The City in the Sea

The City In the Sea is a poem written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1831. The poem details a city that was once glorious, but has become a throne of death and evil, and is swallowed by the sea.

Status

I do not own a book containing this poem, but I have read it.

Review

Good

• The poem flows well. It has nice rhymes, and occasionally changes rhyme order and syllable count.
• As usual, Poe does a good job making descriptions that I can see in my mind's eye.

Bad

• It's not quite clear to me what's going on with the city. I presume that it was destroyed due to the citizen's idolatry, but it's not clear. Has it already sunk, or does it sink in the final part of the poem? I'm not entirely sure.

Ugly

• Nothing.

Poem

Lo! Death has rear'd himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently-
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free-
Up domes- up spires- up kingly halls-
Up fanes- up Babylon-like walls-
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers-
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye-
Not the gaily-jewell'd dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass-
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea-
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave- there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide-
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow-
The hours are breathing faint and low-
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

Gallery

• 

  Illustration by Hugh Steiner-Prag.

Links

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_in_the_Sea - Wikipedia.