And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy grey eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams—
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.
These are the lines I saw in a recent blog post by John Howe, and they inspired me to look up Mr Poe’s original poem. I thought that I would like it based on that stanza, and I was quite right. The full poem by the author can be found here with Mr Howe’s blog post present here, for interests of full disclosure.
John Howe often posts interesting things, and his writings go about on great loops so I am seldom surprised by finding a lot of stuff in them that I would like to take a further look into. This time round he concentrated on an illustrator, Edmund Dulac, and that illustrator’s works on the poems of Mr Edgar Allen Poe.
I discovered quite a few things in that specific post. Firstly, Mr Poe’s writings extend beyond ‘The Raven’ and I am now planning to take a look into them in the not most distant future. Quite a few of his poems look good, and I maybe did not quite expect that. Secondly, illustrators probably live in a better world than ours. That is the feeling I often get when I look at what Mr Howe has drawn, and that feeling also accompanies me when I look at what Mr Dulac managed to draw based on the words of Mr Poe. Maybe they know the secrets to a more fulfilling life?
I’ll have the reader look at the blog post by John Howe to determine how much you like those illustrations, but I am quite fond of some of them.
But now, to the words present in this poem… they carry me away. And I know that was the feeling Mr Dulac wanted to convey in his images for it is exactly with what he has succeeded. I am unsure which one is greater — the poem by Mr Poe or the illustration based on that poem. They form a single unit, and that is most fitting in my mind.
