Haunted Palace

In the beginning, there was a palace of radiant light, where a king ruled with wisdom and grace, his mind a "victorious realm" of perfect reason. Then came the change. Evil things, boding grief and despair, came riding through the air and swept the monarch from his throne. The palace falls into darkness. The king becomes a wandering phantom, and the once-glorious realm is overrun with chaos and screaming vines. Or so the allegory goes. Poe wrote this as a meditation on the fragility of the human mind itself, on how reason can be invaded and destroyed by forces beyond its control. It was later woven into "The Fall of the House of Usher," where it comments on Roderick Usher's deteriorating sanity. But the poem stands alone as something even more unsettling: a vision of what happens when the lights go out inside a brilliant mind. It moves from crystalline imagery of early morning and rainbow clouds to pure Gothic nightmare, and it does it in fewer than fifty lines. Poe's most perfect marriage of beauty and horror. Read it after "The Fall of the House of Usher" and feel the chill deepen.