The Pulse Pounding Conclusion of The Conqueror Worm by Edgar Allan Poe

 To recap:

It's a happy sad party! Everyone's dressed up nice but also crying and the band seems kinda...off.

There's a play and there's mimes and also Invisible Wo!

They go round and round and it's just spooky sad wicked vibes all the way down.

A big monstermin comes out and eats everyone! oh no! Blood icky.

And now, the final stanza:

Out — out are the lights — out all!

And, over each dying form,

The curtain, a funeral pall,

Comes down with the rush of a storm,

And the seraphs, all haggard and wan,

Uprising, unveiling, affirm

That the play is the tragedy “Man,”

Its hero the Conqueror Worm.

Once again, as is the case in every stanza, we get another em dash aside from Poe.

Stanza 1: 

Within the lonesome latter years —

A mystic throng, bewinged, bedight

Stanza 2:

And hither and thither fly —

Mere puppets they, who come and go

Stanza 3:

That motley drama — oh, be sure

It shall not be forgot!

Stanza 4:

It writhes! — it writhes! — with mortal pangs

And now, "Out -- out are the lights -- out all!

For me it draws attention to the theatrical nature of the poet/poem. One point that Crab made that I thought was very good was that everything that happens in the fourth stanza is under the conceit of a play happening. That could explain the discrepancies I was talking about. But that got me thinking about how many layers are between you, the reader, and the world in which the poem takes place in.

There's you reading this, there's me telling you my reading of it, there's the poem itself which I feel like is drawing attention to the reading of itself. Does that make sense? 

Like, sometimes text tries to get out of the way, you know? It's trying to convey information to put the thoughts into your head as seamlessly as possible. To immerse you. Any sort of affectations or embellishments would come from the reader. This poem isn't doing that. The heightened drama is baked in. 

Anyway the poem is describing a play that is a world/scene within the world established in the first stanza. 

I'll see if I can land this plane when we get to the final lines but first we have to talk about what happens.

The play ends! Abruptly!

All the dead bodies are covered and put to rest by the closing of the theater curtain with the rush of a storm. 

I think there's a reading of this play that would be pretty funny to watch. All these mumbling mimes dance about and then horrifically devoured and then the curtain slams shut with the force of a storm. 

And then we get these tired looking angels, the seraphs, all haggard and wan, who perhaps triumphantly or at least conclusively deliver us the moral of the play:

That the play is the tragedy “Man,”

Its hero the Conqueror Worm.

What to make of it? I think it resolves the two ideas established and developed in stanzas 3 and 4. In stanza 3 we get see the sorry cycle of mankind, doomed by the Invisible Wo of the higher powers. And then we learn that the mayhem of stanza 4 was actually "the good ending". 

I don't think Poe is trying to tell us that this is what he actually thinks. Fully. I think the plot of the poem is in service of the main goal and shocking and exciting people. He's being a provocateur. 

He kind of reminds me, in a way, of Tony from Crimes Pays But Botany Doesn't. Tony often talks about "the death cult" that actively destroys native habitats and puts up cheaply made overpriced developments that can't sustain life in the name of profit and growth. The poem is meant to shock the reader but I think in the world it takes place in, it's what this tired, slowly dying society wants. They want this swift end. 

AI singularity doomsday??

I don't know. I definitely haven't made up my mind on this poem but I hoped you enjoyed reading it with me and I appreciate you following all my asides and meanderings and I hope you are also equipped with the knowledge to think about this poem and also appreciate it. 

My favorite thing about Poe is he's so dreary and ghoulish but also entertaining at the same time. He's having the most fun when he's telling you the worst stuff he can imagine.

a new thought on batomon showdown

 it's that game I played and freaked out about.

I'm still playing it but everything is dialed way down now. But it's fun.

One thing that I think playing this game might help with is choosing things quickly. Something I've always hated as a coach and a camp counselor is picking teams or making groups. It's a very fraught endeavor that is, at the same time, often really important to how the experience goes and bound to make some people upset and disappointed. I've seen it done well. I have done it well in the past. But I never like doing it and any time I can pass it off to someone else I will. Especially if it has to be on the spot. 

In my mind there's almost no way to do it without implicitly making a value judgment about someone in front of everyone else. I have a lot of thoughts about it. 

Anyway this game is almost entirely making choices about building a team. It's silly but like one reason I would lose initially is I would get attached to a little batomon that I had chosen from the start but then it's abilities didn't scale as the game progressed and it became a liability. And I didn't want to kick it off the team because it had served me well. Maybe this game is turning me into a sociopath. But I think by nature I'm overly sentimental and could benefit from making more rational in-the-moment choices. 

There is that Maya Angelou quote though, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

Well I've got bad news for you Maya Angelou, you're never making it to Diamond Two rank in Batomon Showdown if you're worried about how that level 2 Gildshell feels.

you ask your childhood friend curtis who he would be if he could be anyone

 "Yeah okay so I would be like a monk on top of mountain somewhere, right? Chilling in a temple. I'm sitting up there--having so many thoughts. Pew pew pew it's like lightning in my mind. My consciousness is like a raging swirling cosmos but then you zoom out and I'm like completely zen and still and stuff and you zoom back in and I've compressed the universe mind into a singularity and it's like everything in nothingness. But I'm sitting up there and I just know I'm so smart. I'm so so smart. I'm having all the revelations and epiphanies and I see how everyone is so misguided and astray but I can't help them because they're too far gone and I weep tears of infinite compassion and sorrow and the tears run down the temple steps and onto the snow because the temple is super high up and it creates a little snowball that starts rolling down the mountain and it gets bigger and bigger until it creates this massive snow boulder that causes an avalanche and it destroys a village at the base of the mountain and only a little girl survives. And so she grows up seeking vengeance and she trains her whole life to come up the mountain and assassinate me. Twenty years later I'm sleeping an seemingly unawares and then for no reason I roll off my sleeping pad and a split second later the girl crashes through the ceiling and pierces the floor right where my neck was just a moment ago. I throw a dagger at her but she blocks it with a kick and then we have an extended fight scene for like twenty minutes, destroying the temple and at the end we're both up on the roof breathing heavily and we each have a knife at the other's throat and she realizes that killing me won't bring her village back and that we're the only two who can understand each other but she can't accept that so she disengages and heads back down the mountain, more lost than ever. Just a regular day for a guy like me though."

The Conqueror Worm Stanza Four!

 The action happens!

But see, amid the mimic rout,

A crawling shape intrude!

A blood-red thing that writhes from out

The scenic solitude!

It writhes! — it writhes! — with mortal pangs

The mimes become its food,

And the angels sob at vermin fangs

In human gore imbued!

First phrase we encounter that's kind of strange is mimic rout. Mimic, in this case, refers to the Mimes from the second stanza. And rout, according to a search, can mean several things but in this case most likely refers to a disorderly and chaotic fleeing by a group. So it's just referencing what the mimes were doing in the second stanza. 

I don't have to tell you this but a horrible creature emerges and starts devouring the mimes. 

One phrase that I think is somewhat interesting is "the scenic solitude!"

At the start we are told that the crawling shape intrudes from amid the mimic rout. Which, as we already established, is a chaotic group. But then we're told this blood-red thing writhes from out the scenic solitude. Scenic solitude is, by definition, the opposite of a mimic rout. A peaceful empty place? Is the writhing thing coming out of chaos or coming out of peace? I don't know. I don't know that there's even a point being made by this discrepancy. Or if it's even a discrepancy at all and I'm not applying definitions correctly.

Anyway I like the double 'It writhes!-- it writhes!" 

Kind of a crazy move by Poe, right? Maybe I'm wrong and Crab can correct me but I don't feel like there was anything in the previous stanzas, other than perhaps the title, that would lead us to believe that a horrible monster was going to show up and eat everyone. 

And, perhaps this is another discrepancy to go along with the rout/solitude thing, we're told very clearly in the start of the second stanza that the Mimes are "in the form of God on high" and maybe that's referring to the idea that like Man is made in God's image or something but the Mimes definitely get eaten and 

the angels sob at vermin fangs

In human gore imbued.

So are the Mimes human or gods? Also why does the monster come and eat everyone? I still don't get it.

But that's also another reason I love Poe. He will just have a monster come and eat everyone. Is there symbolism to it? Seems like we get some commentary on it in the last stanza but I think part of the reason this section is so abrupt is that we just got done talking about the cycle of humanity just goes round and round and nothing ever changes. UNTIL A BIG WORM COMES AND EATS EVERYONE.

I'm rambling. Stay tuned for the finale where the big twist is revealed! 

felt like I looked good today

 

you know what I Iike

 underrated quality!

UNDERRATED QUALITY!

I like when people speak their words with care. I like when people form their words with care. I like when people hand you their words like they're handing you a delicate flaky airy buttery biscuit over a gravel parking lot on a hot summer day. 

Hand your words to me nicely!

I'd get a T-shirt with that on it. Not really though. Because that would be obnoxious. But if you could somehow get a notification that says "HAND YOUR WORDS TO HIM NICELY", I'd appreciate that.

Heck dang shoot I'll even just take a kind of affectation. Put some spin on em. Put some english on your sentences. You know when people talk and the words come out with a little bit of topspin or they have a little bit of two-seam run? I love that.

Don't. 

Don't you ever. 

Don't ever just hurl your words at me formless and expletive. 

I'm not saying to have proper diction. But I'm saying take some time to consider the manner in which you deliver your words. 

Someone tell me how I deliver words! Am I doing a good job? Am I serving em up nice?

I think it's a nice thing you can do for people and for the people who like it it will be like a pleasant breeze and then ones who can't be bothered are already too far gone.

look at the numbers

Listen!

Lo!

As of my checking, there are 81 days left in the year. 82 if you count today.

I have made 219 posts for the year.

Ergo,

I have to post every day OR average a post a day until the end of the year to get to 300 posts.

Which would mean back to back 300 post years. We've never seen that. 

What was going on in 2021? Only 183 posts. 

Here's a post of note from a somewhat historic time. On the leap year, Feb 29, 2020 I made a post that said I was missing home. Little did I know that a virus was going to shut down the world and I would move back home for about 2 months. Funny.