Ulalume | Summary
A ballad comprised of nine stanzas that vary in length from nine to thirteen lines, "Ulalume" was written and published by Poe in 1847, the year that his young wife, Virginia Clemm Poe, died. The poem is related by a first-person narrator as he wanders with his Soul through a semi-real, semi-imagined land—or dreamscape, filled with gloom and images of volcanic destruction.
The initial setting is a lonely October night of the narrator's "most immemorial year" as he moves beside a dark lake of "Auber" (the last name of a contemporary composer of sad music) and through the haunted woodlands of "Weir" (a reference to the early nineteenth-century painter Robert Weir). His own Soul or Psyche accompanies the narrator on this sad journey without a fixed destination, as they move by rivers and mountains lying at the extremities of the earth. The narrator and his Soul are oblivious to their surroundings, for their dialogue is fixated with sad memories.
As the night advances, two brilliant lights appear in the sky. The first is that of the crescent-shaped moon, associated with the cold goddess Diana. The second is called Astarte by the narrator, an alternative name for the warm goddess Venus, and the planet with which she is associated. The narrator believes that Venus has seen tears from his recent loss and that she has arisen to lead him to a "Lethean peace of the skies." In direct dialogue, the narrator's Soul says that she "mistrusts" Venus, and urges them to flee. The narrator replies to Psyche that Venus's appearance is only a dream. The light emitted by Venus is beaming with hope and beauty pointed toward heaven.
His Soul's fears calmed, they are guided by Venus "to the end of the vista" and find the door of a tomb there. He asks his Soul what is written above the tomb; Psyche replies that it is the name of the narrator's lost love, Ulalume. The speaker now remembers that it was on this very night of the previous fall that he journeyed here—not with his Soul, but with the body of his beloved Ulalume, and wonders aloud, "Ah, what demon has tempted me here?" No answer is given, but the narrator ends by saying that he now well "knows" this "misty mid region" of his melancholy mind.
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