and crimson waterfall from the sunset fountains of the sky.

He begins to notice a small island in the middle of it all. It lies east to west, so one end is in deep shadow, the other in the beautiful light. Poe plays up the duality, elaborating, embroidering on how delightful is the light – imbued “with a deep sense of life and joy” – and how black and gloomy the shadow – it even suggests “mortal sorrow and untimely death.”

Now Poe’s ‘fancies’ really kick in. As the sun lowers, he begins to suppose that the trees on the mournful eastern end are literally giving their shadows to the ever-darker waters flowing off to the lee of the light.

I fancied that each shadow, as the sun descended lower and lower, separated itself sullenly from the trunk that gave it birth, and thus became absorbed by the stream; while other shadows issued ... from the trees, taking the place of their predecessors ...

He makes a leap to the idea that this secluded place could be the last remaining home of the race of fairies, or “the Fays,” and that the Fays give up their lives much as the trees give up their shade.

In dying, do they not rather waste away mournfully, rendering unto God, little by little, their existence, as these trees render up shadow after shadow, exhausting their substance unto dissolution?

At this point, Poe transforms a curled piece of sycamore bark floating past into the image of an ethereal Fay standing “in a singularly fragile canoe,” which she guides “with the mere phantom of an oar.” This vision develops into the story’s ultimate image – the Fay going round and round the island, starting out in sunlight and joy, but with each revolution giving up part of her life to the black shadows of the river, and so seeming weaker and more careworn every time she reappears. When the sun finally goes down,

the Fay, now the mere ghost of her former self, went disconsolately with her boat into the region of the ebony flood, and that she issued thence at all I cannot say, for darkness fell over all things and I beheld her magical figure no more.

I encountered this story as I set about to read all of Poe’s collected works; I have a long way to go, so I can’t say how this story will appear in full context, but so far it seems striking for the strength of its attraction to brightness, happiness and sunlight. I think those who look at the story analytically must see predominantly the outcome of shadows and death – another dark tale by Poe. But a simple emotional reading – taking the story’s temperature, as it were, instead of just looking at the skeleton – tips the balance toward light and life. Poe doesn’t stint when he describes the bright end of the island as

all one radiant harem of garden beauties. It glowed and blushed beneath the eyes of the slant sunlight, and fairly laughed with flowers. The grass was short, springy, sweet-scented, and Asphodel-interspersed. The trees were lithe, mirthful, erect – bright, slender, and graceful, – of eastern figure and foliage, with bark smooth, glossy, and parti-colored. There seemed a deep sense of life and joy about all; and although no airs blew from out the heavens, yet every thing had motion through the gentle sweepings to and fro of innumerable butterflies, that might have been mistaken for tulips with wings.

The Fay’s disappearance into the darkness is sad, and the sadness registers all the more strongly because of Poe’s lyrical celebration of the beautiful light of sunset in the woods and his tender affection for the Fay’s gentle radiance.

The ending is explicitly ambiguous (curious phrase) as Poe can’t tell what happens to the Fay. Sunset plays a key role; it’s pretty simple; he can’t say what happens because the sun goes down and everything’s dark.

Maybe I can help.

As the sun goes down behind the mountains, the range we see could be a rugged island in the distance. We don’t need a circling Fay to register the dying of the light; we can see it directly.

Odd thing: When the sun is higher and the light brighter, the rays of the setting sun are less colorful. As the sun goes down, and darkness approaches, the colors of the sun become that much more intense.

It’s a little difficult on an evening so low and heavy with clouds, but we can imagine dividing the sunset into seven rays.

The first would be yellow, for the sun itself. The second ray is a white-gray light, for the clouds. The third is blue, for the air. The fourth another blue, for the waters. The fifth is a flaming red-violet rose orange, for all the hopes and dreams of everything that exists. The sky, often a beautiful bright green near the horizon at this time of year, only rarely shows us the mysterious sixth and penultimate ray – the so-called ‘green flash’.

The seventh ray – that’s the one we never see, at least not on this side of the mountains. The seventh ray might complete the Fay’s mysterious sunset. Perhaps the shadows grow darker not from absorbing other shadows, as our friend supposed, but from taking in all the light. The rays represent the light that night seals into itself. The seventh ray, the brightest light, darker than any midnight, brings tomorrow’s morning sun.

Sunset, Monday, 12 October 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

This seems to be an evening to mention subjects I can’t write about quite yet.

I’ve been sneaking up on the idea of writing about Edgar Allan Poe’s beautiful story “The Island of the Fay,” which I’ve read about five times in the last week. I think I finally see a way ... soon.

If I can’t write about Poe (at one time considered by his peers to be a gifted athlete), that of course leaves us with baseball. For now, all I can do is ask how excruciating it would be if the Colorado Rockies made it to the World Series and we had to watch night baseball from Denver in late October.

More about that, too, another time. Sun’s about to set on what has been a chilly and, until just about this moment, overcast day.