For doubt and darkness, o'er thy head, Forever waved their Condor wings

From The "Old Stone Bank" history of Rhode Island comes this story of a very distant relative by marriage, Sarah Helen Powers Whitman.

One hot July evening in the year 1845, Edgar Allan Poe was walking slowly along Benefit Street in Providence. He had just delivered a lecture at the Lyceum, and, on his return to the hotel, finding the heat unbearable, he had walked up the hill in search of cooler air. At the corner of Church Street, tired by his recent exertions, he paused and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. As he moved on again, cane in one hand and his hat held behind him in his customary fashion, he noticed a woman standing in the doorway of the house on the corner, evidently seeking relief from the heat in the few breezes which occasionally touched the hill. In the light of the moon, Poe could see her face, and, struck by the charm of her beauty, he determined to make her acquaintance at first opportunity.

But it was three years before he was formally introduced to her. In the meantime, he had moved to Providence, leaving Boston, where he had gone with his mother after the death of his girl-wife, Virginia Clemm, whom he had married when she was but thirteen and he twenty-six. He had been in Providence for some time before he was able to arrange a meeting with the woman whose image had been in his mind since that night in July.

Their next meeting took place in September of the year 1848, and the occasion was a gathering of literary devotees at the home of the woman herself, whose name was Sarah Helen Whitman. She was the daughter of Nicolas and Anna Marsh Power, and had been widowed some years before by the death of her young husband, after which she had returned to Providence to live with her mother and sister. Helen Whitman, as she was known at the time, was a prominent figure in literary circles. Her home was a meeting-place for the Providence intellectuals, and numbered among her friends were poets, essayists, and thinkers of national repute. She had contributed to several magazines, and, in fact, Poe himself had praised her work even before he came to know her. She was also a student of spiritualism, and some of her writings were devoted to this subject.

No better example of “love at first sight” can be found than in the case of the romance between Poe and Helen Whitman. The hopes and dreams of Poe, given birth on that night three years before, realized themselves in actuality, while Mrs. Whitman herself was immediately fascinated by his peculiar charm. In a letter to her the day following this meeting—one of seven letters now in the possession of Miss Louise Chace of Providence, which are reputed to be valued at fifty thousand dollars—Poe described his sensations as he touched her hand for the first time. Later, in one of his better-known poems, “To Helen,” he tells of the first time he saw her.

The love letters which followed during the next month reflected the fire and high spirit that the reader finds in many of his tales and poems. They rival, perhaps, the famous “Sonnets from the Portuguese” and the letters of Abelard and Heloise. His passionate, impetuous courtship was too much for Mrs. Whitman, and, in spite of the advice of her mother and friends, who believed the couple incompatible—Mrs. Whitman, at forty-two, was six years his senior—she agreed to the wedding Poe so ardently desired.

The pair used to meet at the Athenaeum and spend afternoons conversing together behind the stacks. The story is told of how one day, while they were discussing poetry, Helen happened to mention an anonymous poem she had read in the American Review. The poem was Poe’s own “Ulahume”, and, finding a copy of the magazine on the shelves, he signed his name beneath the poem. The copy of this magazine has been preserved and can be seen today at the Athenaeum. A portrait, incidentally, of Mrs. Whitman can also be seen at the Athenaeum.

Click to enlarge
Detail of the portrait. Source: Cephas Giovanni Thompson’s Oil Portrait of Sarah Helen Whitman

Their courtship, however, was far from a completely happy one. Mrs. Whitman’s friends and relatives did not approve of Poe, and warned her against marriage with a man whose weaknesses and dissipations were so well-known at the time. The fact that he was penniless, in spite of his writings, while she was so wealthy, was another argument advanced by those opposing the union. These warnings had their effect in the end, even if Helen did persist in feeling that she loved him. Poe finally heard rumors of what was being said about him, and, fearing that she would break the engagement, he took a large dose of laudanum, intending suicide. But it succeeded only in making him ill.

His dreams of a happy marriage, full of inspiration could never come true, although for a time it appeared as if the wedding would take place. He received her consent to a conditional engagement, later banns were published, and a contract was even drawn up in which it was stipulated that Mrs. Whitman, in marrying again, would give up her share in the Power estate; but the engagement was broken almost on the eve of the ceremony.

It was hardly a hopeful situation. Poe, reckless and profligate, barely able to keep himself in food and clothing, was obliged to support the mother of his first wife. Helen, on the other hand, was in ill health, and heart disease constantly threatened to cut her life short. Furthermore, there was opposition to Poe on the part of Helen’s mother and sister.

In December of that year, only three months after the courtship began, Poe came to Providence from New York to lecture at the Lyceum on “American Poetry”. He received Helen’s agreement to an immediate marriage, but, after the lecture, he fell in with a group of young men at the Earl House, where he was staying, and began drinking. Three nights later, he appeared at the Power home, obviously drunk. There was a scene, and Poe was ejected.

The next morning he sent up an apology, but in the afternoon he learned, upon calling at the house, that the engagement was definitely broken. Mrs. Whitman, ill from the excitement of the night before, lay on a couch in a state of semi-consciousness. Disregarding Mrs. Power, Poe knelt at Helen’s side and frantically begged her to speak to him. Finally, she opened her eyes and asked faintly, “What can I say?”

“Say that you love me,” implored Poe.

“I love you,” she said, and those were the last words she ever spoke to him. For her mother was careful that the engagement remain forever broken, and Poe returned to New York. Three weeks later, in a wounded tone, he wrote to her, but Mrs. Whitman, fearing that a revival of correspondence would lead to something more serious, did not reply. Once, later, a friend tried to arrange their meeting in Lowell, but Mrs. Whitman, learning that Poe was coming, left Lowell just before he arrived.

Poe then went to Richmond, Virginia, and entered into a disastrous engagement with a former schoolday sweetheart. His tragic death occurred a little later, after he had been found nearly dead on the streets of Baltimore. Mrs. Whitman, remembering that the fine attributes of Poe had always obscured, for her, his fatal weakness, lived until 1878 in ill health, refusing from time to time the many offers of marriage which came to her even in her old age.

When the news of Poe’s death reached his former lover in Providence, she wrote the following verses which were said to have been inspired by him:

Resurgemus
by Sarah Helen Powers Whitman

I mourn thee not: no words can tell
The solemn calm that tranced my breast
When first I knew thy soul had past
From earth to its eternal rest;

For doubt and darkness, o'er thy head,
Forever waved their Condor wings;
And in their murky shadows bred
Forms of unutterable things;

And all around thy silent hearth,
The glory that once blushed and bloomed
Was but a dim-remembered dream
Of “the old time entombed."

Those melancholy eyes that seemed
To look beyond all time, or, turned
On eyes they loved, so softly beamed,—
How few their mystic language learned.

How few could read their depths, or know
The proud, high heart that dwelt alone
In gorgeous palaces of woe.
Like Eblis on his burning throne.

For ah! no human heart could brook
The darkness of thy doom to share,
And not a living eye could look
Unscathed upon thy dread despair.

I mourn thee not: life had no lore
Thy soul in morphean dews to steep.
Love's lost nepenthe to restore,
Or bid the avenging sorrow sleep.

Yet, while the night of life shall last.
While the slow stars above me roll,
In the heart's solitudes I keep
A solemn vigil for thy soul.

I tread dim cloistral aisles, where all
Beneath are solemn-sounding graves;
While o'er the oriel, like a pall,
A dark, funereal shadow waves.

There, kneeling by a lampless shrine,
Alone amid a place of tombs.
My erring spirit pleads for thine
Till light along the Orient blooms.

Oh, when thy faults are all forgiven,
The vigil of my life outwrought,
In some calm altitude of heaven, -
The dream of thy prophetic thought, -

Forever near thee, soul in soul,
Hear thee forever, yet how far.
May our lives reach love's perfect goal
In the high order of thy star!

A striking declaration for a love of the Poe that might have been but never could be. The mourning of a dream of what might have been.