ZeroJaci10
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(7/24/02 2:59 pm)
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Description of Ligeia
This is taken from Edgar Allan Poe's story, "Ligeia." After I read this, I thought about it and it seemed like a good thing to share with you all. This excert of "Ligeia" is describing her.
There is one dear topic, however, on which my memory falls me not.
It is the person of Ligeia. In stature she was tall, somewhat slender,
and, in her latter days, even emaciated. I would in vain attempt to
portray the majesty, the quiet ease, of her demeanor, or the
incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her footfall. She came
and departed as a shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance
into my closed study save by the dear music of her low sweet voice, as
she placed her marble hand upon my shoulder. In beauty of face no
maiden ever equalled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream --an
airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the
phantasies which hovered vision about the slumbering souls of the
daughters of Delos. Yet her features were not of that regular mould
which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors
of the heathen. "There is no exquisite beauty," says Bacon, Lord
Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, without
some strangeness in the proportion." Yet, although I saw that the
features of Ligeia were not of a classic regularity --although I
perceived that her loveliness was indeed "exquisite," and felt that
there was much of "strangeness" pervading it, yet I have tried in vain
to detect the irregularity and to trace home my own perception of "the
strange." 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 then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and
naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric
epithet, "hyacinthine!" I looked at the delicate outlines of the
nose --and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I
beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious
smoothness of surface, the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the
aquiline, the same harmoniously curved nostrils speaking the free
spirit. I regarded the sweet mouth. Here was indeed the triumph of all
things heavenly --the magnificent turn of the short upper lip --the
soft, voluptuous slumber of the under --the dimples which sported, and
the color which spoke --the teeth glancing back, with a brilliancy
almost startling, every ray of the holy light which fell upon them
in her serene and placid, yet most exultingly radiant of all smiles. I
scrutinized the formation of the chin --and here, too, I found the
gentleness of breadth, the softness and the majesty, the fullness
and the spirituality, of the Greek --the contour which the god
Apollo revealed but in a dream, to Cleomenes, the son of the Athenian.
And then I peered into the large eves of Ligeia.
For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique. It might have
been, too, that in these eves of my beloved lay the secret to which
Lord Verulam alludes. They were, I must believe, far larger than the
ordinary eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the
fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad.
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. The hue of the orbs
was the most brilliant of black, and, far over them, hung jetty lashes
of great length. The brows, slightly irregular in outline, had the
same tint. The "strangeness," however, which I found in the eyes,
was of a nature distinct from the formation, or the color, or the
brilliancy of the features, and must, after all, be referred to the
expression. Ah, word of no meaning! behind whose vast latitude of mere
sound we intrench our ignorance of so much of the spiritual. 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.
There is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of
the science of mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact
--never, I believe, noticed in the schools --that, in our endeavors to
recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves
upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to
remember. And thus how frequently, in my intense scrutiny of
Ligeia's eyes, have I felt approaching the full knowledge of their
expression --felt it approaching --yet not quite be mine --and so at
length entirely depart! And (strange, oh strangest mystery of all!)
I found, in the commonest objects of the universe, a circle of
analogies to theat expression. I mean to say that, subsequently to the
period when Ligeia's beauty passed into my spirit, there dwelling as
in a shrine, I derived, from many existences in the material world,
a sentiment such as I felt always aroused within me by her large and
luminous orbs. Yet not the more could I define that sentiment, or
analyze, or even steadily view it. I recognized it, let me repeat,
sometimes in the survey of a rapidly-growing vine --in the
contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running
water. I have felt it in the ocean; in the falling of a meteor. I have
felt it in the glances of unusually aged people. And there are one
or two stars in heaven --(one especially, a star of the sixth
magnitude, double and changeable, to be found near the large star in
Lyra) in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made aware of
the feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds from
stringed instruments, and not unfrequently by passages from books.
Among innumerable other instances, I well remember something in a
volume of Joseph Glanvill, which (perhaps merely from its quaintness
--who shall say?) never failed to inspire me with the sentiment;
--"And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the
mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will
pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield
him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the
weakness of his feeble will."
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