Upstream by Mary Oliver Page B

them.
    _______
    In the Free Library of Philadelphia there is a portrait of the actress Eliza Poe. She is at once curiously stiff and visibly animated; her long black hair curls at the ends and frames the wide brow and the enormous dark eyes. The same dark curls, the same large eyes—in fact, a very similar white, low-bodiced dress—appear in another painting, this one in Richmond, of Frances Allan. And Virginia Clemm? She is described as having had a chalky white complexion, and long black hair, and a high, clear brow, and large eyes that grew even larger and ever more luminous during her illness.
    To readers of Poe’s poems and tales, it is an altogether familiar face:
    The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once jetty hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets, now of a vivid yellow, and jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning melancholy of the countenance. (“Berenice”) *
    I examined the contour of the lofty and pale forehead—it was faultless—how cold indeed that word when applied to a majesty so divine!—the skin rivalling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant, and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, “hyacinthine”! (“Ligeia”)
    If the faces of Poe’s women are often strikingly similar, other characteristics are no less consistent:
    Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
    How statue-like I see thee stand. . . .
    (“To Helen”) *
    So Poe writes of that pale beauty—that Helen, who is also Lenore in “The Raven” and Eleonora in the story named for her. And the Lady Madeline in “The Fall of the House of Usher” comes from the grave “a
lofty
and enshrouded figure.” And Ligeia “came and departed as a shadow.” And her eyes were large—“far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race.” There is not thebriefest glimpse of Annabel Lee in the rhapsodic, death-soaked poem of that name, yet we know, don’t we, what she must have looked like. Pale, dark-haired, with wide and luminous eyes—vivacious in the trembling, fragile way of mayflies. The narrator says of Berenice: “Oh, gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh, sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! Oh, Naiad among its fountains!” Of Eleonora: “like the ephemeron, she had been made perfect in loveliness only to die.” Of Ligeia again: she has “the face of the water-nymph, that lives but an hour” and “the beauty of the fabulous Houri of the Turk.”
    In Poe’s stories overall, no focus is so constant as that of the face and, within the face, the look of the eyes. “The
expression
of the eyes of Ligeia!” the narrator cries aloud and, sacrificing the “blue-eyed Lady Rowena,” wills the dead, dark-eyed Ligeia to return to him within the vehicle of Rowena’s body. When the corpse stirs slowly and opens its eyes, he shrieks—of course it is the end of the story—“these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes of my lost love.”
    Nothing, nothing in all the secret and beautiful and peaceful Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, where the narrator is but a boy and loves for the first time—nothing shines so brightly as the eyes of the first-beloved, Eleonora.
3.
    Said the poet Robert Frost, “We begin in infancy by establishing correspondence of eyes with eyes.” * It is deeply true. It is where the confidence comes from; the child whose gaze is met learns that the world is real, and desirable—that the child himself is real, and cherished. The look in the eyes of Poe’s heroines—it is the same intensity, over and over, upon the long string of his many tales. It is the look that, briefly,