Nevermore Lenore

Violent screeching pierced the night. He tried in vain to bat away the crow from the carcass. The ring was gone, fallen to its demise hundreds of meters below the cliff face.

Nevermore.

The poet, Edger Poe wrote to novelist Charles Dickens to set a meeting with Grip, his raven. The bird’s volatile reputation preceded him, nevertheless Poe was fixated on knowing the creature that ruled the afterlife.

However, the story wasn’t as simplistic as it seems.

What unfolded left every scholar since then, quaking in horror and disbelief.

This wasn’t any ordinary piece of 19th century literature....more the theft of one’s soul.

The heist!

The wedding ring belonging to Poe’s wife.

Grip's croaking ripped through the ravine as she transmogrified between one realm and another, her talons torn, bleeding. Yes, Poe had collaborated with the Devil; for the theft of the ring in return for wings of everlasting life; but their pact was broken by Poe’s delusions and hallucinations.

Lying motionless, a carcass at the bottom of the cliffs, Poe watched as his wife wiped his blood off her claws and flew away.

“In the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before”.

Nevermore Lenore.

By ~mpowerusleeza~

SYNOPSIS

Since the days of the Greek philosopher, Plato, when he wrote his fictional dialogue between Socrates and the orator Phaedrus, the concept of metempsychosis – the transmigration of the soul – has become in recent years increasingly the domain of fiction and fantasy writers.

Since my visits to the United States, and especially to Poe’s home in Richmond, Virginia, I have been increasingly fascinated with both Poe, and his friendship with Charles Dickens. At some stage in their meetings, or their later correspondence, Dickens must have described to Poe the antics of his pet raven, Grip; when Dickens read to his children at night, the bird would be sitting on Dicken’s shoulder, although other accounts said that the children were terrified of the bird. It had a reputation for aggression and rowdiness, tearing paint off surfaces and shredding paper documents.

Yet, when Grip died, Dickens had it taxidermied and mounted in an elaborate gilt cage which he took with him on his journeys. Grip was inspirational for Dickens, who used it as a minor character in his novel, Barnaby Rudge.

Edgar Allan Poe was fascinated by Dicken’s relationship with the bird, and used it as the centrepiece of one of his most famous and darkest poems, The Raven, after Dickens’ visit to the States in 1842. He wrote the poem three years after Dickens’ tour and the two kept up correspondence for many years afterwards.

I have based my vignette on their mutual fascination with the Raven.

LEEZA COOPER