1835

BERENICE

Edgar Allan Poe

Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-49) - American poet, short-story writer, and critic who is best
known for his tales of ratiocination, his fantastical horror stories, and his genre-
founding detective stories. Poe, whose cloudy personal life is a virtual legend,
considered himself primarily a poet. Berenice (1835) - Egaeus opens his cousin
Berenice’s grave and pulls out her teeth. Poe was criticized for writing about such a
subject and for trying to elicit a shock response from his readers.
BERENICE

Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore
levatas. —Ebn Zaiat.
MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide
horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch, —as distinct too,
yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it
that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? —from the covenant of peace a
simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is
sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies
which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
My baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not mention. Yet there are no
towers in the land more time-honored than my gloomy, gray, hereditary halls. Our line
has been called a race of visionaries; and in many striking particulars —in the character
of the family mansion —in the frescos of the chief saloon —in the tapestries of the
dormitories —in the chiselling of some buttresses in the armory —but more especially
in the gallery of antique paintings —in the fashion of the library chamber —and, lastly,
in the very peculiar nature of the library’s contents, there is more than sufficient
evidence to warrant the belief.
The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber, and with its
volumes —of which latter I will say no more. Here died my mother.
Herein was I born. But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before —that the
soul has no previous existence. You deny it? —let us not argue the matter.
Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. There is, however, a remembrance of aerial
forms —of spiritual and meaning eyes —of sounds, musical yet sad —a remembrance
which will not be excluded; a memory like a shadow, vague, variable, indefinite,
unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the
sunlight of my reason shall exist.
In that chamber was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of what seemed, but was
not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy-land —into a palace of imagination
—into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition —it is not singular that I
gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye —that I loitered away my boyhood in
books, and dissipated my youth in reverie; but it is singular that as years rolled away,
and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers —it is wonderful
what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life —wonderful how total an
inversion took place in the character of my commonest thought. The realities of the
world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of
dreams became, in turn, —not the material of my every-day existence-but in very deed
that existence utterly and solely in itself. -
Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my paternal halls.
Yet differently we grew —I ill of health, and buried in gloom —she agile, graceful, and
overflowing with energy; hers the ramble on the hill-side —mine the studies of the
cloister —I living within my own heart, and addicted body and soul to the most intense
and painful meditation —she roaming carelessly through life with no thought of the
shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the ravenwinged hours. Berenice! —I call
upon her name —Berenice! —and from the gray ruins of memory a thousand
tumultuous recollections are startled at the sound! Ah! vividly is her image before me
now, as in the early days of her lightheartedness and joy! Oh! gorgeous yet fantastic
beauty! Oh! sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! —Oh! Naiad among its fountains!
—and then —then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not be told.
Disease —a fatal disease —fell like the simoom upon her frame, and, even while I
gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept, over her, pervading her mind, her habits,
and her character, and, in a manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the
identity of her person! Alas! the destroyer came and went, and the victim —where was
she, I knew her not —or knew her no longer as Berenice.
Among the numerous train of maladies superinduced by that fatal and primary one
which effected a revolution of so horrible a kind in the moral and physical being of my
cousin, may be mentioned as the most distressing and obstinate in its nature, a species
of epilepsy not unfrequently terminating in trance itself —trance very nearly
resembling positive dissolution, and from which her manner of recovery was in most
instances, startlingly abrupt. In the mean time my own disease —for I have been told
that I should call it by no other appelation —my own disease, then, grew rapidly upon
me, and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form —
hourly and momently gaining vigor —and at length obtaining over me the most
incomprehensible ascendancy.
This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those
properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive. It is more than
probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to
convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous
intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak
technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most
ordinary objects of the universe.
To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device
on the margin, or in the topography of a book; to become absorbed for the better part of
a summer’s day, in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the door;
to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers
of a fire; to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower; to repeat
monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition,
ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind; to lose all sense of motion or physical
existence, by means of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in;
—such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a
condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly
bidding defiance to anything like analysis or explanation.
Yet let me not be misapprehended. —The undue, earnest, and morbid attention thus
excited by objects in their own nature frivolous, must not be confounded in character
with that ruminating propensity common to all mankind, and more especially indulged
in by persons of ardent imagination. It was not even, as might be at first supposed, an
extreme condition or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and essentially
distinct and different. In the one instance, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested
by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a
wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of
a day dream often replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum or first cause of his
musings entirely vanished and forgotten. In my case the primary object was invariably
frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a
refracted and unreal importance. Few deductions, if any, were made; and those few
pertinaciously returning in upon the original object as a centre. The meditations were
never pleasurable; and, at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from
being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the
prevailing feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind more particularly
exercised were, with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and are, with the day-
dreamer, the speculative.
My books, at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to irritate the disorder, partook, it
will be perceived, largely, in their imaginative and inconsequential nature, of the
characteristic qualities of the disorder itself. I well remember, among others, the treatise
of the noble Italian Coelius Secundus Curio “de Amplitudine Beati Regni dei”; St.
Austin’s great work, the “City of God”; and Tertullian “de Carne Christi,” in which the
paradoxical sentence “Mortuus est Dei filius; credible est quia ineptum est: et sepultus
resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est” occupied my undivided time, for many
weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation.
Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial things, my reason bore
resemblance to that ocean-crag spoken of by Ptolemy Hephestion, which steadily
resisting the attacks of human violence, and the fiercer fury of the waters and the
winds, trembled only to the touch of the flower called Asphodel.
And although, to a careless thinker, it might appear a matter beyond doubt, that the
alteration produced by her unhappy malady, in the moral condition of Berenice, would
afford me many objects for the exercise of that intense and abnormal meditation whose
nature I have been at some trouble in explaining, yet such was not in any degree the
case. In the lucid intervals of my infirmity, her calamity, indeed, gave me pain, and,
taking deeply to heart that total wreck of her fair and gentle life, I did not fall to ponder
frequently and bitterly upon the wonderworking means by which so strange a
revolution had been so suddenly brought to pass. But these reflections partook not of
the idiosyncrasy of my disease, and were such as would have occurred, under similar
circumstances, to the ordinary mass of mankind. True to its own character, my disorder
revelled in the less important but more startling changes wrought in the physical frame
of Berenice —in the singular and most appalling distortion of her personal identity.
During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved
her. In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me, had never been of the
heart, and my passions always were of the mind. Through the gray of the early
morning —among the trellissed shadows of the forest at noonday —and in the silence
of my library at night, she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her —not as the living
and breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream —not as a being of the earth,
earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being-not as a thing to admire, but to analyze —
not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory
speculation. And now —now I shuddered in her presence, and grew pale at her
approach; yet bitterly lamenting her fallen and desolate condition, I called to mind that
she had loved me long, and, in an evil moment, I spoke to her of marriage.
And at length the period of our nuptials was approaching, when, upon an afternoon in
the winter of the year, —one of those unseasonably warm, calm, and misty days which
are the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon1, —I sat, (and sat, as I thought, alone,) in the
inner apartment of the library. But uplifting my eyes I saw that Berenice stood before
me. -
Was it my own excited imagination —or the misty influence of the atmosphere —or the
uncertain twilight of the chamber —or the gray draperies which fell around her figure
—that caused in it so vacillating and indistinct an outline? I could not tell. She spoke no
word, I —not for worlds could I have uttered a syllable. An icy chill ran through my
frame; a sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me; a consuming curiosity pervaded
my soul; and sinking back upon the chair, I remained for some time breathless and
motionless, with my eyes riveted upon her person. Alas! its emaciation was excessive,
and not one vestige of the former being, lurked in any single line of the contour. My
burning glances at length fell upon the face.
The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once jetty hair fell
partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets now
of a vivid yellow, and Jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the
reigning melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and
seemingly pupil-less, and I shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare to the
contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips. They parted; and in a smile of peculiar
meaning, the teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view.
Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died! -
1 For as Jove, during the winter season, gives twice seven days of warmth, men have
called this clement and temperate time the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon —Simonides.
The shutting of a door disturbed me, and, looking up, I found that my cousin had
departed from the chamber. But from the disordered chamber of my brain, had not,
alas! departed, and would not be driven away, the white and ghastly spectrum of the
teeth. Not a speck on their surface —not a shade on their enamel —not an indenture in
their edges —but what that period of her smile had sufficed to brand in upon my
memory. I saw them now even more unequivocally than I beheld them then. The teeth!
—the teeth! —they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably
before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them,
as in the very moment of their first terrible development. Then came the full fury of my
monomania, and I struggled in vain against its strange and irresistible influence. In the
multiplied objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth. For these I
longed with a phrenzied desire. All other matters and all different interests became
absorbed in their single contemplation. They —they alone were present to the mental
eye, and they, in their sole individuality, became the essence of my mental life. I held
them in every light. I turned them in every attitude. I surveyed their characteristics. I
dwelt upon their peculiarities. I pondered upon their conformation. I mused upon the
alteration in their nature. I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive
and sentient power, and even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral
expression. Of Mad’selle Salle it has been well said, “que tous ses pas etaient des
sentiments,” and of Berenice I more seriously believed que toutes ses dents etaient des
idees. Des idees! —ah here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me! Des idees! —ah
therefore it was that I coveted them so madly! I felt that their possession could alone
ever restore me to peace, in giving me back to reason.
And the evening closed in upon me thus-and then the darkness came, and tarried, and
went —and the day again dawned —and the mists of a second night were now
gathering around —and still I sat motionless in that solitary room; and still I sat buried
in meditation, and still the phantasma of the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy
as, with the most vivid hideous distinctness, it floated about amid the changing lights
and shadows of the chamber. At length there broke in upon my dreams a cry as of
horror and dismay; and thereunto, after a pause, succeeded the sound of troubled
voices, intermingled with many low moanings of sorrow, or of pain. I arose from my
seat and, throwing open one of the doors of the library, saw standing out in the
antechamber a servant maiden, all in tears, who told me that Berenice was —no more.
She had been seized with epilepsy in the early morning, and now, at the closing in of
the night, the grave was ready for its tenant, and all the preparations for the burial
were completed. I found myself sitting in the library, and again sitting there alone. It
seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream. I knew that it
was now midnight, and I was well aware that since the setting of the sun Berenice had
been interred. But of that dreary period which intervened I had no positive —at least
no definite comprehension. Yet its memory was replete with horror —horror more
horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful
page in the record my existence, written all over with dim, and hideous, and
unintelligible recollections. I strived to decypher them, but in vain; while ever and
anon, like the spirit of a departed sound, the shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice
seemed to be ringing in my ears. I had done a deed —what was it? I asked myself the
question aloud, and the whispering echoes of the chamber answered me, “what was
it?” On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it lay a little box. It was of no
remarkable character, and I had seen it frequently before, for it was the property of the
family physician; but how came it there, upon my table, and why did I shudder in
regarding it? These things were in no manner to be accounted for, and my eyes at
length dropped to the open pages of a book, and to a sentence underscored therein. The
words were the singular but simple ones of the poet Ebn Zaiat, “Dicebant mihi sodales
si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.” Why then, as I
perused them, did the hairs of my head erect themselves on end, and the blood of my
body become congealed within my veins? There came a light tap at the library door,
and pale as the tenant of a tomb, a menial entered upon tiptoe. His looks were wild
with terror, and he spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky, and very low. What said
he? —some broken sentences I heard. He told of a wild cry disturbing the silence of the
night —of the gathering together of the household-of a search in the direction of the
sound; —and then his tones grew thrillingly distinct as he whispered me of a violated
grave —of a disfigured body enshrouded, yet still breathing, still palpitating, still alive!
He pointed to garments;-they were muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he
took me gently by the hand; —it was indented with the impress of human nails. He
directed my attention to some object against the wall; —I looked at it for some minutes;
—it was a spade. With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay
upon it. But I could not force it open; and in my tremor it slipped from my hands, and
fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out
some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white and
ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.
•
• THE END-