Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll! - a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river;
And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear? - weep now or nevermore!
See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
Come! let the burial rite be read - the funeral song be sung! -
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young -
A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.
"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her - that she died!
How shall the ritual, then, be read? - the requiem how be sung
By you - by yours, the evil eye, - by yours, the slanderous tongue
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?"
Peccavimus; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song
Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong.
The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside,
Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy
bride.
For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes
The life still there, upon her hair - the death upon her eyes.
"Avaunt! avaunt! from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven -
From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven -
From grief and groan, to a golden throne, beside the King of
Heaven!
Let no bell toll, then, - lest her soul, amid its hallowed mirth,
Should catch the note as it doth float up from the damned Earth!
And I! - to-night my heart is light! - no dirge will I upraise,
But waft the angel on her flight with a Paean of old days!"
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More Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
• A Dream
• A Dream Within A Dream
• A Valentine
• Alone
• An Enigma
• Annabel Lee
• Bridal Ballad
• Dreamland
• Poe Dreams
• Eldorado
• Elizabeth Poe
• Eulalie
• Evening Star
• Fairy-Land
• Hymn
• Imitation
• Israfel
• Lenore
• Romance
• Serenade
• Song
• Spirits Of The Dead
• The Bells
• The City In The Sea Poe
• The Coliseum
• The Conqueror Worm
• The Happiest Day, The Happiest Hour
• The Haunted Palace
• The Raven
• The Sleeper
• The Valley Of Unrest
• To Helen
• To My Mother
• To One In Paradise
Also read poems by
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Emily Dickinson
• George Gordon, Lord Byron
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Hilaire Belloc
• John Donne
• John Keats
• Lewis Carroll
• Robert Browning
• Robert Burns
• Robert Herrick
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Rudyard Kipling
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Sarah Teasdale
• Thomas Hardy
• Walt Whitman
• William Blake
• William Butler Yeats
• William Wordsworth
Lenore - Poem Lyrics - Edgar Allan Poe - Lenore
