Happy Birthday Uncle Edgar

Today is the 200th birthday of one of my favorite authors and poets, Edgar Allan Poe. While I was in high school I had a friend named Jake who was constantly exposing me to new music. I never knew how people did this, I could only find musicians that were played on the radio and I was always impressed with people who knew of cool music before anyone else did, well that was Jake. We both shared an interest in the macabre, the depressing and the dark. I wasn't goth by today's standards but I was definitely the brooding type, my unicorn obsessed brother in-law came close when he guessed me as the kind of guy in high school who " dressed up as the Crow, brooded in the downtown gazebo reading poetry,". He was close in this description, I dressed as the Crow twice for Halloween, I proposed to my wife in the downtown gazebo and I brooded in high school as I read poetry in the library. When Jake introduced me to Edgar Allan Poe I found someone who was tormented with grief and sorrow, who suffered as I felt I suffered and was depressed as I felt I was depressed. I didn't find that many authors who interested me during this period of my life so when I was introduced to the works of Poe I devoured just about everything he ever wrote. His contributions to American Literature are being celebrated by the U.S. Postal Service with his own set of stamps, which I purchased on Saturday. I'd like to leave you today with one of my favorite poems by Edgar Allan Poe from the book I carried with me in school.


A Dream Within a Dream 1827

Take this Kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
Oh God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Happy birthday Uncle Edgar!