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RSS Feed Fairyland by Edgar Allan Poe: A Moonlit Dreamscape of Beauty, Shadow & Unease
Moonlight, mountains, lakes, and drifting clouds form an unstable dreamscape in Edgar Allan Poe’s strange poetic journey through “Fairyland.”
The landscape appears at once enchanting and disorienting. Enormous moons descend over shadowed valleys, their light falling across strange flowers, silent water, and forested spaces that seem removed from the waking world. Beauty does not make the place safe; every image carries the stillness and uncertainty of a dream that might darken without warning.
Poe’s speaker observes the scene rather than explaining it. Clouds become garments, moonlight changes the visible world, and familiar features of nature lose their ordinary scale. The poem moves through atmosphere and sensation, allowing Fairyland to remain a mental and supernatural territory rather than a location that can be mapped.
This spoken-word reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fairyland” is suited to listeners seeking classic Gothic poetry, dream poems, dark-fantasy landscapes, moon imagery, and lesser-known Poe works beyond his tales of murder and mourning. The revised notes preserve the poem’s ambiguity while giving its searchable subjects—moonlight, nature, dreams, shadow, and the uncanny beauty of an imagined realm—clear prominence.
This episode is sponsored by HenFlix.com.
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WEBVTT
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One of my favorite memories of scaring
myself as a child was getting a compilation
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book of Edgar Allan Poe stories from
my elementary school library. It brought me
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so much fear and so much excitement. I remember running home from school with
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that book in my backpack as the
sky was dark and a storm was coming.
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I was in my childhood living room, but I wasn't alone. I
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had a pizza and the books of
Poe. Every so often I'll bring you
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a tale of Poe, and I
hope it gives you that scary fun sense,
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just the same as it does for
me. When the clock strikes midnight,
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the story will begin. Fairyland by
Edgar Allan Poe. Dim vals and
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shadowy floods, and cloudy looking woods
whose forms we can't discover. For the
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tears that drip all over huge moons. There wax and wane again again again,
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every moment of the night, forever
changing places, And they put out
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the starlight with the breath from their
pale faces, about twelve by the moon.
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Dial, one more filmy than the
rest, a sort of which,
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upon trial they have found to be
the best, comes down, still down
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and down, with its center on
the crown of a mountain's eminence, while
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its wide circumference in easy drapery falls
over hamlets and rich halls, wherever they
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may be, o'er the strange woods, over the sea, over spirits on
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the wing, over every drowsy thing, and buries them up quite in a
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labyrinth of light. And then how
deep, oh deep, is the passion
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of their sleep. In the morning
they arise, and their moony covering is
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soaring in the skies with the tempests, as they toss like almost anything,
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or a yellow albatross. They use
that moon no more for the same end
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as before, videlicita tent, which
I think extravagant its atoms, however,
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into a shower dissever of which those
butterflies of earth who seek the skies and
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so come down again the unbelieving things
have brought a specimen upon their quivering wings
