Poe’s Deep in Earth is a curious couplet. It was found pencilled in on a copy of the manuscript to Eulalie, which speaks of the joy of his marriage. Perhaps that scribbling is Poe thinking out loud, taking a note to remind himself of a couplet which he might use later. Perhaps he was adding a […]
Edgar Allan Poe’s Spirits of the Dead: Thy soul shall find itself alone, ’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone …
Poe’s Spirits of the Dead is a walk through the graveyard, a treatise on death by one in mourning. The spirits of the dead live on in Poe’s poem, and surround you as you walk the alleys of tombstones. The feeling of loneliness one gets as you wander the graves, Poe reasons is without merit, […]
Edgar Allan Poe’s A City In The Sea: Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, Shall do it reverence.
Poe’s A City In The Sea is an apocalyptic vision, a conspiracy of evil set to rise up and usher in Hell on Earth. The city in question lies unnamed and without location, somewhere in the west. It’s a peaceful city, not unlike the Atlantis legend, but it would be more apt to describe a […]
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven: Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven represented the pinnacle of the author’s success. Though most of his fame was brought on by his macabre tales and stories, Poe’s The Raven took off and brought him national, as well as world-wide acclaim. Unfortunately it didn’t bring him much in the way of income, when he desperately needed […]
On the Poe videos that accompany The Conqueror Worm, The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe
We’ve played with video for a while, and all along we hoped to make Poe videos for each of the songs on The Conqueror Worm. Since most people find our music typically find it through YouTube, and YouTube is a video platform, why not make the most of it? The original guidelines for the Poe […]
A return to Bardstown, Kentucky: Spending the night in a cell at the Jailer’s Inn, a haunted jail in a town known around the world for its ghosts
The only troubling sound I heard the night I spent in the Jailer’s Inn in Bardstown, Kentucky was the sound of a cell door closing. There are two reasons I found that disturbing. First, the jail was shut down late in the twentieth century, so there are no inmates, and it’s unlikely the staff was […]
Pondering why landscapes become sacred and the mysteries of the Uffington White Horse, Uffington Castle and White Horse Hill
A month ago I stood atop a long barrow on White Horse Hill, with the grass covered chalk walls of Uffington Castle behind me, the galloping Uffington White Horse below me, and pondered a question for which there is no answer. What makes a landscape sacred? Is sacred the right word? Mystic perhaps. What makes […]
The hammer of the gods still ring out at Wayland’s Smithy, a long barrow chamber tomb nestled in a secluded grove in Oxfordshire
The chambered tombs and long barrows of Britain have long tickled the imagination, and perhaps none more so than Wayland’s Smithy. Perhaps it’s the stand of beech trees enclosing it which makes it feel more intimate, more hushed. Unlike West Kennet Long Barrow near Avebury, sitting exposed to the wind and the rain, high on […]
