King Arthur Movie Tristan

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

"'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--

Only this and nothing more."



Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Eagerly I wished the morrow;--vainly I had sought to borrow

From my books surcease of sorrow--sorrow for the lost Lenore--

For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore--

Nameless here for evermore.



And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

Thrilled me--filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;

So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating

"'Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door--

Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door;

This it is and nothing more."



Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,

"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;

But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,

And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,

That I scarce was sure I heard you"--here I opened wide the door--

Darkness there and nothing more.





quoted from The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe



--------------------


I always liked Poe's The Raven, I think there's a musical tone to it. It begs to be read aloud. And what better time than the night before Halloween?



I hope you all enjoy your weekend. I'll be taking the children trick-or-treating tomorrow. Diego will be coming along with us. He is dressing as a Wizard this year. I'll post pics soon :)

title: Ligeia


author: Edgar Allan Poe


genre: short story/horror


published: 1838


first line: I Cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia.





In this short story an unnamed narrator is describing his wife Ligeia, claiming that she is beautiful, yet also strange looking. She's pale and thin with unusually large eyes.

Those eyes! those large, those shining, those divine orbs! they
became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers.

Ligeia falls ill and as her health begins to decline, the narrator knows she will die. She suffers and fights for her life. On her deathbed she asks him to read aloud verses she wrote a few days earlier.





After her death, the narrator moves away and buys an abbey in England. He begins to use Opium to ease his pain over the death of his wife. The narrator eventually remarries, his new bride is the Lady Rowena.

The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored memories connected with both, had much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into that
remote and unsocial region of the country.

His marriage is an unhappy one. He misses Ligeia so much that he can't fully love his second wife.



One line in particular made me laugh out loud. Yes, laugh while reading Poe.

I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man.

That's harsh! I wondered why he married her then.




Lady Rowena becomes sick suffering from a chronic disease that has her bedridden and feverish. She tells the narrator that she thinks she sees and hears things in their room. He also thinks he sees something, but blames it on the opium.




After Rowena passes, she is wrapped for burial and the narrator is grieving at her deathbed, when he hears a low sobbing. He checks on his wife and thinks he sees color in her cheeks and her breathing, but he isn't sure. Throughout the night he keeps hearing sighs coming from the body. After many hours, he sees the body rise from the bed and walk to the center of the room. He's frozen in horror and when he looks at her face, her eyes look just like his beloved Ligeia's.



While this is not my favorite Poe, mostly because I felt the writing to be too mellow, I enjoyed it. I'm used to alot more darkness and intensity in his writing. I liked the creepy ending. I felt there was a mystery to the story because the since the narrator wasn't too reliable due to his opium habit, I was guessing as to what to believe or not.






R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril Challenge

title: The Fall of the House of Usher

author: Edgar Allan Poe

genre: short story/horror

published: 1845

first line:

DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.





Ahhhhh....Edgar Allan Poe. He doesn't disappoint. There's something about cuddling up on the couch at night reading Poe, draped in a blanket and sipping hot tea.
That's exactly how I read this short story.



In The Fall of the House of Usher the narrator is traveling by horseback and arrives at the house of Roderick Usher, who is his boyhood friend.
He will be staying there a few weeks. Roderick had written him a letter saying that he was suffering a 'mental disorder' and asking if he would come and stay with him a while.

Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks.

As usual, Poe is intense. I enjoy his writing, it's so dark and dramatic.

I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity - an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn - a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.

Once inside the house, a silent butler takes the visitor through the dark hallways to the master of the mansion. He finds Roderick looking pale and sick and blaming the house for his poor health as well as the illness of his sister Madeline.



The visitor spends a few days with Roderick. They read, Roderick plays the guitar and even sings. When the very ill Madeline passes away, Roderick insists on burying her in the family tomb located in the house, for two weeks, before taking her body to the cemetary. The narrator helps Roderick place her in the tomb, but does take notice that Madeline's cheeks are still rosey and she seems to be asleep.



One night a storm starts and Roderick appears at the narrators bedroom. He is very anxious and the narrator decides to read him a story to calm him. As the narrator reads the story, adn the storm rages, cracking and ripping sounds are heard from within the house. Roderick is terrified and is insisting that his sister Madeline is making the noises and was buried alive.





I liked this one, and the way Poe described the house was perfect. The imagery alone can give the reader chills and take them inside the house itself. I could totally picture the creepy mansion.


This is a great short story, especially if you want a quick dose of something spooky.

...the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode...

R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril Challenge

title: The Tell-Tale Heart

author: Edgar Allan Poe

published: 1843

first line: TRUE! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?



The Tell-Tale Heart is the first story I read by Edgar Allen Poe when I was in high school, and it is still a favorite of mine. If you have never read Poe, I suggest starting with this one.

In this short story, the narrator tells about an old man that he decides to kill. The only reason being was that the old man had a creepy white eye.
After several nights of creeping into his room and watching the old man sleep, the narrator finally attacks and kills him. As he kills him, he thinks he can hear his heart beating loudly. He then dismembers the body and buries it underneath the floorboards.

The neighbors hear the old mans screams and call the police. When the police arrive at the front door, the narrator tells them that the screams the neighbors heard were his own and that the old man is out of town.
The narrator thinks he has the policemen fooled and he sits right above the floorboards where he hid the body. However, he beings to hear a sound, the beating of the old mans heart. When he feels he can't take it anymore and that the policemen can hear it too, he begins tearing at the flooboards and admits to his crime.

Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief - oh, no! - it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well.






Read Poe's works for free here.

This read has been part of R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril…IV

title: Eleonora

author: Edgar Allan Poe

genre: short story

published: 1842

first line: I AM come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion.



First of all, what better way to spend a cold Fall evening than curled up on the couch with a book of Edgar Allen Poe's work and a cup of hot tea? I've been doing just that lately and very much enjoying it.



The narrator of this short story is Eleonora's cousin. He tells the story about how he lived with Eleonora and her mother in 'The Valley of the Many-Colored Grass'. Soon enough, the narrator and Eleonora fall in love.

Hand in hand about this valley, for fifteen years, roamed I with Eleonora before Love entered within our hearts. It was one evening at the close of the third lustrum of her life, and of the fourth of my own, that we sat, locked in each other's embrace, beneath the serpent-like trees, and looked down within the water of the River of Silence at our images therein.

Eleonora becomes sick, and the narrator vows to never marry and to love only her forever. He even swore a curse upon himself if he ever broke his vow. Eleonora promises to visit him after she dies, and to perfume the air so he knows she is there.


The valley is not as lush and beautiful after Eleonora's death. She does visit him and he hears her whispers and sighs and smells her perfume.

oh, but once only! I was awakened from a slumber, like the slumber of death, by the pressing of spiritual lips upon my own.

Eventually he leaves the valley and moves into the city. He ends up marrying and was not cursed like he swore he would be. One night he hears Eleonora whispering to him, saying 'Thou art absolved' and giving him and his new wife her blessing.





I enjoyed this short story. I was glad there was a love story involved and a bit of the supernatural to it also.


And Poe's writing is fantastic as usual.

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence -- whether much that is glorious- whether all that is profound -- does not spring from disease of thought -- from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

This is supposed to be Poe's signature, I thought this was pretty cool.






Read Poe's works for free here.

This read has been part of R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril…IV

title: The Pit and the Pendulum


author: Edgar Allan Poe


published: 1842

genre: horror/short story

first line: I WAS sick -- sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me.


In The Pit and the Pendulum
a prisoner who has been sentenced to death during the Spanish Inquisition finds himself in a dark room. The man faints a few times and when he wakes up he finds himself strapped to a table with a bladelike Pendulum swinging above him and coming closer to cutting through him. He manages to free himself but he realizes there is a large pit in the middle of the room. Soon he realizes the walls are burning hot and closing in on him, moving him towards the pit. Just as he begins to fall into the pit, he hears human voices and trumpets and the fiery walls move back. The man is saved before falling to the bottom of the pit.

What boots it to tell of the long, long hours of horror more than mortal, during which I counted the rushing vibrations of the steel! Inch by inch -- line by line -- with a descent only appreciable at intervals that seemed ages -- down and still down it came! Days passed -- it might have been that many days passed -- ere it swept so closely over me as to fan me with its acrid breath. The odor of the sharp steel forced itself into my nostrils. I prayed -- I wearied heaven with my prayer for its more speedy descent. I grew frantically mad, and struggled to force myself upward against the sweep of the fearful scimitar. And then I fell suddenly calm, and lay smiling at the glittering death, as a child at some rare bauble.

I enjoyed reading The Pit and the Pendulum, and as usual Poe sets the scene perfectly. There's a dark dungeon, rats, a deep pit and a blade coming down on a man strapped to a wooden table. Sound creepy and dramatic? It is.

In the deepest slumber -- no! In delirium -- no! In a swoon -- no! In death -- no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream.

It was not that I feared to look upon things horrible, but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing to see. At length, with a wild desperation at heart, I quickly unclosed my eyes. My worst thoughts, then, were confirmed. The blackness of eternal night encompassed me. I struggled for breath. The intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me. The atmosphere was intolerably close.

Read Poe's works for free here.

This read has been part of R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril…IV

Poe Friday: The Black Cat

First off, I hope you are all having a great Friday. Hubby took me and the kids out to dinner today at IHOP (what is better than a stack of buttermilk pancakes and scrambled eggs for dinner?) and now i'm home getting some online time in.

This week I read Edgar Allan Poe's short story called The Black Cat.



first line: For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief.

The narrator starts of the story by speaking about his black cat named Pluto. One day, he comes home drunk and Pluto scratches him. He loses control and cuts one of the cats eyes out.

When reason returned with the morning - when I had slept off the fumes of the night's debauch - I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched. I again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed.

Soon after, the narrator hangs the cat. I know, how depressing. After a fire burns down his home, he and his wife end up living in a cellar. He then ends up finding another black cat. This cat however, has white fur on his chest. The narrators wife takes the cat in and the narrator soon begins to get creeped out by the animal. Before you know it, the narrator finds an ax and tries to kill the cat, when his wife stops him, he kills her instead.




I liked this short story. I always enjoy Poe's dramatic words.

Alas! neither by day nor by night knew I the blessing of Rest any more! During the former the creature left me no moment alone; and, in the latter, I started, hourly, from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast weight - an incarnate Night-Mare that I had no power to shake off - incumbent eternally upon my heart !

Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?

You can read Poe online for free here.

Time for Poe Friday.






title: The Premature Burial

genre: horror/short story

author: Edgar Allan Poe


first line: There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.


rated: pretty good

The Premature Burial deals with a fear many people have, being buried alive.
As Poe writes:

To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.

The narrator in this short story tells of different instances of people being buried alive. Some were able to make thier way out of the poorly buried coffins, others skeletons were found years later in odd positions, as if they had been trying to escape.

We know of nothing so agonizing upon Earth -- we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost Hell.

The narrator then goes on to tell of his own experience. He suffered from a disease that made him pass out and fall into a death-like trance. He would be unconcious for days, he calls it 'cataleptic disorder'. He was terrified of being buried alive one day, so he had the family vault remodeled so that it could be easily opened from the inside. He winds up living in fear and not traveling far from home, in case he falls into one of his fits and is accidentally buried alive.



In the end, he winds up waking up in a dark, confined area, and right away he thinks he is buried alive. It turns out, he was on trip with a friend, on a boat. When a storm comes, they anchor the boat and all go to sleep in the berth, which is small and dark. When he starts screaming, the crew screams back at him to be quiet, he realizes he is still on the boat. After that, he no longer lives his life in fear of being buried alive. Life is too short!

I went abroad. I took vigorous exercise. I breathed the free air of Heaven. I thought upon other subjects than Death. I discarded my medical books. "Buchan" I burned. I read no "Night Thoughts" -- no fustian about churchyards -- no bugaboo tales -- such as this. In short, I became a new man, and lived a man's life.

I liked this short story, the ending was different than what I expected.




Have you read this short story? If not, you can do so here

I stumbled upon Poe Fridays while blog hopping, i'm sorry but I can't remember whose blog I first found it on. The basic idea is to read Poe and post on Fridays about it. I am a fan of EAP's dark, dramatic writing, I do have his collection of works on my bookshelf. The Tell Tale Heart and The Raven are my favorites. For today I will post his poem, Lenore.

Lenore

Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll! -a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river -
And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear? -weep now or never more!
See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
Come! let the burial rite be read -the funeral song be sung! -
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young -
A dirge for her, the doubly dead in that she died so young.



"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her -that she died!
How shall the ritual, then, be read? -the requiem how be sung
By you -by yours, the evil eye, -by yours, the slanderous tongue
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?"



Peccavimus; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song
Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong!
The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside,
Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride -
For her, the fair and debonnaire, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes -
The life still there, upon her hair -the death upon her eyes.



Avaunt! tonight my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise,
But waft the angel on her flight with a paean of old days!
Let no bell toll! -lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth,
Should catch the note, as it doth float up from the damned Earth.
To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven -
From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven -
From grief and groan to a golden throne beside the King of Heaven."

related link: http://www.online-literature.com/poe/

Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!

Let the bell toll! -a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river -

And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear? -weep now or never more!

See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!

Come! let the burial rite be read -the funeral song be sung! -

An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young -

A dirge for her, the doubly dead in that she died so young.



"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,

And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her -that she died!

How shall the ritual, then, be read? -the requiem how be sung

By you -by yours, the evil eye, -by yours, the slanderous tongue

That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?"



Peccavimus; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song

Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong!

The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside,

Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride -

For her, the fair and debonnaire, that now so lowly lies,

The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes -

The life still there, upon her hair -the death upon her eyes.



Avaunt! tonight my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise,

But waft the angel on her flight with a paean of old days!

Let no bell toll! -lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth,

Should catch the note, as it doth float up from the damned Earth.

To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven -

From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven -

From grief and groan to a golden throne beside the King of Heaven."



-Edgar Allan Poe