On Edgar Allen Poe and Final Exams
Final examinations induce the habit of existentializing, of looking back, up, around, and looking for a means of why and who and what we are living for.
Reflecting on the past semester and surfacing long forgotten lore embodies the very idea of metaphysical rumination, of what is real, of what we know, of what we are.
As we sit, scribbling through hours and hours of exams, we think to ourselves,“Is this what the past semester of education has come to? Is this thickly stapled booklet all I have truly learned?”. And we ponder the merits of education, of life, of death, as we conclude a chapter of high school.
Edgar Allen Poe, a poe-t amidst a devastating world, wrote wretched, tortured tales, echoeing soundly through the lonely delves of the startled, trembling heart. Upon reading Poe, bewailing final exams seems futile, empty, stale. Upon reading Poe, life ought to appear more fleeting, more precious, something more profound than to be sullied by final exams, which are known to plunge our lives into a turmoil of tension and unease. But as Poe wrote, “All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream”.
Poe, as an infant, was effectively orphaned and placed under the charge of a foster family who never properly adopted him. His foster father, despite being considerably affluent, dismally neglected him in perfect juxtaposition to his son (that is, Poe’s foster brother), who was coddled and pampered and clutched as tight as can be.
When Poe set about to studentship, John Allen, his foster father, did not supply him with money or clothes enough to trudge through day-to-day life, and so he resorted to gambling. As a student, Poe developed a tender passion for a lady called Sarah Elmira Royster. Despite their extraordinary feelings for one another, however, Miss Royster’s ill-mannered father shoved her into a marriage with a wealthy, though rather sniveling, gentleman, with whom she had two children before his death.
At a time in which Allen was pointedly ignoring Poe’s letters, his foster mother, of whom he was on relatively merry terms with, died, though no one thought to mention anything of it to Poe, who found out long after the burial had taken place.
Allen eventually remarried, and, with his new wife, decided to disown Poe. Upon Allen’s death, Allen bequeathed all of his money to his illegitimate children, discluding the neglected Mr. Poe.
After being renounced all familial regards by the family he had grown up with, Poe sought housing with his biological aunt, cousin, and elder brother Henry, although such happiness was ephemeral, fleeting, and minute, for Henry soon died of alcoholism.
Poe, 26, became infatuated afresh, this time with his thirteen-year old cousin Virginia Clemm. They married in secret, concealing her age, though she soon died of tuberculosis.
Poe, depressed and alone, soon became engaged to a poet called Sarah Helen Whitman, but the engagement was broken in a due course of time as a consequence of his excessive drinking.
He then became engaged once more to Sarah Elmira Royster, his previous forlorn maiden, but perished of peculiar circumstances before his marriage took place. After his death, Poe’s obituary and first biography were written by Rufus Griswold, a wicked adversary of Poe, who cackled and leered and filled them with lies.
Poe’s life was a tempest amid a thrashing sea, his poetry a mast he clung to. From Poe, we study brilliance, such brilliance, however, being soundly attributable to his immense suffering. But if absolute splendor is hammered from pain and pain alone, why ought we yearn for delight? If distress is required of beautiful poetry and art, why should we want to feel joy?
But Poe aside, whatabouts the finitely finicky finals? How does the nature of happiness, of life, of Poe, pertain to semester exams? Finals mark a conclusion, an end of a path. At ends, we tend to crane our necks, behind, to squint at the tumults of the beginning. We do this to gratify ourselves, to congratulate our strength of will, and to brace ourselves for the briars and thorns to follow.
Finals, themselves, are not too dreadful a task. Looking back, though, causes the majority of the difficulties. “When did we learn about Newton’s first law of motion?” for instance, or “I thought I was finished with that particularly ugglesome unit of math!” Even so, the piercing skirl of finals themselves prove to be the grief-licking grugglespouts we make them out to be.
Though finals, for one, are much preferable to the inky depths of oblivion. In the afflicting The Pit and the Pendulum, Poe wrote, “It was not that I feared to look upon things horrible, but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing to see”.
For oughtn’t we rather fail a mere quiz of mathematics than fail out of existence? What is English class, when actuality is in question? Why should one worry about a man-made set of multiple choice questions, when they should, instead, worry of their very state of being?
Finals, though, teach us a certain lesson one seldom learns in the “real world”. For when are bankers, or investment lawyers, or accounting clerks, or someone else hired to the slog of boring, blank-minded employment confronted with the chance to reflect, complete, and start anew on their journey of gathering the wisdom of mankind?
Poe, as he draggled his sorry life behind him, taught us that despite how unpleasant one’s circumstances are, resplendence, if not found, can be made.
And if one were to fasten these two concepts together, learning from the thistles of our past and tinkering with the tremendous dreams of our future, the piercing struggle of final exams is not too harrowing a task.
Quoth Poe, “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
