In honor of the month of October, the month of my anti-birthday, my second and actually my first favorite month, I'll be discussing the poem The Conqueror Worm by Edgar Allen Poe.
https://poemuseum.org/the-conqueror-worm/
You can read it yourself here. I'll summarize as best I can.
Actually, there's a lot going on. Maybe over the course of the entire month of October I will do a line by line analysis of Poe's Worm poem.
It starts with the line:
Lo! 'tis a gala night
So right off the bat we've got the exclamation 'Lo!' Which is an old expression meaning 'Look!' or 'Behold!'
Pay attention! Edgar is telling you. AH! he says.
'Tis a gala night.
He's saying it's a festive, celebratory night. A special occasion. In other words,
HEY LOOK EVERYBODY THEY'RE THROWING A PARTY!
Then he says
Within the lonesome latter years--
So he's like subverting the first line a little bit. It's a special occasion but it's also lonesome somehow. And 'latter years' I feel like refers to the end of something. You might imagine some ghost town or soon-to-be ghost town. Like how in Salt Lake City the lake is evaporating and it's releasing all these heavy metals and junk so it will probably eventually be uninhabitable. That's something my sister told me once. But anyway we've got this celebration of sorts in this place and time where things are on their way out, so to speak. A last hurrah, perhaps!
Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years--
A mystic throng, bewinged, bedight
in veils and drowned in tears,
Here's one thing that always gets me about this kind of analysis, I imagine ol' Edgar Allan Poe wanted to be understood in real time, ya know? Like he's speaking in a poetic mode obviously but I don't think his intention was for people to have to look up these words. I don't know. And like, I can make enough sense of the words to know what's going on but to really understand it and make sure I'm not missing something, I gotta look up a lot of this stuff.
Anyway this group of people is a mystic throng-- so it's like some sort of magical crowd. Or an gathering of people with esoteric knowledge. A mystic throng is just a great phrase, in my opinion. Then he says they are 'bewinged, bedight'. He's suggesting they're wearing wings some sense and then he says they're dressed in veils and drowned in tears.
I'm not exactly sure what he's saying this crowd looks like. It seems like it's supernatural in some way and they're also sad. Deeply sad. Mournful veil sad. Drowned in tears, even. Boo-hooing. Absolute boo-hooery. What are they so sad about? Their society collapsing? But it's a party.
And that's where we'll leave it for tonight. Tune in tomorrow. To learn the next 4 lines that make up the second half of the first stanza. Weird stuff going on.
