From: LouisFors <LouisFors@aol.com>
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Date: Sat, 25 Apr 1998 21:29:04 EDT
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Subject: ED's fun with extravagant imagery:  # 414
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Dear friends:

I've just come upon # 414 and have been examining it for a couple of days.
I've also checked the e-mail archive and discovered that this poem has not
been explicated in our postings.  I know explication was not the original
purpose of this group, but we've learned a lot from it.  

"Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch,
That nearer, every Day,
Kept narrowing its boiling Wheel
Until the agony

Toyed coolly with the final inch
Of your delirious Hem -
And you dropt, lost,
When something broke -
And let you from a Dream -

As if a Goblin with a Gauge -
Kept measuring the Hours -
Until you felt your Second
Weigh, helpless, in his Paws -

And not a Sinew - stirred - could help,
And sense was setting numb -
When God - Remembered - and the Fiend
Let go, then, Overcome -

As if your Sentence stood - prounounced -
And you were frozen led
>From Dungeon's luxury of Doubt
To Gibbets, and the Dead -

And when the Film had stitched your eyes
A Creature gasped "Reprieve"!
Which Anguish was the utterest - then -
To perish, or to live?

My first reaction, after dropping my jaw at ED's imagery, was that she knew
Poe's work, especially his story "Descent Into the Maelstrom."  I'm guessing,
however, that the Maelstrom off Norway was doubtless of talk of seafarers, Poe
or no Poe.  So, who knows?

But, Poe aside, I am entranced by the images.  "a Maelstrom, with a notch..."
( A wild, wild image!)  Then, later, there's a "Goblin with a Gauge," (what a
superb mix of technology and spookiness--a goblin with a gauge and paws) the
evil one, or one of the evil ones, who tracks us, the readers, down, down,
down, until God steps in to modulate things, stopping the Fiend (the same as
the Goblin or not?). Then we are led to a dungeon, a place of luxurious doubt
(!), where we wait for the fate of the future.  But, from the dungeon we go to
the gallows (I looked up "gibbetts") and apparent death. Then another creature
(the goblin or fiend, or does it matter?) shouts "Reprieve"! and we are once
again in limbo and the anguish is bad.  Then ED leaves her readers in an
unusual state, that is to say, a forthright question:  Is it better to live or
die?  And ED leaves God in an awkward position.  He has interceded but
apparently doesn't have full control.

My feeling is that ED is having a lot of fun, generating those
Gothic/mechanical images and taking us deep into deep trouble and leaving us
wondering whether we will go behind door A or door B, but with no personal
choice.  Other murmurings say to me, however, that I make too much of ED's
display of virtuosity and that I should try other readings, of which I imagine
there are dozens.  One very tempting one is that ED was predicting the
industrial age,  which wasn't quite in America yet--a boiling wheel, gauges,
and, in general a feeling of being caught up in something that would lessen
the role of the single individual, all very scary stuff.  For some reason,
perhaps quite idiosyncratic, I am reminded of the ending of Benet's John
Brown's Body which speaks of the coming of the industrial age.

Just an attempt to end well a late lazy Saturday afternoon in Santa Fe.

With greeting to all,

Louis Forsdale