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RSS Feed Imitation by Edgar Allan Poe: Pride, Dreams & a Bright Hope Lost
Edgar Allan Poe turns childhood memory into a dark dream of pride, mystery, and a bright hope that has vanished beyond recovery.
First published in 1827, “Imitation” is one of Poe’s earliest poems. Its speaker looks back on a life shaped by visions no one else could share, describing youth as an unfathomable tide suspended between waking thought and dream. What once seemed bright has passed, leaving a mind haunted by its own private history and unable to find ordinary worldly rest.
The poem already contains ideas that would define Poe’s later work: the instability of memory, the loneliness of an inner world, the seduction of dreams, and the painful distance between an ideal past and a diminished present. Its language is compact, but the emotional landscape is unmistakably Gothic—a speaker surrounded not by literal ghosts, but by mysteries and vanished possibilities that continue to rule him.
This spoken-word reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Imitation” offers a concise entry into his early poetry for listeners drawn to classic Gothic literature, melancholic verse, dream imagery, and reflections on pride and lost hope. The revised notes identify the poem’s central ideas without forcing a supernatural plot onto an introspective work.
This episode is sponsored by HenFlix.com.
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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 Awlan 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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00:00:40.119 --> 00:00:48.079
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. Imitation by
Edgar Allan Poe. A dark,
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unfathomed tide of interminable pride, a
mystery, and a dream should my early
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life seem. I say that dream
was fraught with a wild and waking thought
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00:02:04.799 --> 00:02:10.400
of beings that have been, which
my spirit hath not seen. Had I
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let them pass me by with a
dreaming eye, let none of earth inherit
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00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:24.560
that vision of my spirit. Those
thoughts I would control as a spell upon
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00:02:24.800 --> 00:02:30.360
his soul, for that bright hope
at last, and that light time hath
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pass'd and my worldly rest hath gone
with a sigh as it passed on.
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I care not though it perish.
With a thought I then did cherish
