REELY'S POETRYBLOG

Sarah Helen Whitman, as you may know, was engaged to marry Edgar Allan Poe in the year before he died. I’m not going to go into her biographical information. You can find that out readily enough on Wikipedia, and there is also a link on our poem page, The Portrait, to a more in-depth account of the courtship, engagement and break-up of the unreliable Mr. Poe and the ether-sniffing Mrs. Whitman. It was a very short-lived engagement and in the following year — the year he died — Poe was even romancing another woman.

Sarah Helen Whitman wrote The Portrait to Edgar Allen Poe many years after his death. During those years, she often defended him against criticism and slander.

Wouldn’t it be all so romantic and tidy to say that after his death, Mrs. Whitman deeply regretted not marrying him? Maybe, but I get the feeling she simply felt he deserved better posthumous treatment than he was getting. Whether you like the poem or not, I hope you agree that her last stanza proved prophetic indeed:

Though cloud and sorrow rest upon thy story,
And rude hands lift the drapery of thy pall,
Time, as a birthright, shall restore thy glory,
And Heaven rekindle all the stars that fall.

We also have added To Helen … well, actually, all three To Helen poems. The original, published in 1831, and the revised 1845 version, which is probably the first To Helen Poe sent to Mrs. Whitman. Then in 1848, he wrote the last one for her.

In the 1848 To Helen, please be careful when copying this poem online. This line:

No footstep stirred: the hated world all slept,

appears in some online versions as “No footstep stirred: the hated world an slept.” This is an OCR mistake that went uncorrected, though it really shouldn’t. The very notion that Poe would write a line like that is just ridiculous!