Edgar Allan Poe's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Poe sat again at his dark writing desk. The typewriter waited, one page rolled and empty. His raven gripped his shoulder and stayed still. The lines from the willow were fading in his head. He pressed his fingers to his temples and reached for the first word. Nothing came. The silence after the flock felt worse than their noise. He struck a match and lit the black candle beside the machine. Wax had slumped down its sides in heavy drips. The small flame steadied him. He watched it burn and let his breathing slow. "Come back to me," he said. "One line at a time." Then the tapping returned. Soft at first, on the tall window. Poe turned. The ravens were back on the twisted tree outside, every branch loaded with black bodies. Leaves drifted down around them. He waited for the old dread to climb up his spine. It did not. He stood and looked at them, and something turned over in his mind. He crossed to the stack of his old books against the wall. He had piled them there for years. He pulled one from the middle. The whole tower leaned, then toppled. Books slid across the floor. His own raven burst off his shoulder with a cry, then circled back and landed. Poe left the books where they fell. He had what he needed. He returned to the desk and set his fingers on the keys. The candle threw shadows across the page. Outside, the flock tapped and waited, as if listening. This time Poe did not fight them. He let the sound become the poem. He typed the first line fast. "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary." The keys clacked. He did not stop to think. The tapping at the window became the tapping at his chamber door. The bird on his shoulder became the bird in the verse, perched and grim and refusing to leave. Stanza after stanza filled the page. He fed a fresh sheet in and kept going. "And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting." His hands ached and he did not slow. When the bird in the poem spoke, Poe spoke the word aloud with it. "Quoth the Raven, Nevermore." He pulled the last page free and read it all through. It was whole. It was better than the drowned draft under the willow. The ravens had not stolen his poem. They had given him a new one, larger and darker than anything before it. Poe gathered the pages and squared their edges. He looked at the empty black book waiting on the shelf, the one with the raven stamped on its cover. This poem deserved binding. This was the poem that would silence them. But a bound book meant a publisher, and a publisher meant the man who had called his last title overwrought. Poe set the pages inside the book and shut the cover. He would have to face that man again.