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Such a literate request -- you deserve a response. :)
in reply to a message by KS
I dunno if you've tried this message board yet:http://members2.boardhost.com/haggisbutt/But that's the place which really "generates a lot of responses" on a question of this nature.Personally, I don't care for either "Audrey" or "Claire". Not that there's anything wrong with either name, it's just that neither is my style.Go with "Ulalume". Now *that's* a lovely name for a girl child. :)-- Nanaea
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In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir*shivers*Ulalume
by Edgar Allan PoeTHE SKIES they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crispèd and sere,
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir:
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.Here once, through an alley Titanic
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul—
Of cypress, with Psyche , my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll,
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole,
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere,
Our memories were treacherous and sere,
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year,
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)
We noted not the dim lake of Auber
(Though once we had journeyed down here),
Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.And now, as the night was senescent
And star-dials pointed to morn,
As the star-dials hinted of morn,
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn,
Astarte 's bediamonded crescent
Distinct with its duplicate horn.And I said—"She is warmer than Dian:
She rolls through an ether of sighs,
She revels in a region of sighs:
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
These cheeks, where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion
To point us the path to the skies,
To the Lethean peace of the skies:

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Very nice. :)If you would like to read a revealing commentary on Poe's unfinished work, "Ulalume", go to this page at Poe Central:http://www.poecentral.com/article1008.htmlThis commentary was first published in the year 1900.-- Nanaea
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A comment : Making reconstruction easier than one aughtThank you Nanaea . I did not know that page and it really interesting.
The article is interesting too and I have learnt many factual things I did not know before. I will surely look more into this page. But I have a few comments regarding the article.------
The biographical approach generally.Yet, the article does also become it's own worst enemy so to speak, for it interprets the poem by trying to reconstruct Poe's inner and outer life and in the light of these the interpretation is to arise.
But by using this way of interpretation the poem gets no chance to speak for itself. It simply becomes a reflection of a reconstructed Poe and a reconstructed Poe is not the real Poe. Therefore since a biological approach is used excluding the possibility that the poem could point beyond Poe's own life the author is trapped in the same point of view, which he says himself that Poe's own generation was caught in:"It was Poe's fate to be misunderstood. His own generation looked only at his external life. "Any reconstruction even of a person's inner life will always end in an external look upon the person. Only God and perhaps Poe himself could have an internal look at Poe.
I think the author should have pointed out more clearly that his starting point is a qualified guess as to how Poe were and felt and at the same time underline that we actually do not know for sure.-------Explaining a part separated from the whole.Reconstructing a person and his emotional state puts us in danger of making a person too understandable. That is to make him/her feel and act in a way we as bystanders can understand looking at the person from the outside.In the article the author makes the reconstruction task easier for himself simply by focusing on one single poem. Yet, had he been forced to make the same reconstruction based on a few more poems e.g. the poem "Ulalume" and the poem "Dream-land" then it would have been much harder.

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Hahaha! U and Ulalume!:P
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