The Island of the Fay

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The mezzotint by John Sartain after John Martin that inspired Poe

The story The Iceland of the Fay (The Island of Fee) of Edgar Allan Poe was in Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine first published 1,841th Poe put his sonnet To Science above the text as the motto .

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The first-person narrator approaches his subject circling as it were. It is based on a quote from the Contes moraux by Marmontel , in which the latter claims that music is the only talent that can be enjoyed entirely to oneself. The narrator contradicts this: The music not only needs the musician, but also the listener. One can enjoy all alone looking at a landscape that must of course be free from the “stain” (blemish) of the presence of a non-vegetal living being, it should only consist of short grass, flowers, trees, forests and mountains. The first-person narrator extends his contemplation into the cosmic , which to him seems to circulate in concentric circles around the single center - God - who looks at us humans with the same majesty as we do at "animalculae" (microbes). Only then, in the last third of the text, does he report how, on a hike, he came across an island surrounded by a stream, which seemed to him to have two sides: a western one, brightly illuminated by the setting sun, which he called “all one radiant harem of garden beauties "(radiant harem of garden beauties) describes and dig dark eastern side where" sombre, yet beautiful and peaceful gloom "(gloomy, but peaceful melancholy) permeates everything. It goes through the mind of the viewer, "This is the haunt of the few gentle fays who remain from the wreck of the race" (this will be the realm of the few lovely fairies who are still left from the demise of their race). Very soon his imagination creates one of them, perceiving her as she goes around the enchanted island in a “fragile canoe” (fragile boat). He compares the dying of a fairy with the shadowy disappearance of a tree into the darkness of the water. The description ends with complete darkness.

Emergence

Along with the narrative, Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine published a mezzotint by John Sartain in June 1841 , supposedly based on an oil painting by John Martin . This illustration matched Poe's text so well that it could be mistaken for his illustration; however, it was probably the other way around: Poe was inspired by the Sartain mezzotint for his text. In the same year Poe also published the story Eleonora , which in its description of nature is very close to The Island of the Fay and takes up the motif of the simultaneous death of a female figure and the nature surrounding her. John Sartain, with whom Poe had been friends since working at Graham's in Philadelphia, played a special role in the latter's last weeks.

German translations (selection)

Classification in the overall work

If one compares the bitterness with which Poe attacked science as the destroyer of poetry in his sonnet To Science (which he put in front of this text as the motto) with the enlightened nostalgia that is expressed in The Island of the Fay , it becomes clear that that he has come a long way in the 12 years since 1829. While in the sonnet he laments the hamadryads , naiads and elves as real expellees, the fairy here is the product of dreamy imagination presented to him with skeptical reservation, and the cosmological remarks in Poe's essay Heureka announces his great attempt at poetry and science to unite.

Literary references

  • "Nullus enim locus ..." (Because no place is without genius) - Servius , Vergil commentator
  • Jean-François Marmontel , whose Contes moraux already Lessing found that they do not deserve their title.
  • Pomponius Mela , ancient cartographer
  • "La solitude est une belle chose ..." (Loneliness is beautiful, but you need someone who tells you that it is beautiful.) "The well-known work of Zimmermann " - meaning his main work on loneliness .
  • "So blended bank and shadow there ..." (Shore and shadow so blended ...) Changed self-quote from Poe's poem The City in the Sea
  • "Florem putares ..." (You think a flower is swimming through liquid ether) - Jean Commire (1625–1702), French. Jesuit, known for his elegant Latin (after) poetry.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On John Sartain cf. in the English Wikipedia
  2. ^ Edgar Allan Poe: Werke II, Bargfeld and Zurich, 1994, annotation by Kuno Schuhmann, p. 430
  3. ^ Marie Bonaparte : Edgar Poe I, Vienna 1934 pp. 172, 181, 327–329
  4. ^ Silverman, Kenneth Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance . New York, 1991, p. 416. ISBN 0-06-092331-8
List of the works of Edgar Allan Poe


Poems

Tamerlane (1827) • Song (1827) • Dreams (1827) • Spirits of the Dead (1827) • Evening Star (1827) • Imitation (1827) • Stanzas (1827) • A Dream (1827) • The Happiest Day (1827 ) • The Lake (1827) • Sonnet — To Science (1829) • Al Aaraaf (1829) • Romance (1829) • To - - (1829) • To The River - (1829) • To M— (1829) • Fairy -Land (1829) • To Helen (1831) • Israfel (1831) • The Sleeping Woman (1831) • The Valley of Unrest (1831) • The City in the Sea (1831) • Enigma (1833) • Serenade (1833) • To - (Sleep On) (1833) • Fanny (1833) • The Coliseum (1833) • To One in Paradise (1834) • To Elizabeth (1835) • To Mary (1835) • Bridal Ballad (1837) • To Zante ( 1837) • The Haunted Palace (1839) • Sonnet - Silence (1840) • The Conqueror Worm (1843) • Lenore (1843) • Dream-Land (1844) • Eulalie (1845) • The Raven (1845) • Impromptu. To Kate Carol (1845) • To - (1845) • The Divine Right of Kings (1845) • Stanzas (1845) (1845) • A Valentine (1846) • To ML S— (1847) • Ulalume (1847) • To Marie Louise (1848) • An Enigma (1848) • The Bells (1849) • A Dream Within a Dream (1849) • For Annie (1849) • Eldorado (1849) • To my Mother (1849) • Annabel Lee (1849) • O, tenses! O, Mores! (1868) • Alone (1875)

Volumes of poetry

Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827) • Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems (1829) • Poems (1831) • The Raven and Other Poems (1845)

Stories

Metzengerstein (1832) • The Duc de L'Omelette (1832) • A Tale of Jerusalem (1832) • Loss of Breath (1832) • Bon-Bon (1832) • MS. Found in a Bottle (1833) • The Appointment (1834) • Berenice (1835) • Morella (1835) • Lionizing (1835) • The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall (1835) • King Pest (1835) • Shadow - A Parable (1835) • Four Beasts in One - The Homo-Cameleopard (1836) • Mystification (1837) • Silence - A Fable (1837) • Ligeia (1838) • How to Write a Blackwood Article (1838) • A Predicament (1838) • The Devil in the Belfry (1839) • The Man That Was Used Up (1839) • The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) • William Wilson (1839) • The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion (1839) • Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling (1840) • The Business Man (1840) • The Man of the Crowd (1840) • The Double Murder on Rue Morgue (1841) • A Descent into the Maelström (1841) • The Island of the Fay (1841 ) • The Colloquy of Monos and Una (1841) • Never Bet the Devil Your Head (1841) • Eleonora (1841) • Three Sundays in a Week (1841) • The Oval Portrait (1842) • The Mask of the Red Death (1842 ) • The Landscape Garden (1842) • The Secret of Marie Rogêt (1842) • The Pit and the Pendulum (1842) • The Treacherous Heart (1843) • The Gold Beetle (1843) • The Black Cat (1843) • Diddling (1843) • The Spectacles (1844) • A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (1844) • The Premature Burial (1844) • Mesmeric Revelation (1844) • The Long Box (1844) • The Angel of the Odd (1844) • Thou Art the Man (1844) • The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq. (1844) • The Stolen Letter (1844) • The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade (1845) • Conversation with a Mummy (1845) • The Power of Words (1845) • The Imp of the Perverse (1845) • The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether (1845) • The Facts in the Waldemar Case (1845) • The Sphinx (1846) • The Amontillado Barrel (1846) • The Domain of Arnhem (1847) • Mellonta Tauta (1849) • Hopping Frog (1849) • Von Kempelen and His Discovery (1849) • X-ing a Paragrab (1849) • Landor's Cottage (1849)

Other works

Maelzel's Chess Player (1836) • The Daguerreotype (1840) • The Philosophy of Furniture (1840) • A Few Words on Secret Writing (1841) • The Rationale of Verse (1843) • Morning on the Wissahiccon (1844) • Old English Poetry (1845) • The Philosophy of Composition (1846) • The Poetic Principle (1846) • Heureka (1848) • The Balloon-Hoax (1844) • The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) • The Journal of Julius Rodman ( 1840) • Politian (1835) • The Conchologist's First Book (1839) • The Light-House (1849)