XIII. Death
Edgar Allan Poe

Shadows of shadows, passing. It is now 1831 and as always I am absorbed with a delicate thought. It is how poetry has indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential. Since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception, music when combined with a pleasurable idea is poetry. Music without the idea is simply music. Without music or an intriguing idea color beomes pallor, man becomes carcass, home becomes catacomb and the dead are, but for a moment, motionless.
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of the revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad Humanity may assume the semblance of a Hell - but the imagination of man is no Carathis, to explore with impunity its every cavern. Alas! the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful - but, like the Demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will devour us - they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.

For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words with even more distinctness than that which I conceived it. There is, however, a class of fancies of exquisite delicacy which are not thoughts and to which, as yet, I have not found it absolutely impossible to adapt to language. These fancies arise in the soul, alas how rarely, only at epochs of most intense tranquillity when the bodily and mental health are in perfection and at those mere points of time when the confines of the waking world blend wth the world of dreams. And so I captured this fancy where all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Out -- out are the lights -- out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy of "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
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