Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

 

The Tell-Tale Heart

(1843)

 

Edgar Allan Poe

(January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849)


Notes

First rejected by The Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion because the publishers wanted "more quiet articles," this short story was eventually published in the inaugural issue of the short-lived (only three issues printed) literary magazine The Pioneer in January 1843.


The Pioneer (1843) version of the story has an epigraph: the fourth stanza of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life." This poem contains another stanza, the seventh, well-known to Thais because it has been translated into the memorable kloang printed in Dusitsmit 1.11 (1918), and cited frequently and widely.

 

what the heart of the young man
said to the psalmist

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
    Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
    And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
    And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
    Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
    Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
    Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
    And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
    Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
   In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
   Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'ever pleasant!
   Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!
   Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
   We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
   Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps antoher,
   Sailing o'ver life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
   Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

 

 


135  dissimulation:


137  tattoo:


138  scantlings:


139  dissemble:

 


When an editor scolded him in 1835 for the disgusting particulars of an early tale, he coolly enumerated the narrative modes he meant to exploit: "the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque; the fearful colored into the horrible; the witty exaggerated into the burlesque; the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical."

—J. Gerald Kennedy, "Introduction," The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Penguin, 2006) ix.

 



The Philosophy of Composition


I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view—for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest—I say to myself, in the first place, “Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?” Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can best be wrought by incident or tone—whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone—afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.

[...]

The initial consideration was that of extent. If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression—for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed.

[...]

That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful. When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect—they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul—not of intellect, or of heart—upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating “the beautiful.” [...] Now the object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and Passion, a homeliness (the truly passionate will comprehend me) which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement, or pleasurable elevation, of the soul. [...]

Regarding, then, Beauty as my province, my next question referred to the tone of its highest manifestation—and all experience has shown that this tone is one of sadness. Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

[...]

But in subjects so handled, however skilfully, or with however vivid an array of incident, there is always a certain hardness or nakedness, which repels the artistical eye. Two things are invariably required—first, some amount of complexity, or more properly, adaptation; and, secondly, some amount of suggestiveness—some under[[-]]current, however indefinite of meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of that richness (to borrow from colloquy a forcible term) which we are too fond of confounding with the ideal.



—Edgar Allan Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition," Graham's Magazine 28.4 (1846): 163–67.



Sonnet—To Science


Science, meet daughter of old time thou art,
    Who alterest all things with thy piercing eyes!
Why pray’st thou thus upon the poet’s heart—
    Vulture, whose wings are dull realities!
 
How shall he love thee, or how deem thee wise,
    Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering,
To seek for treasure in the jewell’d skies,
    Albeit he soar with an undaunted wing.
 
Hast thou not dragg’d Diana from her car,
    And driven the Hamadryad from the wood,
To seek for shelter in some happier star,
    The gentle Nais from the fountain flood.
 
The elfin from the greenwood and from me,
The summer’s dream beneath the shrubbery.


—Edgar Allan Poe, "Sonnet—To Science," Saturday Evening Post 9.470 (1830): 1.




 

Study Questions

  • The narrator addresses this story to an unseen character. Who might this be? What has this person said to prompt such protests? Where does the narrator seem to be at present?
  • What is the difference between being nervous and being insane? What aspects and elements in the story might you examine in determining anxiety versus insanity?
  • Certain actions, words, phrases, structures, and sounds (ex. "this I did for seven long nights," eye, "very, very," "I foamed—I raved—I swore!," the beating of the heart, among others) recur again and again throughout "The Tell-Tale Heart." What is the function of repetition in the story?

            


 


Review Sheet

Characters

Narrator – "True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am" (135); "Villains!...dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!" (139)

Old man – "Who's there?" (136); "It is nothing but the wind in the chimney—it is only a mouse crossing the floor...it is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp" (136)

 

Setting

 


 

 

 

Sample Student Responses to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart"


Prompt: The act of reading rests upon some familiar ground or structure like grammar and language conventions with the understanding that some new information is proposed. Likewise, a story works because on some foundation of recognizable elements, it offers something unknown. Discuss an example of such interplay between expectations and surprise in one of the stories we have read.

 

Response 1:

 

 

 

 

 

Kemika Jangjit

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

August 31, 2011

Reading Response 3

 

Heart: 1, Head: 0

 

In his “Sonnet—To Science,” Poe calls science a vulture who preys upon the poet’s heart, whose wings give flight to “dull realities,” and whose eyes pierce through treasures of mythology, dreams and imagination, and drains the poet of his lifeblood. More than a decade later, Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a display that seems to challenge the significance of science by demonstrating the power of literature. This fight between the head and the heart, one being the rational and the other being passion, is presented in a scenario where the narrator struggles to show sanity despite his madness by recounting how he has murdered an old man. There is no mystery that the story is a crazy person’s argument, and that the reader is the rational party who already foresees the eventual failure of the narrator’s illogical proof, but oh, the fun of reading this! How deprived the world would be, Poe seems to argue, without its fantasies and madmen? The surprise of the story seems to be on us, roped unawares into the game by the power of pure fiction. That despite our logic and our sanity, we are still drawn into the delusional narrative of a sick mind, proves too that triumph belongs to the everlasting heart. Mirroring the narrator’s own failing battle to control his laughter, glee, and all sorts of roiling emotions and conscience, the reader has to admit that after an excellent match, the ever-thumping heart has won and rational intellect comes up empty.


Works Cited


Poe, Edgar Allan, “The Philosophy of Composition.” Graham’s Magazine 28.4 (1846): 163–67. <http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm>.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” 1843. The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. and introd. Stephen Peithman. New York: Avenel Books, 1986. 134–39. Print.

 

 

 

 

 

            

 

Response 2:

 

 

 

 

 

Student Name

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

November 16, 2009

Reading Response 2

 

Title

 

Text

 

 

 

 

 

            

 


Reference

 

 

Link
Texts
  • Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” The Pioneer 1.1 (January 1843): 29–31.
  • Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, vol. 3: Tales and Sketches (Cambridge: Belknap, 1978) 789–99. (with an introduction to the text and notes)
Essays

The Gothic
Resources

 


Media
  • The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe, Biography (1994; 43:24 min.)


  • The Tell-Tale Heart, dir. Ted Parmelee, narr. James Mason, Columbia Pictures (1953 animation; 7:24 min.)

  • The Tell-Tale Heart, dir. Annette Jung and Gregor Dashuber, narr. Tom Strauss (2006 animation; 8:01 min.)

  • "200th Anniversary of the Birth of Edgar Allen Poe," Direct Connection with Jeff Salkin,  Maryland Public Television (2009 round table discussion; 14:24 min.)

 


Edgar Allan Poe

 

 


Reference

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Tell-Tale Heart." The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. and introd. Stephen Peithman. New York: Avenel Books, 1986. 134–9. Print.



Further Reading

Jay, Gregory S. "Poe and the Unconscious." Modern Interpretations of Poe. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Print.


Kennedy, J. Gerald Kennedy. Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Print.


Levy, Maurice. "Poe and the Gothic Tradition." Trans. Richard Henry Harwell. ESQ 18.1 (1972): 19–25. Print.

 

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Last updated August 24, 2015