North View High School - Southside Echoes Yearbook (North View, VA)

Page 67 text:

46 SOUTHS IDE ECHOES And if there were not nobler lives, we might well say, as we stand by his grave : “Out — out are the lights — out all, And over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm ; And the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm, That the play is the tragedy ‘ Man,’ And its hero the Conqueror Worm.” Virginia Flournoy Ogburn, ’08.

Page 66 text:

SOUTHSIDE ECHOES 45 “And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the palid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamplight o ' er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor, And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted never more.” In his stories he conjures up unearthly landscapes as a sett- ing for his gloomy and morbid fancies, as, for example, in “The City in the Sea” : “There shrines and palaces and towers (Time-eaten towers that tremble not!) Resemble nothing that is ours. Around, by lifting winds forgot, Resignedly beneath the sky, The melancholy waters lie.” During his stay in New York he was often present at the literary gatherings of the city. His gentle and amiable wife, whom he had married in her fourteenth year in Richmond. She was his cousin, Virginia Clemm. Poverty now pressed upon them very heavily, for in the course of a few years he became an object of charity. His invalid wife soon passed away. The weather was extremely cold, and she died with her husband holding her hands and her mother her feet, and a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom, and her husband’s great- coat around her to keep out the cold. She died January 30, 1847. After this event Poe was never the same man again. He took to drinking, and the terrible work was soon done. On one of his visits from Richmond to Baltimore, he died from the effects of drinking, October 7, 1849. Thus ended the life of a man who was gifted, self-willed, proud and passionate. In his maddening poem, “The Con- queror Worm,” he gives an unequalled picture of pessimism.

Page 68 text:

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