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Updated: June 17, 2025
An intensity in thought, action, or speech was possibly, in her, a result, or at least an index, of that gigantic volition which, during our long intercourse, failed to give other and more immediate evidence of its existence. Of all the women whom I have ever known, she, the outwardly calm, the ever-placid Ligeia, was the most violently a prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern passion.
He succeeded absolutely in giving his narrative the utmost emphasis with the greatest economy of means. =Analysis of "Ligeia."= If we learn through and through how a single perfect story is constructed, we shall have gone far toward understanding the technic of story-building as a whole.
But these absurdities I must not pause to detail. Let me speak only of that one chamber, ever accursed, whither, in a moment of mental alienation, I led from the altar as my bride as the successor of the unforgotten Ligeia the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine.
To-night, for the first time since his desperate plunge into the abyss of vice, conscience, which he had believed effectually strangled, stirred feebly, startling him with a faint moan, as unexpected as the echo from Morella's tomb, or the resurrection of Ligeia; and down the murdered years came wailing ghostly memories, which even his iron will could no longer scourge to silence.
Let us therefore analyze one of Poe's short-stories following in the main the method which he himself pursued in his analysis of "The Raven" in order to learn the successive steps by which any excellent short-story may be developed from its theme. Let us choose "Ligeia" for the subject of this study, because it is very widely known, and because Poe himself considered it the greatest of his tales.
Poe could lose no time in preparing a place for his climax; and therefore he was obliged, as soon as he had laid Ligeia in the grave, to begin an elaborate description of the stage settings of his final scene. The place must be wild and weird and arabesque. It must be worthy to receive a resurrected mortal revisiting the glimpses of the moon.
How poignant, then, must have been the grief with which, after some years, I beheld my well-grounded expectations take wings to themselves and fly away! Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted. Her presence, her readings alone, rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed.
Yet it was only at intervals in moments of intense excitement that this peculiarity became more than slightly noticeable in Ligeia. And at such moments was her beauty in my heated fancy thus it appeared perhaps the beauty of beings either above or apart from the earth the beauty of the fabulous Houri of the Turk.
I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense such as I have never known in woman. In the classical tongues was she deeply proficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended in regard to the modern dialects of Europe, I have never known her at fault.
Whether in the next moment Ligeia dies again irrevocably, or whether she lives an ordinary lifetime and then ultimately dies forever, or whether she remains alive eternally as a result of the triumph of her will, are questions entirely beyond the scope of the story and have nothing to do with the single narrative effect which Poe, from the very outset, was planning to produce.
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