House of usher book. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe 2022-11-15
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The "House of Usher" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839. The story is about a man named Roderick Usher, who lives in a mansion called the House of Usher. The house is in a state of disrepair and is described as being "sickly." Roderick Usher is the last surviving member of the Usher family, and he is suffering from a rare and mysterious illness.
The story's narrator is a close friend of Roderick's who has come to visit him at the House of Usher. As the narrator spends more time at the house, he becomes increasingly uneasy and begins to sense that something is wrong. He becomes convinced that the house itself is somehow causing Roderick's illness and that it is a manifestation of the family's decline.
Throughout the story, Poe uses vivid and detailed descriptions of the house and its surroundings to create a sense of foreboding and unease. The house is described as being "moated by its own stagnant and fetid waters," and the grounds are overgrown and uncared for. The narrator also notes that there is a "vacant eye-like window" in the house that seems to be watching him.
As the story progresses, Roderick's health deteriorates further and he becomes increasingly paranoid and delusional. He believes that he is being watched and that the house is trying to harm him. The narrator, meanwhile, becomes more and more convinced that the house is alive and that it is responsible for Roderick's illness.
The climax of the story occurs when Roderick's twin sister, Madeline, dies. Roderick believes that Madeline's spirit is trapped in the house and is haunting him. He becomes convinced that the only way to rid himself of the spirit is to bury Madeline's body in the basement of the house. The narrator tries to stop him, but Roderick is determined to go through with it. In the end, Madeline's body is buried in the basement and the house collapses, trapping Roderick and the narrator inside.
Overall, "The House of Usher" is a haunting and atmospheric tale that explores themes of decay, isolation, and the supernatural. Poe's vivid descriptions and use of symbolism help to create a sense of unease and tension that keeps the reader engaged until the very end.
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
And travellers now within that valley, Through the red-litten windows, see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody; While, like a rapid ghastly river, Through the pale door, A hideous throng rush out forever, And laugh β but smile no more. The Fall of the House of Usher Edgar Allan Poe - Roderick Usher is ill, but not due to any normal causes. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. He took this idea to extremes; and the violent and intemperate action which he often displays destroys the grand effect of many of his pieces.
Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn. Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her malady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed; but, on the closing in of the evening of my arrival at the house, she succumbed as her brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation to the prostrating power of the destroyer; and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus probably be the last I should obtain β that the lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no more. In the greenest of our valleys, By good angels tenanted, Once fair and stately palace -- Radiant palace --reared its head. And, round about his home, the glory That blushed and bloomed Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed. The belief, however, was connected as I have previously hinted with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. One favorite volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorium , by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and Εgipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. Additionally, Roderick somehow knew that she was alive.
I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
The Fall of the House of Usher: An Edgar Allan Poe Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe
Early poetic verses found written in a young Poes handwriting on the backs of Allans ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business. I will read, and you shall listen; β and so we will pass away this terrible night together. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the door of iron, made our way, with toil, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house. Long --long --long --many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it --yet I dared not --oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am! I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was labouring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage.
Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea β for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none. To an I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. Poe was criticized for following his own patterns established in works like Morella and Ligeia using stock characters in stock scenes and situations.
βThe Fall of the House of Usher: Audio edition on Apple Books
The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. For me at least β in the circumstances then surrounding me β there arose out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvass, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. I was by no means certain that he had noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his demeanour. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears.
The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones β in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around β above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. His action was alternately vivacious and It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. When a door, at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the brother β but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe is a classic short story first in 1839, and was memorably adapted for film by Roger Corman in 1960. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. He favored the supernatural, and pitched everything on an ideal scale, believing a certain amount of exaggeration necessary.
Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe published 1839 Son coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne. Our books β the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid β were, as might be supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm. In state his glory well befitting, The ruler of the realm was seen. .
Roderick becomes increasingly hysterical, and eventually exclaims that these sounds are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she was entombed. However, there is speculation that Poe used a real-life incident as the basis for his story: the entombment of two lovers at Usher House in Boston, whose bodies were discovered when the house was demolished in 1800. At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. His air appalled me β but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief. We have put her living in the tomb! Poes reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry. No one is sure how Poe could have known about this book.
And now β to-night β Ethelred β ha! Pomponius is unique among ancient geographers in that, after dividing the Earth into five zones, of which only two were habitable, he asserts the existence of antichthones, inhabiting the southern temperate zone inaccessible to the folk of the northern temperate regions. Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of the second and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the sensitive nervousness of my companion. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why; β from these paintings vivid as their images now are before me I would in vain endeavor to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. The body having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. Shaking off from my spirit what musthave been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building.
