pulp goes on living then, eternally tormented, eternally thirsting for what can never be, perhaps even for what never was. Did Lenore actually ever exist? This poem preceded the death of Poe's wife, Virginia, by two years. Many women were Lenore for this romantic poet, and at the same time none of them was. She was an ideal of love created in Poe's imagination. Springing fully grown from the head of her creator, Lenore took on many attributes of a goddess, but proved to be all too mortal. Again and again she died, and as soulless phantom she was raised each time with a new name and face. It was said of Poe: "Only in the imagination could he find ideal satisfaction. Every woman he loved was exalted into the dream angel whom he could worship imaginatively rather than physically enjoy." (6) The intensity of this poem certainly suggests genuine mourning, passionate grief, and bitter sorrowing. Is it possible to grieve so much over the death of an illusory ideal? Have we not all, like Icarus, flown our dreams a bit too close to the light and heat of reality, and watched as the pinions fluttered away, falling surely to our own destruction? Have we not watched our self-centered ideals rise like fantastic flying machines borne aloft by some capricious breeze and then, unable to sustain their own weight upon such fragile wings, plummet to the ground and perish in flames? Did we not cry and mourn among the ruins and ashes as passionately as though we mourned our beloved? God be praised that in His infinite mercy, He gave us more to hope for than what we are able to create in our imaginations. What is born must die; what is given over to Christ will transcend even death. "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit" (St. John 12:24).The demon of despair seeks to deprive us especially of this hope. In the last stanza of "The Raven," the unholy me...
