I’ve always wanted to do an in-depth read of an Edgar Allan Poe poem after watching videos like TedEd’s piece on Poe: https://youtu.be/8lgg-pVjOok, as well as Buzzfeed Unsolved’s video on analyzing his death: https://youtu.be/y4DTW4B3Sjs.
I settled on his piece “The Haunted Palace” due to it’s more convoluted tone, alongside the fairly complex yet descriptive diction, as it would make a challenging read. When reading through, I found my best approach to understanding the poem was to go line by line, stanza by stanza, then finally piecing it all together, so I’ll structure my blog in a similar way! You can find the poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52370/the-haunted-palace, and I’ll be showing the particular parts of the poem as I discuss them.
The poem opens with this image of luscious green valleys stretching for miles, and immediately starts with words like “tenanted” “seraph” and “pinion”. Through admittedly a lot of dictionary searches, my interpretation of this first stanza is setting the scene for the rest of the work: on top of this picturesque, angel-owned landscape (due to tenanted meaning to own property or land like modern day tenants) there is a bright palace that even angels haven’t flew/been to (as seraphs refer to angels, and a pinion is a special feather used for flight). This puts us, the reader, into this almost dreamlike world with a palace that even angels don’t visit to disrupt the landscape.
One especially tricky part about this passage is the line “In the monarch Thought’s dominion”, where we learn that this palace is controlled by a monarch. Yet the wording at first is unclear here: is “Thought” the monarch? Or is it the concept of “Thought” that allows this palace to exist, inside of one’s mind? Mulling it over, I found that the name of “Thought” would be pretty arbitrary out of all the possible names Poe could’ve chose, leading me to believe in the second interpretation, that this palace is not truly a location somewhere, but an idea in one’s mind. Technically, we could say that the monarch named “Thought” does control this palace, as the castle is at the whims of one’s imagination. As the poem progresses, we can piece together what this means for Poe’s intentions of the work.
Continuing on, this next paragraph describes the “palace” itself, ironic since we just discerned that this palace is controlled by one’s imagination, so it is fluid in nature and not fixed to one particular look. While a lot of descriptions, Poe continues with flight metaphors, where he states “Along the ramparts plumed and pallid” (Poe 15). While initially it sounds like the entire palace is decorated, pallid has a meaning closer to pale – where we can understand that Poe sees this palace as heavily decorated, yet pale and almost fake looking. Digging deeper, this palace isn’t the magnificent place we initially thought, the edges of this mental picture are less refined (like the pale ramparts), much like our own thoughts.
This next stanza is definitely my favorite in the entire piece! While the line about luminous windows seems like a simple description of the palace architecture, I found the logic to not make sense. Mainly due to the fact that “wanders” wouldn’t see the palace inside from the outside (we know the “windows” separate the wanders and palace interior due to the descriptions of the monarch’s throne).
Instead, using our earlier approach that this palace only exists in imagination, it makes more sense for these “windows” to not be windows at all, but rather 2 eyes. When we imagine, we close our eyes, and open “windows” into imaginary thoughts.
While the imagination approach makes more sense than the literal representation, I did want to point out a confusing part of this stanza I had to work through: the word “Porphyrogene”. Apparently this word literally means “to be born in purple”, calling back to roman royalty wear colored purple due to the cost of purple silk at the time. Using the literal interpretation, Poe hints at how this palace isn’t as pristine as we initially think.
This stanza contains one point I want to note further that helps us understand this poem, in the first line. We hear about all of this pearl and ruby that glows, either due to 1) manual shining/polishing or 2) some sort of ethereal glowing quality. While either interpretation leads to a plausible conclusion, I believe the latter conclusion makes more sense with what we’ve been discussing.
In summary, Poe’s use of describing thoughts through this imaginary palace challenges us to think with vivid imagery.
I put in the rest of the poem below, for your enjoyment. Thanks for reading!
-Max
3 thoughts on “Poetry Difficulty Essay Blog”
Hello Max, I really enjoyed your blog especially because of the similarities it had to my own poem in the types of metaphors it used. While reading the poem, I personally was very intrigued by the title. Your blog really analyzes this verdant and lively depiction of the palace. (which by the way I loved. I really like how you break down the metaphors and the connections made between windows, eyes, wanderers, and spirits. The whole world that gets built up actually gave me goosebumps). Anyway, I think that the contrast between the title of the poem and your analysis of the fantasy-like world has a significant contrast.
The poem is almost split where half is about this wonderful palace, and the other half has a more sobering tone about how it becomes haunted. I think it’s pretty clear from your identification of the extended metaphor that the second part of the poem is about the subject experiencing some kind of loss. The wanderers see the palace behind “red-litten” windows, there is a discordant melody inside, and the speaker laughs but no longer smiles. Overall, I think that it’s completely radical how Edgar Allen Poe places loss in the context of the story of a kingdom in peril. It puts a fresh and interesting perspective on how things like this feel to outsiders.
vvvaid
Hi Max,
I like your interpretation of the poem being about a person’s thoughts.
Through the first read, I thought that the poem began like a fairy tale, describing the beautiful kingdom. I also picked a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, and in my poem, he also described something as golden: sand. Here, it says that banners are golden. In my poem, I thought the golden sand meant happy memories, and there are golden banners, so the gold does relate to thoughts as you can think of memories. My favorite stanza of the poem would have to be “”And all with pearls…kind.” It has a nice rhythm. I thought the flowing Echoes could signify thoughts that flow into one’s brain. The wit and wisdom of the king could mean the brain. I was wondering though, why does it say that the subject was in the past? It does not make much sense to me that someone’s thoughts and brain are in the past, unless they are dead or people do not think wisely anymore. Maybe that contributes to the meaning. I am wondering if the castle is a metaphor for something else. I enjoyed reading your poem and analysis! Good work.
yli1
Is that Andrew Max Nguyen? Oh really? I’m very surprised to hear that you’ve always had such a love for Edgar Allan Poe. I’m sure that those videos contributed a lot to your passion of your poetry idol. It’s good that you decided to challenge yourself in your reading of poetry. I also approach poems piece by piece, and I even take it a step further than that by going word by word. Then if there’s any similarities I’ll try to connect them but I don’t always find a meaning in that connection. Even if you’re confident that what you think it is, is all there is, if you have a dictionary at your disposal it’s always a good idea to search up the definition and/or meaning of words. If there are no angels, who could the monarch be and the monarch of who? I like how you pointed out the wordplay in this poem because a lot of poets do that and both interpretations could be right. Maybe the descriptors of the palace represent aspects of your imagination? Good job on making those connections. I completely agree that those windows symbolize eyes, almost like your eyes are a window to your soul.
alu1