Poe’s A City In The Sea is an apocalyptic vision, a conspiracy of evil set to rise up and usher in Hell on Earth.
The city in question lies unnamed and without location, somewhere in the west. It’s a peaceful city, not unlike the Atlantis legend, but it would be more apt to describe a progressive Sodom and Gomorrah. Poe describes towers, shrines, turrets, domes and spires, yet the light of heaven never reaches there. Instead the perpetual night is only lit by a glow emanating from the lurid sea.
The locations of Poe’s City in the Sea, the west has long been associated with death and the afterlife, and here it is ruled by Death personified, or rather deified. Death as person is common, coming for the living robed and with his scythe. Poe takes it a step further and rather than a messenger, Death wields more power here than previously given credit.
In Poe’s city in the sea, the population is dressed in their finery, dressed for the grave. That’s where they lie, devoid of life, movement and even the flowers are lifeless, stone carvings.
Perhaps the city in the sea is an offering to figure greater than Death itself, Satan. For the climax of the poem, Hell rises up and takes sovereign over the city and beyond, and the city sinks into the red sea. It is the coming of Satan and apocalypse is unleashed up on the land.
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Edgar Allan Poe’s A City In The Sea
LO! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently —
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free —
Up domes — up spires — up kingly halls —
Up fanes — up Babylon-like walls —
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers —
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine. [page 22:]
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.
There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye —
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass —
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea —
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.
But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave — there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrown aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide —
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow —
The hours are breathing faint and low —
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence. [[,]]
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.