The Vigil for Virginia

Dedicated to Gayle Goodin, Ph.D.,

Godfather and Teacher!

The chamber was a cathedral of cold. Not merely the chill of a New York January, which clawed at the ill-fitting windowpanes of the Fordham cottage, but an absolute, metaphysical cold that seemed to emanate from the very heart of despair. It was the winter of 1847, and the air, thin and sharp as a shard of glass, carried the incessant, rhythmic tick of the tall clock in the hall—a merciless metronome measuring out the last breaths of his

‘Annabel Lee.’

Edgar sat, rigid and hunched, a shadow cast by the sputtering flame of a whale-oil lamp. His coat, threadbare and inadequate, was pulled tight, but he felt nothing but the inner freezing that had begun three years prior, the moment the scarlet stain had first appeared upon her lips as she sang.

His gaze never left her. Virginia. His Sissy, his wife, his cousin, his child-bride—the singular, exquisite object of his life's adoration. She lay upon the narrow, iron-framed bed, covered by a collection of shawls and his great-coat, which Maria Clemm, his mother-in-law and eternal guardian, had meticulously arranged. Virginia was eighteen years old, but the consumption had rendered her tiny, a porcelain figurine carved by famine and fever.

Her hair, raven-black and still lustrous, was fanned out against the pillow, stark against the terrifying pallor of her face. Her breathing was the only sound that dared challenge the clock—a shallow, rattling sound, like dry leaves scuttering across a tombstone. It was a sound that made his soul recoil, for it was the physical manifestation of the ‘grim demon’ that had, with malicious calculation, infiltrated their sacred kingdom by the sea.

He thought endlessly of his poem, "Annabel Lee," the words already forming in the spectral chambers of his mind, a future epitaph carved from present, searing agony. Their love, he knew, was more than love. It was a fusion of souls ordained by seraphs. And yet, this celestial, perfect love was being systematically destroyed by earthly disease, aided, perhaps, by the ‘high-born kinsmen’—the cruel, judgmental world, the critics, the editors, the creditors, all those who mocked his vision and starved his devotion. They were the jealous angels, not half so happy in Heaven, who coveted his treasure.

They have torn her from me, these demons of the mist and the dust, he thought, clenching his hands until his nails bit into his palms. They envied our unity. They saw the purity of a bond uncorrupted by the coarse realities of the world, and they sent this pestilence—this red, wasting consumption—to dissolve the bond of flesh, hoping to dissolve the bond of spirit.

He wrestled with a monstrous guilt. Was he, the poet of terror, the chronicler of the abysmal, somehow responsible for inviting this darkness? Had his obsession with the grave, the premature burial, the revenant shade, drawn the very specters he wrote about into their home? He, who had sought only to build a world of beauty and intellect for her—a world free from the squalor of Grub Street—had instead provided only a cold room and a leaky roof in which his star might expire.

He remembered their life in Philadelphia, the fleeting moments of financial ease, the evening readings by the hearth, her clear, girlish voice echoing his own dark verses. He remembered the wild, desperate happiness that would sometimes seize him when he finished a piece like "The Raven," believing, truly believing, that this time the success would hold, that the money would buy warmth, health, and a sanctuary. And always, the success would crumble, his own self-destructive demons would surface, and the subsequent ruin would land, heaviest of all, upon Virginia's fragile shoulders. He was a flawed, drunken god who could conjure galaxies of words, yet could not conjure enough wood for the fire.

A movement beside him drew his attention. Maria Clemm sat in her worn rocker, eternally awake. Her face, etched with the most profound sorrow and ceaseless toil, was a study in profound, quiet fortitude. She was the ballast of his life, the anchor that kept his skiff from being wholly swallowed by the maelström of his psyche. She had nursed Virginia since birth, and now, she was nursing her toward the inevitable, final sleep.

"Edgar," she whispered, her voice a low, comforting burr, "She's resting easy. The fever is lower now, I think."

Poe merely nodded, unable to articulate the savage irony of her words. Resting easy. A euphemism for the final, irreversible cessation. He knew the pattern of the disease: the temporary, deceptive rally before the final plunge.

"She asked for your hand, dear. She wants to feel you close."

He leaned forward, carefully taking her skeletal hand. It was startlingly cold, yet fragile, like a nest of tiny, brittle bones. Her fingers, fine and long, closed weakly around his own. He pressed the palm of her hand to his cheek, feeling the dryness, the absence of life-heat.

Virginia’s eyes fluttered open. They were the color of the sea on a stormy day—a deep, bruised blue, but still possessing that fierce, childlike light that had first captivated him when she was a girl of thirteen. A faint, almost invisible smile touched her lips.

“Eddy,” she murmured, using his private, family name. Her voice was like the sound of a lute string stretched too thin, ready to snap. “Don’t go. Don’t leave me in the shadows.”

“Never, my love. I am here. Your husband is here.” He choked on the last word. Husband. What kind of husband could not keep the breath in his beloved?

She seemed to look past the damp, unkempt room, past the shivering poet, toward a vista known only to the dying.

“A kingdom by the sea,” she sighed, the phrase sounding perfectly natural, perfectly true in her final delirium. “Where the tide runs cold… but the souls remain entwined.”

Maria Clemm rose silently, adjusted the shawls once more, and then placed a damp cloth on Virginia’s forehead.

She caught Edgar’s eye, and in the depth of her weary gaze, he saw an immense, unspoken commiseration—the absolute understanding of shared, irreparable loss. She was not bitter, merely exhausted and accepting. She mouthed two words: Be strong.

But he could not be strong. He was nothing without her—a mere mechanism for weaving exquisite language, powered only by the light she cast. As the night deepened, and the wind outside began to howl, Virginia’s breathing grew fainter, the pauses between each rasping inhalation growing impossibly long.

The clock ticked. The lamp sputtered. The wind cried like a mournful banshee.

Then, there was only the clock.

Edgar waited for the next breath. He stayed past the natural rhythm, past the agonizing stillness. He waited until the silence in the room became a physical pressure, a suffocating blanket woven of dread and finality.

Maria Clemm moved first. Her fingers went to Virginia’s wrist, lingered, and then she quietly closed the beautiful, unseeing eyes. Her quiet sob was a slight, contained sound, the only protest in the face of the universe’s brutal decree.

“She is with God, Edgar,” Maria whispered, her own tears blurring her vision.

But Edgar heard nothing of God or heaven. He only heard the echo of his beloved’s final sigh, the perfect chord of his life snapped in two. He didn't rail or scream. He simply collapsed over the bedside, his body convulsed by a silent, elemental weeping that drew from a well of grief he had spent his life exploring in verse, only to find the reality infinitely deeper and more terrifying than the fiction.

The ensuing hours were a kaleidoscope of necessary horrors, all handled by the unwavering strength of Maria Clemm. The preparation of the body, the cold, efficient presence of neighbors, the terrible, hollow sound of the small wooden box being sealed—every moment was a nail hammered into the coffin of his own sanity.

The burial was a blur of frozen ground and gray sky. The date was January 21, 1847. The cemetery, a cold, anonymous field outside the cottage, felt less like consecrated ground and more like an icy pit dug by the relentless cruelty of fate.

After the brief, mumbled rites were over, and the few neighbors had offered their condolences and retreated to the dubious warmth of their own homes, Edgar remained. Maria Clemm lingered for a time, touching his arm gently, but seeing the glazed, fixed quality in his eyes, she finally left him, knowing that the vigil was a necessity, a covenant he had to keep with the earth that now held his heart.

He waited until dusk had fully descended, folding the world in a thick, velvety blackness. The stars appeared, cold and distant, mocking him with their indifferent perfection. He stumbled to the fresh mound of earth. The soil was a dark, frozen contrast to the purity he had lost.

He did not kneel. He simply pitched forward, throwing his entire body across the grave, embracing the cold, hard ground that separated him from his love. A roar of pure, animal grief followed the shock of the cold air leaving his lungs. He clawed at the frozen sod, his fingers scraping the earth, trying, in a primal, insane gesture, to dig his way to her.

“Virginia!!” he cried into the unfeeling night. “My life! My love! The angels have won! They have entombed us, they have torn my heart from my breast, they have killed my soul and left only this husk!”

He wept, not just with tears, but with the very core of his being. He wept for her lost youth, for the poems he would never read to her again, for the years they had been cheated of, for the perpetual cold that had been their final dwelling. He wept for the inadequacy of his love, which, though stronger than the power of angels, could not conquer a simple, pathetic human disease.

He lay there for what felt like centuries. The cold seeped into his bones, and his mind drifted on the edges of final darkness, seduced by the sweet, quiet oblivion the earth promised. Why not stay? Why not let the cold finalize the rupture? Why not join his darling in the grave and defy the jealous seraphim who had sought to divide them?

But then, as the eastern horizon began to bruise with the first, faint, tentative gray of a new day, a thought, clear and hard as a diamond, pierced his despair.

He looked up. The sun was not yet visible, but its impending arrival was turning the deep midnight blue to a terrible, accusing lilac. The light did not bring comfort; it brought responsibility. He was still here. His consciousness, his torment, his voice—they remained.

He remembered her words: “Don’t go. Don’t leave me in the shadows.”

To stay here, to succumb to the grave, would be to let the demons win. It would be to acknowledge that the power of the tomb was greater than the power of their union. He saw, with the lucidity of absolute suffering, the one way to conquer disease, poverty, jealous angels, and the grave itself.

He had to turn the sorrow into song. He had to forge the tragic reality of Virginia Clemm Poe into the transcendent, immortal ideal of his beloved Virginia into the immortal Annabel Lee. He had to take the exquisite agony of this night and refine it into literature so pure, so terrifyingly beautiful, that it would echo for all time, proving their love was indeed stronger than that of those "who were neither so happy nor so wise."

He was the chronicler of the night, but he was also the architect of eternity.

Slowly, painfully, Edgar rolled his body off the frozen earth. His muscles screamed with the cold and the rigor of despair. He rose to his feet, a gaunt, shivering monument to loss, his coat dusted with the cemetery mud. He did not look back at the grave, for he knew she was not there.

She was not in the cold clay. She was into his music now.

The sun crested the horizon, a brilliant, bloodless sphere of light. Edgar Allan Poe turned his face toward it, squinted, and began the long, cold walk back to the cottage where Maria Clemm waited.

He knew what he had to do. He would live, and in his life, he would make her live forever.

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

The poem was already written in his heart, a defiant, heartbreaking testament. He would go on, because he had no choice, but his going on would be his grand rebellion against the grave. He was leaving the tomb, but he was taking her with him, sealed not in wood and lead, but in ink and immortal rhyme.

Dear Reader, please take a moment to enjoy our greatest gift from Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee!

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,

   In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

   By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

   Then to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love—

   I and my Annabel Lee—

With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven

   Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

   My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsmen came

   And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre

   In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,

   Went envying her and me—

Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,

   In this kingdom by the sea)

That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

   Of those who were older than we—

   Of many far wiser than we—

And neither the angels in Heaven above

   Nor the demons down under the sea

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

   Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

   In her sepulchre there by the sea—

   In her tomb by the sounding sea.