From Poe Newsletter, Vol. II, No. 2:

Poe's Raven, Faulkner's Sparrow, and Another Window

Two recent notes have pointed out parallels between Poe and Faulkner. James Stronks [Poe Newsletter, I, 11] finds similarities between Poe's image of Helen in a window-niche and Faulkner's metaphorical descriptions of Emily in "A Rose for Emily." Sister Mary Dominic Stevens [Poe Newsletter, I, 31] strengthens the case for Poe echoes in Faulkner by finding similar images in descriptions of Eula in The Hamlet. Though the emphasis of these two notes is upon the statue-like quality of Helen, in both of Faulkner's works the image of Helen is associated with windows. In two other of Faulkner's works situations associated with windows can also be paralleled in Poe. A brief paragraph of the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury [1st ed., 1929, p. 97] very likely owes its conception and several of its details to "The Raven." Despite the obvious differences in setting and situations, the opening pages of Quentin's section and "The Raven" have a distinct similarity: in each the narrator (in his own way) has lost his lover and is dominated by the magnitude of his loss, and each narrator is visited by a bird. Attempting to escape the memory of Lenore, Poe's narrator turns to books and looks forward to the passage of time ("Eagerly I wished the morrow") as a means of returning to life. The raven — black and ominous, suggestive of the supernatural, of death, psychic immobility and spiritual annihilation — becomes in the poem a symbol of never-ending remembrance of Lenore, whose memory the narrator initially hopes to escape. Unlike [page 38:] Poe's narrator, who wishes to return to the healing course of time, Quentin Compson is immersed in time, which to him is corrupting rather than healing, and wishes to escape it. The psychological states of the two protagonists being different, Faulkner thus sends to Quentin's window a bird which in all respects is opposite to the raven. Arriving "across the sunlight," rather than on "a midnight dreary," the sparrow perches on "the window ledge" instead of entering through the window. Whereas the raven moves in a stately fashion, "with mien of lord or lady," the sparrow "cocked his head" at Quentin. Its "eye was round and bright" It looked at Quentin first with one eye, then with the other, in contrast to the raven, whose "fiery eyes . . . burned into [the narrator's] bosom's core"; and, after listening to the chimes complete the toll of eight o'clock, it "flicked off the ledge and was gone." Its movements are in all respects suggestive of life and vitality (its throat pumped "faster than any pulse"), even of time. It becomes a symbol of the world of life and time which Quentin wishes to escape, just as Poe's raven is a symbol of the morbid remembrance which Lenore's lover wishes initially to escape. The probability that Faulkner had "The Raven" in mind in this passage is supported by another reference to the same window in Absalom, Absalom! [Modern Library ed., p. 373]. Quentin and Shreve, their winter night's rehearsal of the story of Thomas Sutpen and his family nearly at an end, are in the room that will figure later (in Faulkner's chronology) in The Sound and the Fury. Quentin does not answer a question by Shreve about Miss Rosa's motives in returning after three months to the old Sutpen mansion. His thoughts are fixed on the implications of Sutpen's tragedy. His body is rigid, his "breathing hard but slow, his eyes wide open upon the window, thinking 'Nevermore of peace. Nevermore of peace. Nevermore Nevermore Nevermore'." The windows of both Poe's narrator and Quentin Compson are, in their different manners, the entrances to "nevermore."

Robert H. Woodward, San Jose State College