Tabb Centenary Year IV

Three poems on Edgar Allan Poe by Rev. John B. Tabb.

Poe’s Cottage at Fordham

Here, where to pinching penury the gloom
   Of Death was wedded, came Immortal Love,
   And Genius, with all the pomp thereof,
To consecrate a temple and a tomb.

May 1897 (p. 349, Quatrains: Persons)

Poe

Sad spirit, swathed in brief mortality,
Of fate and fervid fantasies the prey,
Till the remorseless demon of dismay
O’erwhelmed thee—lo! thy doleful destiny
Is chanted in the requiem of the sea
And shadowed in the crumbling ruins gray
That beetle o’er the tarn. Here all the day
The Raven broods on solitude and thee;
Here gloats the moon at midnight, while the Bells
Tremble, but speak not lest thy Ulalume
Should startle from her slumbers, or Lenore
Hearken the love-forbidden tone that tells
The shrouded legend of thine early doom
And blast the bliss of heaven forevermore.

1882 (p. 297, Sonnets)

To Edgar Allan Poe

Dead fifty years? Not so;
Nay, fifty years ago
   Death, obloquy and spite,
To curse his ashes came.
   But lo, the living light
Beneath the breath of shame
   Indignant, spurned the night,
And withered them in flame.

October 1899 (p. 269, Himself and Others)

[Today is the bicentenary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe.]

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 01/19/09 09:46:38 AM
Categorized as Father Tabb Centenary Year & Literary.