Max’s Musings: Poe on Love

Why do poets use poetry as their medium of choice?

I wanted to continue sharing my thoughts on Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “Deep in Earth” from last week through another lens due to the impact it yields on me.

“Deep in Earth”

Deep in earth my love is lying

And I must weep alone.

Poe’s use of the word love can either be a physical person, a personification of the love the speaker has to offer, or a mix of both. Either way, the speaker is forced to deal with the coming grief when a part of them is removed from the normalcy of their life.

Furthermore, the poem allows the reader to reflect on their own mortality as well as the mortality of their loved ones. The speaker offers their experience almost as an ominous warning. Their life is a foreshadow of what the reader’s life will eventually be. Although it is troubling, the speaker never regrets the course of their love journey. 

The speaker memorializes not only their deceased lover, but their love for them. This is their own way to grieve and process their traumatic loss from their own world. Although the speaker does not shed light on if the untimely death was unforeseen or foreshadowed, the loss remains.

Whether or not Poe is speaking from experience while reliving a lover lost to death through his poetry, he portrays and prompts the reader to mourn with the grief-stricken speaker like they are attending the funeral of the fallen lover.

Complete Tales and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe

The Evergreen Echo

Ironically, when the reader is invited into the speaker’s world of grief and pain, the speaker is now no longer forced to “weep alone”. Even though the reader loses out on knowing the dead individual in life, they can grasp a sense of who this person was to the speaker and how remarkable they were for the speaker from reflecting on their own relationships. Even people today feel obligated to suffer alone rather than risk being an inconvenience or a burden. 

When a writer writes, the act not only is put on display for others but becomes authentically theirs. This is the forefront of what writing is and can be. A writer must be vulnerable enough to write them down to begin with before they can fully process and cope with the emotions they produce from the fruitful or fruitless tree. They must be vulnerable enough to share their thoughts regardless of foreseen or unforeseen fear or judgment from others or even one’s own sense of self. 

When pen touches paper, the words become real, the feelings become real, even if the loss we endure never truly fades. As writers, we are constantly grieving and mourning from unwritten worlds to unsung songs, to love gained, and love lost.

Like the poem, as humans, we remember death for the first time. Whether it was someone crucial in your life or not, the feeling as well as the image stays with you. Death, a formidable archetype, never gets easier to overcome; but as writers, we remember our ways of coping while adopting and formulating new and innovative ways to overcome the feat ahead of you. Even in death, people live on through memories even if the speaker is the only one who holds them and cherishes them. For me, writing has always been at the forefront of my coping strategies as someone who suffers from anxiety.

When forced to face these lingering feelings of potential loss, the reader is allowed to reflect on the individuals in their life. Nobody wants to imagine life without those who make up the pillars of their own, but this experience exists as fuel for making better writers and better individuals. I believe writing like this is what weaves writers together. Writers understand fellow writers in ways that other individuals only dream of.

Where will you turn to when the will to write dims?