Poe’s “For Annie” has been popular with anthologists and their readers for generations. It is a great accomplishment, undeniably [page 453:] effective, although a tour de force.(1) The subject is quietude, but a most unquiet rhythm is employed, obviously suggested by Thomas Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs” — a poem Poe recited in his lectures on “The Poetic Principle” in 1848 and 1849.
On March 23, 1849, Poe wrote to Mrs. Richmond: “I enclose also some other lines ‘For Annie’ — and will you let me know in what manner they impress you?” He added that he had sent them to the Flag of Our Union. This mention clearly refers to the present poem; “A Dream Within a Dream” had been called “For Annie” in a manuscript previously sent to Mrs. Richmond.
Poe’s relation with Gleason and Ballou’s Flag of Our Union was not a happy one. On April 20, 1849, he wrote to Willis: “The poem which I enclose ... has been just published in a paper [page 455:] for which sheer necessity compels me to write ... It pays well as times go — but ... whatever I send it I feel I am consigning to the tomb of the Capulets.” He went on to ask Willis to reprint the lines as “From a late [Boston] paper” and to write an introduction in the Home Journal. The Flag regularly came out a full week before the date it bore, and Poe rightly assumed that “For Annie” would be in the issue appearing April 21. Willis sent the script Poe had given him to the printer at once, with the note: “Will Mr. Babcock please put this on the second page this week, & leave me twenty lines room for an introduction.” The result was that even if the Flag actually reached dealers before the Home Journal, Poe’s poem appeared in two papers bearing the same date. The Flag, not unnaturally, protested in the issue for May 12. Poe soon thereafter sent Mrs. Richmond word that the Flag had misprinted his lines — an accusation which (if true at all) can only mean that the editor refused to make changes in proof at the last minute. Poe added that the Flag still had two of his articles. These had been paid for and were printed, but the paper for which he felt such contempt purchased nothing more of Poe’s.
On May 23 Poe sent a Home Journal clipping to E. H. N. Patterson, thus authorizing its publication in that young editor’s paper, the Spectator of Oquawka, Illinois.(7) Poe sent to Griswold in June “perfect copies” of “Annabel Lee” and “For Annie” for use in Poets and Poetry of America; the former is a manuscript, but the latter may well have been a corrected clipping.(8) Griswold used the same text in the Works as in his anthology.
(A) Manuscript sent to Mrs. Richmond, March 23, 1849, facsimiled in London Bibliophile, May 1909; (B) Boston Flag of Our Union for April 28, 1849; (C) manuscript sent to N. P. Willis on April 20, 1849; (D) Home Journal for April 28, 1849; (E) Oquawka Spectator, May 16, 1849; (F) Poets [page 456:] and Poetry of America, 10th edition (dated 1850, issued late in 1849), p. 422; (G) Works (1850), II, 48-51; (H) manuscript sent to Susan Archer Talley on September 26, 1849, now lost; (Z) Richmond Examiner proofsheets from Whitty, Complete Poems (1911), pp. 74-77.
The text adopted is Griswold’s (G), which has a superior reading in line 97. The presentation manuscript (A), once lent to Ingram, was in the Harold Peirce Sale, Philadelphia, May 6, 1903, lot 958, and is now owned by Colonel Richard Gimbel. The manuscript given to Willis (C), now incomplete, was once in the collection of the late William H. Koester. The manuscript sent Miss Talley on September 26, 1849, is mentioned in the article “Last Days of Edgar A. Poe” by Susan Archer Talley Weiss in Scribner’s Magazine for March 1878 (15:714) but was destroyed during the Civil War. The text in Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of America (F) is verbally like that in Works (G), but the printer used apostrophes thus: in line 6, conquer’d; 28, madden’d; 29, burn’d; yo, Drown’d; 79, extinguish’d; 80, cover’d. The Examiner proofsheets (Z) are said to have had a unique reading, in line 45.
10, 12 Wilbur (Poe, p. 150), calls the double use of length “a lame pun ... probably not so intended.” It seems to me rather a successful use of “absolute rhyme,” since it has been so rarely noticed.
22 See “The Beloved Physician” for a note on Poe’s heart trouble.
25 Many readers may regret that Poe chose to be so clinically accurate here. He defended Shelley’s use of “sicken” in a review of a book called The Poetry of Life (by Sarah Stickney) in the Southern Literary Messenger, January 1836.
35 “Napthaline” is better spelled “napthalene.” Moore, in a note to Lalla Rookh, quotes Scott Waring as saying, “Naptha [sic] is used by the Persians (as we are told by Milton it was in Hell) for lamps.” It is clear, combustible rock oil, procured by the ancients from asphaltum, usually brought from the Dead Sea. Wilbur (Poe, p. 150) points out the allusion to Phlegethon, the fiery river of Hades. See also line 53.
37 John 4:14: “But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” The unusual form of the participle drank is in all texts authorized by Poe.
39-44 Wilbur, p. 150, suggests an allusion to Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.
53 Tantalus was tortured by water he could not drink and fruit he could not reach; see also line 35.
56-58 Roses and myrtles are symbols of love.
83 The Blessed Virgin is called Regina angelorum (queen of the angels). Compare Poe’s “Hymn,” addressed to our Lady.
102 In “Landor’s Cottage” we are told, “The eyes of Annie ... were spiritual gray; her hair a light chestnut.” The eyes of the lady in “To One in Paradise” were changed to gray in the last revised version, perhaps for Annie’s benefit.
1 Quinn (p. 600) says it “is one of Poets finest poems ... He reproduced an emotional state by a short throbbing measure ... the very incoherencies mirror perfectly the mood.” N. P. Willis invented the word “individualesque” for it, in the introduction he wrote at Poe’s request and published with “For Annie” in the Home Journal of April 28, 1849. This introduction, headed “Odd Poem,” was reprinted by Killis Campbell (Poems, p. 288); most of it has little pertinence.
2 Stedman, Poets of America (Boston and New York, 1885), p. 246. Campbell (Poems, p. 289) gives these and other favorable opinions, and some from critics who disliked the poem, because of the clinical details in some stanzas.
3 Phillips, II, 1293ff., quoting directly a letter of December 18, 1915, from Mrs. George P. Lawrence, Mr. Richmond’s niece.
4 Complete copies of Poe’s letters were made surreptitiously before the originals were destroyed. About thirty years ago my late friend, James Southall Wilson, read them under pledge not to make copies, a pledge which he kept. He did, however, tell me of the nature of the passage to which I refer. I have been unable to trace these transcripts myself.
5 In Poe’s day laudanum was a specific remedy for toothache and diarrhœa, was sold without a prescription by all druggists, and was often taken for other maladies, real or imagined.
6 Smith, Edgar Allan Poe: How to Know Him (Indianapolis, 1921), p. 232, Mallarmé’s interpretation appeared (with Edouard Manet’s illustrations) in the first edition of his famous book Les Poèmes d’Edgar Poe: Traduetion en Prose (Paris, 1889), pp. 190-191.
7 Apparently Patterson had already received a copy of the Home Journal or a clipping from it, since he published an identical text in his paper for May 16. I have used the file in the library of Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois.
8 A letter of “May 17, 1849,” addressed to Mrs. Lewis, promising to make a copy of “For Annie” for her that day and signed “Edgar A. Poe,” has no history prior to 1935 and I cannot regard it as authentic. It is hard to believe we should have no earlier trace of so important a manuscript if the Brooklyn poetess ever had it.