Tuesday, December 13

A little bit of literature

“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was; but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil.”

Vocabulary build-up

The adjective dull means “arousing little interest; lacking liveliness; boring; dispirited; depressed; not bright, vivid, or shiny.” In this context, close synonyms are “tedious”, “boring”, “uninteresting”, and “passionless”.

The intransitive phrasal verb draw on means “To approach” and it’s usually used with time phrases: “the night/evening draws on/approaches, so we should take shelter.”

The transitive verb pervade means “to become diffused throughout every part of something; to be present throughout; permeate something.” Close synonyms are “permeate”, “suffuse”, “imbue”, and “diffuse through.”

While the noun sedge is “a plant like grass that grows on wet ground, often next to rivers”, in this context, rank is an adjective that means “growing profusely or with excessive vigor”, especially used for vegetation. Therefore, the expression rank sedges means “fast-growing vegetation.”

Comments

Although reading Edgar Allan Poe is not an easy task for any foreign English speaker, especially due to the rich vocabulary, we think that Poe's short stories could be used on the CACD exam.

Born in the early 19th century, in Boston, Massachusetts, the Master of Macabre is best known for his dark tales of horror, psychological terror, and madness. He published his “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque” in 1839, which included one of his most famous short stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher" and catapulted his career as a writer. His style fits perfectly in the sullen spirit of the Victorian age, a period that witnessed a rising Gothic literature and the first horror novels and tales. Poe’s stories convey in a few pages what some writers take hundreds of pages to tell. Before the formal field of psychology existed, his stories explored guilt, paranoia, delusions, and obsessions. Unlike many other 19th century writers, Poe thought that fiction should never be didactic or moralizing. This might be a consequence of his life’s tragedies, particularly the deaths of his mother, stepmother, and wife - which inspired his poetic masterpiece, “The raven”. 

If you want to be immersed into Edgar Allan Poe’s dour atmosphere, the author is also a character in the movie “The Pale Blue Eye”, a gothic thriller (based on a best-seller written by Louis Bayard), which premieres in theaters December 23 and streams January 6 on Netflix.

Check out the trailer below!