My Soul's Destiny

Thou wert my Destiny;—thy song, thy fame,

The wild enchantments clustering round thy name,

Were my soul’s heritage, its royal dower;

Its glory and its kingdom and its power!

- Sarah Helen Whitman

My fountain pen rested after its arduous work. I, too, was drained as I always was after baring my very soul to the impartial stare of the blank parchment. However, the depletion on this day was all-consuming. Left an empty vessel, I was like a wine carafe that remained at the buffet table after a gluttonous feast. Stunned, if only momentarily, with the knowledge that my destiny no longer existed on the same plane, I refueled myself by reading over the lines still drying on the page. The story of Sarah and Edgar was not over. Pain could never dwell where his bright presence – however corporal - threw its blissful spell. From afar, quivering like a star, he still possessed the power over my heart.

Thou wert my destiny.

Thou art my destiny yet.

Fully aware that Edgar had many loves before me, without a doubt ours was most unique. Rather than appearing in my life through conscious will, he emanated from mysterious forces deep in my heart that my intuition forbade me to deny. While other women circled the edges or dipped their little toes into the pools of his darkness, I dove straight in and let the waters swallow me. I met him idea for idea, dancing with the skeletons that crept from his dark imagination. Not content to simply be his muse, I wrote. And I wrote more. My work, it was seasoned with him, as his was seasoned with me. Later, after he breathed no more, no severance of our spiritual connection ensued. And it was I who picked up sword to defend his honor.

At times, I identified with the sole leaf of late fall, turned russet on the branch, fighting the unseen public enemy of his reputation. But one sweet day, when I turned around, countless leaves of nursling green covered that tree again. It was only then that I could release my hold and drop to the earth, in the knowledge that he would be loved and remembered forevermore.

∞

In the quietude of my red-colored Benefit Street home in Providence so many years before, the night air stole through my open window to whisper its spell. Putting down the volume of Emerson’s Essays, I allowed myself to bathe in the transcendentalist ideas of a brilliant mind.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

I digested my reading, pondering the waking of the mind from its deep slumber. To know one’s mind, to know it as a center, as a creator. It is not often that something, or someone, can offer ideas that burn right through the oppressive veil of stale paradigms and jolt us into surprising new ways of thinking.

Just as my conscious mind began to emerge from the ideas blooming in its gray matter, a most enchanting scent surfed on the air filtering through the window’s curtain. The pervading scent roused me to my feet and out of doors. Wrapping a scarf tightly around the shoulders of my house dress, I allowed my nose to guide me to the Queen of the Night. The cereus’ bud, which had grown larger than the size of my fist, had surely opened. There, in my garden, the ornate white blossom with its delicate yellow center unfurled in magnificent, albeit awkward, glory. After drinking in its shimmering splendor, I backed away, leaving space for the bats, moths, and other creatures drawn to the heady magic. Knowing that its vibrancy, like Grimm’s Aschenputtel, would be spent by the first rays of dawn, I headed indoors.

But then, drunk on romance, I did not reengage with the essays of Emerson. My fingers were guided to a different work. An author, then unknown to me. A word weaver who managed to lure me into one of his peculiar fantasies. And there, with increasingly fearful desire, I half-reluctantly consumed each contoured line created by his pen. In a stance of recognition, a sort of mysterious echo stemming from my heart, a singular pain washed over me. Filled with utter horror, I vowed to avoid more works penned by this man, or even utter his name.

It was not until many years later, when I revisited this introduction, that I recognized my repulsion as an innate apprehension of the agonies my soul was fated to endure through its strange union with his very own soul.

∞

Edgar first set eyes on me as I stood clad in white, under a midnight July moon, tending my rose garden. From my core, on that humid night, drifted the aroma of perfumed orchards that he sought from the staleness of a tossed-about, classical ship of circumstance that never lost sight of land.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

To the glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome.

-Edgar Allan Poe

The pair of us were widows, but of my situation he was not yet aware. Even though my friend Mrs. Osgood, his companion earlier that evening, offered to make an introduction, he adamantly declined. Perhaps already burdened with interest, however surely platonic, in one married woman, he did not want to make a practice of it. However, I left in his mind an everlasting mark when the heat drove him over the hill from his hotel to my house next to St. John’s churchyard. Though one-sided, fate could not be denied. My form must have appeared ethereal and ghostlike as I stood in the doorway overlooking my moon-kissed patch of heaven. As the world slept, he paused and knew me at once from Mrs. Osgood’s description. He looked at my uplifted eyes that guided his lonely path back to his room.

∞

Still never having met the man, the words that brought such terror that Cereus night a few years prior murmured to me. Breaking my personal vow, I again began to read the works of Edgar. I could no longer refute the forceful energies colluding to bring us together, and I could no longer stand silent during the literary salons where The Raven and other works were certain to be a topic of conversation. On a whim, when my friend Anne asked me to write a Valentine’s Day poem for a party, I wrote it in answer to his raven and addressed it to Edgar. Although meant mostly to tease and jest, I made certain to reveal my understanding of his cynicism, of his rejection of his golden contemporaries.

Trusting, though with sorrow laden,

That when life’s dark dream is o’er,

By whatever name the maiden

Lives within thy mystic lore,

Eiros, in that distant Aidenn,

Shall his Charmion meet once more.

-Sarah Helen Whitman

Although Edgar was not in attendance at that New York party, he heard about my poem. And, in response, he sent me To Helen. Unaware that I was the source, the stimulus, of the verses, I did not respond. It was not until he described that evening he witnessed me beneath the grandeur of the night sky that I realized I was truly his Helen.

Without further delay we became two scribblers, strangers but intimate in ink, as we exchanged a flurry of correspondence. The fact that we shared the same day of birth, January 19, was surely a sign of soul-love. However, I worried that the six years I had upon him, perverted with illness, would make my countenance disappointing if he beheld me presently. I wrote him as much, and in response, a lengthy letter declared his undying love and put my fears to rest.

It was not long until he traveled to Providence with the hopes of becoming ever closer, and I wished he would attend one of my literary salons.

My salons, although would never be that of my friend Anne’s, were a personal source of pride. When I lost my husband, John, I lost an intellectual mate as well. He was a soul with whom to share not only a home but the language of poetry. And after leaving Boston, the salons became a link to the intellectual circles to which I had been accustomed. The evening I officially met Edgar, however, was not at a salon. The awaited union transpired at one of his lectures in Providence, where he recited a poem without tearing his gaze from mine.

“Helen. Have I finally met my Helen, the Helen of a thousand dreams?” he said afterward, no doubt in reference to that notorious and oftentimes despised daughter of Zeus.

“I am Helen, of that you are correct,” I said, disregarding all other souls in the room. “But that other Helen I am not.”

“You are not pleased with my comparison?”

“Not entirely,” I said with a coy smile.

In truth, I was flattered that he thought me beautiful, but that woman of myth was never the protagonist of her own destiny. Each aspect of her life was dictated by the desire of men, and I told him as much.

“I am no damsel in distress.”

He chuckled at that. “No, I would not presume anything like that. But what of divine intervention? I believe the Spartan beauty had a fair share of that as well.”

“Why, yes. I suppose she did,” I said, laughing. I did not add at that time that I held much credence in the powers of divinity.

“I have enjoyed our correspondence, Helen.”

“As I have. Your literary criticism fascinates me, oft times capable of moving me beyond my own ideas. I, too, truly delight in analyzing the arts.”

“And your poetry is, beyond question, poetry—instinct with genius,” he told me before taking a sip from his teacup.

“As is yours,” I responded truthfully.

“You really believe so?” he said, a shadow of a smile arranging itself upon his lips. “My work is amply different than some of your Transcendentalist peers.”

This was undoubtedly true, as the Transcendentalists penned light and hope to the world. And I understood that he was probably thinking about my friend, Mr. Emerson, who none could deny as the emblem of America’s new birth of freedom. However wise, clear-sighted, unique, gentle, and beautifully cool and clear Mr. Emerson was, I held a secret. I am fain to confess that he was a bit too nicely balanced and self-conservative to win one’s whole heart. Whereas Edgar’s wild, fascinating prose tempted me to abandon all four bloody chambers that comprised the beating organ beneath my breast.

“I defend artistic spirit wherever I discover it,” I said. “But your work shows that light makes shadows.”

As Edgar’s attentions were highly sought, our conversation was cut short. But before parting ways, he requested my company for the next day.

“How about the Athenaeum?” I suggested, detecting the dimming of the gaslights in the hall. “Shall we say noon?”

The suggestion seemed the perfect setting for us, the two scribblers, and I knew it would prove to be more private than at home with Mother and Sister.

“It would be my pleasure, Helen, the darling of my heart,” he said, brushing back the strand of hair that fell over his forehead. “My soul, this night, shall come to you in dreams and speak to you those fervid thanks which my pen has been powerless to utter.”

∞

We sat in the window seat at the Athenaeum Library. I selected the library’s copy of an anonymous poem I had so admired in the American Review. I began to read to him in a hushed voice.

The skies they were ashen and sober;

The leaves they were crisped 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.

“It is lovely, is it not? Have you read this poem, Ulalume?” I asked him after reading the first stanza, completely missing his amused expression. “Whatever is the matter?”

“Oh, my dearest love, there can be no denying that you and I make a perfect match,” he said. “You appreciate the highest echelon of literary works, of that much is clear.”

I, at a loss to his deeper meaning, waited for him to expand on his commentary.

Until at last, his smile erupted into tickled laughter. “Would you believe me, my darling, if I revealed myself as the author of that work in your lovely hands?”

“No, it cannot be so,” I said, affected by his infectious laughter.

“A remarkable coincidence,” he said, trying to control his merriment in the relative quietude of the library. “Let me see that anonymous poem for a moment, would you?” He gestured for me to hand him the copy of The Review. Upon his receipt, he boldly penciled his name, Edgar Allan Poe, next to the poem and closed the journal. “Shall we, my dear?” He held out his hand to me.

Less than an hour later, he pulled me into the Swan Point Cemetery, far enough to evade Mother’s disapproving glare. And by an unmarked garden grave is where he proposed marriage beneath September’s gorgeous beams. Sloping lands swept to the Seekonk’s lonely wave below. He must have thought the setting so fitting, me with my black dress, coffin-shaped charm, and penchant for holding Sunday séances.

“Look, with your searching, your seraphic eyes, into the soul of my soul.”

He took my hand in his as I peered into the depths of his eyes, sad but hopeful.

“My whole soul shakes in tremulous ecstasy, darling. The great Giver of all Good has preordained you to be mine, only mine. You are my one and only Helen. Be my wife.”

A cloud passed over the sunlight, momentarily blocking its warming rays.

Edgar continued, perhaps anticipating my contemplation. “Your influence and presence would undoubtedly lift my life out of the torpor of despair which weighs upon me,” he said. “You give inspiration to my genius.”

There upon the land settling atop the whispering bones of those who lived before us, I threw pragmatism into the wind. Heady with abandon and high on his wild talk, I craved to experience all the messiness and beauty that life bestowed to me, until I too would be positioned in the confines of a wooden box beneath the soil, delegated to become a spirit without ties to the physical world. I agreed to an immediate marriage.

It was not until I stepped across the threshold of my house that reality crashed down upon me. Notwithstanding the eloquence with which he urged upon me his wishes and his hopes, I knew too well that I could not exercise over him the power which he ascribed to me. My mother, my friends, they talked about Edgar as hardly a hair away from being a rogue. As uncertainty spread upon my skin like a rash, itchy and unsettling, I wrote to Edgar after he departed Providence to tell him of my misgivings.

When he next appeared at my door, he looked quite the fright. Dark half-moons were stark upon the pale skin beneath his eyes.

When I asked what the matter was, he replied, “I fell in love with my melancholy. I went to bed and wept through a long, long hideous night of despair."

I was not aware at the time that he had endured a half-hearted effort to end his earthly existence with a couple of ounces of laudanum on the train ride from Philadelphia. I was cognizant only of the fact that he was desperate for me, his salvation, to latch onto and pull him out of his divine despair. And in his fatal presence, love owned my power.

The one thing I could not abide, however, was the dulling of his senses with drink.

“I will not, Edgar,” I said, softening to proposal, “kiss the lips that touch liquor.”

“I will, my Helen, will extricate myself from that difficulty,” he promised. “I pledge myself to temperance. I am done forever with drink, depend on that.”

As feared, I was not the lifeline to save him from himself, from the demons alluring him to revisit his binging bouts. Only days later, he arrived on my doorstep, most agitated. In an appalling tone that rang through the house, he called upon me to save him from a terrible, impending doom. Before I could nerve myself to see him, Mother suggested that I have a cup of strong coffee prepared for him. After a mad, distracted night, he looked worse than any other day of his life - this made more tragic as it was to be immortalized in daguerreotype. Although very fine, it revealed him for the tragic poet he was in his solemnity and detachment, consumed by a self-destructive personality.

“I love you,” I uttered, putting an ether-soaked handkerchief to my nose. “But I shall not see you again.”

He clung to me so frantically as to tear away a piece of fabric from the dress I wore.

My vow to myself was not broken, except through dreams and séance.

Our spirits remain in communion as we prevail in portrait at the Atheneum. He stares out, searching for connection, for home, while my own orbs seep everlasting regret. Near each other eternally, one can almost discern our whispered prose drifting through the stacks of tomes.

TO HELEN

I saw thee once — once only — years ago:

I must not say how many — but not many.

It was a July midnight; and from out

A full-orbed moon, that, like thine own soul, soaring,

Sought a precipitate pathway up through heaven,

There fell a silvery-silken veil of light,

With quietude, and sultriness, and slumber,

Upon the upturned faces of a thousand

Roses that grew in an enchanted garden,

Where no wind dared to stir, unless on tiptoe —

Fell on the upturn'd faces of those roses

That gave out, in return for the love-light,

Their odorous souls in an ecstatic death —

Fell on the upturned faces of these roses

That smiled and died in this parterre, enchanted

By thee, and by the poetry of thy presence.

Clad all in white, upon a violet bank

I saw thee half-reclining; while the moon

Fell on the upturned faces of the roses,

And on thine own, upturn'd — alas, in sorrow!

Was it not Fate, that, on this July midnight —

Was it not Fate, (whose name is also Sorrow,)

That bade me pause before that garden-gate,

To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses?

No footstep stirred: the hated world all slept,

Save only thee and me. (Oh, Heaven! — oh, God!

How my heart beats at coupling those two words!)

Save only thee and me. I paused — I looked —

And in an instant all things disappeared.

(Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!)

The pearly lustre of the moon went out:

The mossy banks and the meandering paths,

The happy flowers and the repining trees,

Were seen no more: the very roses' odors

Died in the arms of the adoring airs.

All — all expired save thee — save less than thou:

Save only the divine light in thine eyes —

Save but the soul in thine uplifted eyes.

I saw but them — they were the world to me!

I saw but them — saw only them for hours,

Saw only them until the moon went down.

What wild heart-histories seemed to lie enwritten

Upon those crystalline, celestial spheres!

How dark a woe, yet how sublime a hope!

How silently serene a sea of pride!

How daring an ambition! yet how deep —

How fathomless a capacity for love!

But now, at length, dear Dian sank from sight,

Into a western couch of thunder-cloud;

And thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees

Didst glide away. Only thine eyes remained;

They would not go — they never yet have gone;

Lighting my lonely pathway home that night,

They have not left me (as my hopes have) since;

They follow me — they lead me through the years.

They are my ministers — yet I their slave.

Their office is to illumine and enkindle —

My duty, to be saved by their bright light,

And purified in their electric fire,

And sanctified in their elysian fire.

They fill my soul with Beauty (which is Hope,)

And are far up in Heaven — the stars I kneel to

In the sad, silent watches of my night;

While even in the meridian glare of day

I see them still — two sweetly scintillant

Venuses, unextinguished by the sun!

-Edgar Allan Poe