by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: December 15, 2010   Last Updated: December 25, 2010

Edgar Allan Poe’s Ulalume is a mournful tone poem similar to Annabel Lee and The Raven. Originally it was intended as a pronunciation or elocution exercise, and Poe was not overly concerned with clarity and meaning. He indulged his inventiveness in coining names and places that have the morbid sound that invests so much of his gothic poetry. The title rings the ell sound that we hear in many of his dead beloveds - Ulalume, Lenore, Annabel Lee – combining it with the central consonant sound in Ballad. According to the report of a hearer of Poe's recitation, the title is pronounced You-la-loom.  [ Susan Ingram, who heard his reading of the poem (Collected Work of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969]: 419).

In stanza one the ears hear in the first three lines the alliterative and medial ess sounds of “skies. . .ashen. . .sober. . .leaves. . .crisped. . sere. . .lonesome. . . .” Then the letter em is featured in “Immemorial. . ..dim. . .misty mid” followed by the repeated w sounds of Weir. . woodland. . .Weir. The place names Auber and Weir are apparently fabrications of Poe’s to rhyme with October and sere and to import the suggestion of weirdness.

The ess  sounds recommence in the beginnings of the next four stanzas. Stanza two has “once. . .cypress. . ..soul. . .cypress. . .Psyche. . soul. . . As. . .scoriac rivers. . .lavas. . .restlessly. . .sulphurous. . .currents. . .climes. . .realms.”

 The poet is wandering in company with Psyche, his soul.  They are at first unaware that the month is October and the date one year after he buried his wife Ulalume. The poet states that his heart was “volcanic,” and supports that idea with “scoriac rivers,“ and sulfurous lavas rolling down the volcano Mt. Yaanek. Scoriac means pertaining to the slag or dross of smelted metallic ore: Mt. Yaanek is a harsher sounding name for Mt. Erebus, the only volcanic mountain in the Arctic or Antarctic regions.

The evening grows senescent or late as the bright twin horns of Astarte (Venus) appear. Psyche protests that they should flee from Astarte, but the poet argues in favor of the warm light. He calms Psyche with a kiss and they proceed until confronted by the door of a tomb. Psyche knows that it is the grave of Ulalume. In the final stanza the poet realizes that some “demon hath tempted me here” and remembers the day and date and the dread burden he bore to this ghoul-haunted woodland near the tarn of Auber.

The classical allusions to Dian, Sybil, Psyche, Astarte and the Lion (the constellation Leo) as well as the repetitions of those mysterious names and words create an atmosphere of gloom  and mystery that is vague in meaning but precise in sound. The dim lake of  Auber becomes a dank tarn. The misty mid region of Weir is a ghoul-haunted woodland.

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