oes not read as a journal. I reads more as notes taken down with the intent to organise and elaborate later. This could quite possibly be the effect Poe was looking for when he wrote the story. If one looks closely at this description, the narrator is not actually saying much at all. He says that he really can’t say what type of ship it is, and that the wood it was made of was old and worm-eaten and porous. He then speculates on whether the ship is made of Spanish oak or not. It takes him a half-page long paragraph to do this, when he could have used a paragraph the size of the previous one. Long meandering paragraphs are Poe’s style, and he nearly always uses them. The next excerpt is from “The Oblong Box”, and is another atypical description: Now, my state-room opened into the main cabin, or dining-room, as did those of all the single men on board. Wyatt's three rooms were in the after-cabin, which was separated from the main one by a slight sliding door, never locked even at night. As we were almost constantly on a wind, and the breeze was not a little stiff, the ship heeled to leeward very considerably; and whenever her starboard side was to leeward, the sliding door between the cabins slid open, and so remained, nobody taking the trouble to get up and shut it. But my berth was in such a position, that when my own state-room door was open, as well as the sliding door in question (and my own door was always open on account of the heat,) I could see into the after-cabin quite distinctly, and just at that portion of it, too, where were situated the state-rooms of Mr. Wyatt. This is a concise description where Poe gets straight to the point. It is something like a floor plan, with directions but no distance markers. He offers no opinions in this paragraph, which is unusual – opinions being almost essential to Poe’s descriptions. Poe appears to find it difficult to describe a scene without offering an ...
