Some time ago found myself wide awake staring at the ceiling, wide eyed at the realization that the poem doesn’t say Lenore is dead. Maybe she (finally, sensibly) just dumped him and Edgar won’t stop writing weird letters and being a sulky, whiny drama queen about it. Imagine being such a sulk that your ex has to train the local crows to go to your house and tell you to get over it, does that not sound like Poe to you?
That sounds like Poe to me.
Consider:
Years without a word, without a hint, a breath. But somehow in these last ragged moments, by some sensing or long knowing, perhaps the secret thread he’d often wished of, she is here. Poe looks up from his deathbed through rheumatic, half-focused eyes to see her, unexpected, uninvited, the decades-lost, yet-radiant Lenore. Framed as often dreamt, though his vitality is long past, by his bedroom’s doorframe.
Wheezing and incredulous, his heart racing for the first time he can remember, his cracked voice strains to whisper her name one last time. “Le… Lenore?”
She smiles down at him, once-alabaster skin grooved with the deep wrinkles of a life of laughter and song, the joys of living well and anywhere but here. Savouring the moment for a heartbeat, her eyes sparkle as she says – at last – what she has waited the better part of a lifetime to say.
“It’s pronounced Leh-nah-ray.”
In an instant, it is all there. The full realization of the empty vanity of years playing out before her eyes; The confusion, the dawning insight, the flashing visions of a lifetime of narcissism mistaken for love crashing across his expression with the relentless cruelty of an avalanche. A moment of clarity, if first and very last; all she had ever in her most secret (sometimes vain, sometimes cruel) moments hoped for. Everything.
A small voice whispers within her, you will never be this happy again. The moment after this one, and every moment after, all will be somehow less. But she finds the joy in that too. In knowing the gift she’s given him; a single moment of perfect awareness, the very instant of his spirit’s consummate realization of itself in final failure of the flesh. This moment was enough. It is perfect and enough.
Another heartbeat as his last untasted breath leaves him and she turns away. Framed again in the doorway for a moment her smile is unseen, and then she is gone.
At the window, a single raven alights on the sill. It looks in through the mottled glass, it’s eyes sparking in the dim candlelight. It tilts its head curiously before silently alighting, an unheard whisper on the wind that carries it away into the warm, moonless night.
(I was aiming for “Edgar Allen Poe dying of embarassment, but as Edgar Allen Poe as possible”. Couldn’t quite hit the tone I was looking for, but that tone is so deeply centered around Edgar’s perpetual self-absorbed moroseness that I couldn’t see a way to nail down that tone with this hammer, much less do right by the idea of its lead.)