A Poem for the Birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, by Martin Rizley

The Tomb on the Hill

The ancient tomb sits brooding all alone
Atop a rocky hill, remote and bare.
Perched like a vulture on a dismal throne,
It overlooks a valley green and fair
With baleful gaze, as if to guard its own.

Dark, slippery steps of crumbling cobblestone
Lead to the summit of that lonely hill
Where, wrapped in vines, by thick weeds overgrown,
It sits in silence, sinisterly still,
As grasses whisper, by the chill breeze blown.
.
No stone engraved with fading words makes known
The names of those whose bodies lie confined
Within those barren walls, which now disown
The memory of those who’ve been consigned
To molder there like seed that has been sown.

Who built this tomb, abandoned and moss-grown?
A legend says that, many years ago,
A wealthy couple, in their day well known,
Were blessed to see their only daughter grow
To womanhood. Beloved, but sadly prone

To fainting spells, she oft would make a moan,
Then fall into a state of seeming death,
Whose grim effects could not be overthrown
Until she, with a sudden gasp of breath
And fleeting quake, would wake up on her own.

Her somnolence and deathly pallor flown,
She’d rise renewed, as from refreshing sleep,
Her face then glowing with a rosy tone,
Unconscious of the terrifying deep
In which she’d lately plunged to depths unknown.

One day, her parents found her lying prone;
And though they waited for their lovely lass
To rise again, when all their hopes had gone—
Since neither pulse, nor breath stain on clear glass
Appeared, to show her life was still on loan—

They let the earth reclaim her as its own,
And buried her upon her favorite hill.
They spent a time of mourning to bemoan
Their loss; then with resolve, of their own will,
They made this tomb her memory to enthrone.

Then on a chosen day, cold and windblown,
They brought her to her final resting place,
With solemn dirges and a bagpipe’s drone
Directing steps at elegiac pace
To where, with darkness as her chaperone,

She’d lie in peace. But when the deed was done,
And all had turned to leave that sacred space,
They clearly heard a faint, blood-curdling groan
Emitted from her casket, now in place,
A sound that chilled all hearers to the bone.

With haste they pried the lid, and there was shown
Before them all a sight none could forget—
The corpse of her whose posture made it known
She had been still alive and conscious yet
When she was sealed inside, in days now flown!

Her parents never could accept, nor own
The truth they learned about their daughter fair—
The pain she had endured, left there alone
Beneath the ground, was more than they could bear.
Their reigning grief, mere time could not dethrone.

The fact they could do nothing to atone
For what had taken place, cut like a knife,
So, when their final years had quickly flown
And broken hearts had sapped them both of life,
They went to join her in that house of stone.

Since then, from time to time, reports are sown
Of sojourners who stumble on that place
And hear at night a tragic, muffled groan,
Emitted from inside that eerie space,
That echoes in the midnight breezes blown.

They often see a woman in that zone
Who paces on that windy hill on high,
And weeps aloud while nightingales intone
A song before they soar into the sky.
She walks and weeps before the tomb, alone.

Poet’s Note

Edgar Allan Poe was born in the depth of winter on January 19, 1809. Poe’s Gothic poems and stories are often pervaded by a sense of melancholy, dread, and fear. His own life was marked by frequent tragedy and sorrow. He lost four dearly beloved family members to untimely deaths while they were yet in their twenties—his mother, foster mother, brother, and cousin, whom he had taken as his wife. Another sister of Poe lived to be 63 years old, but she lived a very hard life and became indigent and confined to an institution before her death. Poe lost other people who were near and dear to him, and this frequent acquaintance with death and loss, coupled with recurring struggles with poverty and alcoholism most likely influenced the darkness of the themes he chose to address so frequently in his writing.

There is rarely a redemptive ray of hope in his writings, though in his later life, he began to address more theological themes in his writing, especially in the 150 page prose poem “Eureka,” in which he sought to find a resolution to the problem of pain by appealing to the unfinished unfolding of God’s plan for history. If we can believe the testimony Dr. John Moran, who was the attending physician during Poe’s final days in Washington College Hospital in Baltimore, Poe’s final words were, “Lord, help my poor soul.” Could it be that Poe’s grief-haunted soul found peace at the end? The above poem, reminiscent of Poe in mood and theme, addresses a subject that appears in several of his works, which was of concern to many in the nineteenth century—the fear of premature burial.

Martin Rizley grew up in Oklahoma and in Texas, and has served in pastoral ministry both in the United States and in Europe. He is currently serving as the pastor of a small evangelical church in the city of Málaga on the southern coast of Spain, where he lives with his wife and daughter.