The dead, the gentle dead — who knows? —
In tungsten filaments abide, [ ]
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And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell.
( Cf. Pale Fire: CK's annotations to line 347 brings up the posthumously published "The Nature of Electricity" by John Shade.)
Here are a few interesting associations garnered at the wikipedia site, related to Ada Lovelace, Byron's work Don Juan and Manfred, Poe's sometime pseudonym and his use of endnotes:
"Tamerlane ignores the young love he has for a peasant in order to achieve power. On his deathbed, he regrets this decision to create "a kingdom [in exchange] for a broken heart". The peasant is named Ada in most of Poe's original version of the poem, though it is removed and re-added throughout its many revised versions. The name "Ada" is likely a reference to Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, a renowned poet whom Poe admired. In fact, the line "I reach'd my home — my home no more" echoes a line in Byron's work Don Juan. [ ] Only 17 when he wrote the poem, Poe's own sense of loss came from the waning possibility of inheritance and a college. Distinctly a poem of youth, the poem also discusses themes Poe will use throughout his life, including his tendency toward self-criticism and his ongoing strivings towards perfection. The poem was influenced by Lord Byron's drama Manfred and his poem "The Giaour" in both manner and style.[ ]Poe may have identified with the title character. He used "TAMERLANE" as a pseudonym attached to two of his poems on their first publication, "Fanny" and "To ——," both published in 1833.[ ] Tamerlane and Other Poems, which appeared in June 1827, was forty pages long and credited only by "a Bostonian". In its initial publication in the collection Tamerlane and Other Poems, Poe included endnotes explaining some of his allusions from "Tamerlane." He also confesses early on that he knows little about the historical Tamerlane, "and with that little, I have taken the full liberty of a poet." These endnotes do not appear in any other collection that includes "Tamerlane." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamerlane_(poem)
and a curious link between Thomas Brown, Poe and Kinbote's ancestors:*
" In the following year an anonymous contributor to the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post disclosed the fact that Poe had drawn freely on Captain Thomas Brown’s Textbook of Conchology (1833) for his Conchologist’s First Book (1839), a compilation to which in an evil hour he had attached his name." http://www.eapoe.org/PAPERS/misc1921/kcm33c06.htm or to Shade's "gentle dead": "But even more obvious than the debt to Manfred and "The Giaour' that appears in “Tamerlane” is the borrowing from Byron seen in his early lyric “Spirits of the Dead,” which is, much of the way, a mosaic of materials drawn from the incantation at the end of the first scene of Manfred." (idem)
Jansy Mello
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*CK's Note to line 12: "To return to the King: take for instance the question of personal culture. How often is it that kings engage in some special research? Conchologists among them can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand."