Horror Story: "Ligeia" by Edgar Allan Poe

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The unnamed narrator loves his wife, Ligeia, a lady of great erudition and beauty. She is tall and slender. As time goes and sickness takes greater hold of her, she grows emaciated. But most of all, the narrator remembers her eyes: “The expression of the eyes of Ligeia! How for long hours have I pondered upon it! How have I, through the whole of a midsummer night, struggled to fathom it! What was it—that something more profound than the well of Democritus—which lay far within the pupils of my beloved? What was it? I was possessed with a passion to discover. Those eyes! those large, those shining, those divine orbs! they became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers.” The learned Ligeia writes a cheery little poem, “The Conqueror Worm” on the inevitability of death. The next day, she dies. The narrator, an opium addict, eventually remarries a woman unlike Ligeia in appearance and background. They spend a happy month. Sort of. The narrator is moody and the new wife starts to withdraw. The narrator can feel no affection for her, even when she falls ill and lies sick for weeks. She, too, dies. But of course, that’s not the end of the story. And the narrator, sailing along in an opium dream (he thinks), isn’t sure what he’s seeing… According to biographer Peter Ackroyd, Poe is supposed to have (at least on one occasion) spoken of this little story as his best. And it has a lot of classic Poe elements, minus the gore of things like “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat.” The narrator isn’t reliable, in part because he’d loaded. Did he see what he says he saw? What do those things mean? This is sad primarily. This story is available from Project Gutenberg: _____ Title: “Ligeia” Author: Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) First published: The American Museum of Science, Literature, and the Arts September 1838 Source: ISFDB