Both poems confront the inescapable specter of death; a specter that haunts the human mind, body and soul, every day up to and including the day (or night) it arrives to claim another victim.
The Conqueror Worm and Shakespeare's As You Like It
A film or a book, or even the occasional television program can temporarily distract the human mind from weightier matters; but, thoughts of death creep in like a worm, stealthily insinuating itself between the lowly culture vulture and the harsh realities of mortality.
Poe's poem, The Conqueror Worm tells this very Victorian tale; theater-goers settle in to enjoy a pleasurable night of escapism via a bit of life imitating art:
An angel throng...
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears...
But, after a beautiful bit of stagecraft, Poe lyrically synchronizes the plotting action on the stage with the fantastic events unfolding in the house:
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot...
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.
Poe's The Conqueror Worm offers a brilliant and compelling view indeed, but, not without precedence, as the oft-quoted scene from William Shakespeare's play As You Like It covers similar territory:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances...
But, alas it is the concluding lines from As You Like It that most resemble The Conqueror Worm's more violent misanthropy (The curtain, a funeral pall); as The Conqueror Worm ingests the dead back into the muck and mire from which life sprang; while Shakespeare holds a mirror to the infant, newly born, and reflects the elderly, slowly dying away:
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
"Alone"
Great American filmmaker Orson Welles said, We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.
Orson Welles may or may not have been interpreting Poe (or Nietzsche), when he made that rather profound statement; but, there is little doubt, to read Edgar Allan Poe's poetry is to understand what it means to live and die alone.
The possible origins of Poe's melancholia are depicted in heart-breaking detail in his poem, "Alone".
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were...
I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
Autobiographical in every sense, "Alone" remains one of the more Romantic and sentimental of Poe's works; but, in adopting a more restrained approach, the dark poet was able to lure the unsuspecting reader (practically non-existent today) into a false sense of security, before shocking the system with bitter irony:
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—
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