Auber and Avernus: Poe’s Use of Myth and Ritual in “Ulalume”

Joseph P Kenyon Auber and Avernus: Poe’s Use of Myth and Ritual in “Ulalume” In Poe’s “Ulalume,” the narrator wanders to the tomb of his dead lover, and his state of mind during that journey is a puzzle. He is obsessed with continuing, despite the misgivings expressedby his soul and his initial failure to recognize the area of his lover’s interment. Aware of the symbolism of the strange signsthat surround him, he is blind to their meaning. Instead,he choosesto seeonlywhat he wants to see. These contradictions raise questions about the impetus for the narrator’s actions. Is he in a frenzy, rent by frustration and despair over the death of his beloved? Is he looking for reunification with his lover?Or is he being driven by his subconscious toward a discovery that he is consciously resisting? The solution to this puzzle, I will argue, lies in four facts. First, Poe famouslyhad a literary fascination with dying women. Both J. Gerald Kennedy and PaulaKot explore the frequencyand depth of Poe’suse of this motif.’ Second, Poe was driven to near madness by his wife’s illnessof 1846 and early 1847.Third, he often used mythic allusions and situations in his works. As a student of French and Latin as well as ancient history at the University of Virginia,* he came into extensive contact with many romance and classical myths, and his training manifests itself in his nearly exclusive usage of the Roman names for the classical gods. Constance Rourke points out that Poe is “oneof those major writerswho instinctivelyturn toward longestablished traditions,”namelymyth.3 Fourth, “Ulalume”was composed following the death of his wife,Virginia.4 In “Ulalume,”Poe conjoins the literary motif of the DymgWoman and his fresh personal grief over the death of a corporeal woman. While the loss of women throughout Poe’s life had a cumulative negativeeffecton him, the death ofVirginia transformed a nominallypoetic image into a fleshand -blood event. Since the Dying Woman is a motif grounded in mythology and folklore, Poe utilizes mythic allusion and the phantasmagoric narrative of myth to depict what was for him, evidently , a real-life epiphanic experience. The poem also displaysa predilection for an archetypal theme inherent in all classical mythic traditions: the hero’sjourney to the underworld. Poe’s narrator is of two minds: in the beginning, frenzied and irrationally obsessed; at the end, becalmed and reflective. Such duality fits with Poe’s dispositionbefore and afterVirginia’sdeath. In a letter written in early 1848,Poe describes his mental state during his wife’s decline: “[Ilt was the horrible never-ending oscillation between hope & despair which I could not longer have endured without the total loss of reason. In the death of what was my life, then, I receive a new but-oh God!how melancholyan existence” (Letters , 2:356).In the poem, death has carried away the narrator’s lover, and suffering a total loss of reason, he strikes out for her tomb on the one night of the year when the living can commune with the dead. Unlike the heroes and heroines of myth,however,the biographical Poewho lived this motif was a corporeal being unable to descend into the underworld. Similarly, the narrator of “Ulalume”is barred from accomplishing thejourney of reunification with his love. Instead, he is pulled back into the reality of the living world, where there is peace in reason, but also great melancholy. Poe uses mythic narrativeand allusionto form the poem’s infrastructure. An analysis of the fictional and surrealisticnames and actions that constitute the poem’splot and characterization points to their origins in Celtic, Greco-Roman, Mesopo- Myth and Ritual a n "Ululume" 59 tamian, and Egyptian mythologies. From this material, Poe draws stories vital to Western cultures : the Aenkd, Cupid and Psyche, Venus and Adonis,Ishtarand Tammuz.Evidently,the nature of mythology itself-the dreamlike quality, the rooted symbolism-made the subject attractive enough toemployoftenin hisworks. T h eRaven," "To Helen," and "Sonnet-To Science" draw extensivelyfromclassicalmythology ."TheGold-Bug" is replete with references to Egyptian mythology, and many Poe stories use mythic and folkloric details for effect, such as Pluto (Roman god of the underworld) in "The...