'Glory of the East,' thou art in danger of mastication!
This is clearly either on of the finest sentences ever written, or a really odd typo to find in the middle of an Edgar Allen Poe story. So lets go with the former, and appreciate it for what it is, a really bizarre but somehow wonderfully understated sentence.
The 'Glory of the East' in question is Epiphanes king of Syria. As to why his is 'in danger of mastication!' well he chose to dress himself up as a cameleopard, half camel, half leopard in order to enact the public execution of a thousand Jewish prisoners before an adoring crowd. An act that so enrages the domesticated animals of the city of Antioch that they riot through the crowd and chase the king in an effort to eat him. Hence the rather imprecise cry from the crowd, which should have been.
'Glory of the East,' thou art in danger of being masticated!
Now, as I chose to start this entry of Dear Edgar with a short discussion on just one sentence in the middle of a story, rather than speaking about the story as a whole, you might infer that I was struggling to say anything about this story...
You would be right...
The problem with this story is it is a whole lot of nothing, interspersed with long meandering rambles of word soup descriptions that at no point hold your interest. If it is comedy the joke misses it target, if it is a window on to antiquity it fails to inspire. It is dull and torrid and just not very interesting. If Poe had not written this then the impact on the echelons of human achievement would be nil. As it is the only reason it gets read and is remembered is because of its author.
Which is why, as you may have noticed if you are following this series of blogs, Dear Edgar has been on hiatus for a couple of months, because after the high point of Shadow: A Parable, I read this and could not find a word worth saying about it. I left it a while then read it again, and then left it a while longer and so on... And still I can't find much to say about it because it is a whole lot of nothing. It was also the last story published of his published in the Southern Literary Messenger for six years and this was also the beginning of the end his association with the magazine on an editorial front. Though a couple of his poems were published there in then January of the follow year.
In essence this story is told to you by the narrator who invites you to look at events in the past. think of this as an antiquarian giving you a power point lecture, who randomly sings a couple of hymns at you along the way. I say power point, actually its more like a bad slide show, and the narrator is either drunk, or had a failing memory. Possibly both.
Don't get me wrong, I am sure Poe researched the period, and certainly Epiphanes is a historical figure, who did quite horrendous things to captured enemies and is documented as doing some quite mad things in general, so none of this is actually that much of a stretch, but it is just dull for the most part. An intellectual exercise that recreates on the page what you could find in hundreds you tube speculative history documentaries, but without the narrative charm.
THE DEADEST OF RAVENS, ONE THAT IS TRUELY NEVERMORE...
Should you read it: No... Just no...
Bluffers fact: Epiphanes, was a name adopted by many kings of the Hellenistic period. In Greek it means 'God Manifest' or possibly just 'the Glorious one'. So no ego's there...
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