I've always paid attention to imagery, and I
love the twist of love that was seen in "Ellenore." Love is always
seen as something that brings people closer to life and even light itself. Love
is usually as a warm glow through depictions of art and literature, pushing
towards a positive point in their life where they truly start living. I thought
the correlation that this had with the Christianity belief of love was very
interesting as well. In Christianity, that remains the same as well. Love is
equal to God (or rather God is love), and to be without God was the same as
being without love, ultimately leading to death of oneself or life in the end.
What really brought this to my attention was the contrast between Ellenore’s
mother and Ellenore in their beliefs in God at the beginning of the poem. The
contrast between the two really drew out the similarities of the Biblical views
of love. I feel almost as if Ellenore's stance against God because of her dead
William was the twist of love in her own destiny in life. It was through
William that she found love, but now that he was taken away, she was resistant
against God, the one who gave her love according to the Biblical beliefs of
which her mother held onto so tightly. It was because she didn't want anything
to do with God that she followed her own death as she accepted William’s hand
and traveled further and further away from living with him, similar to the
Devil dragging the sinners who do not believe into the demise of death with
him.
This leads me to conclude that perhaps because of Ellenore's cursing of God, as such a thought is considered blasphemous, condemned her Hell. Thus, William's apparition was a facade and a trick played by the Devil to lure Ellenore to her death. However, as the end of the poem suggests, "Be patient; tho thyne herte should breke/ Arrayne not Heaven's decree;/ Thou nowe art of thy body reft,/ Thy soul forgiven bee!" there is hope for Ellenore's soul; so maybe William as Devil made an attempt at Ellenore's soul, yet, because of God's love (and maybe her mother's plea to dismis her daughter's blaspheme) in the end she was forgiven and the Devil only got her body (the underlying dialectical transformation of ideas regarding the body and soul)...thus leaving us with a morbidly happy ending, kind of.
ReplyDeleteYes, this seems like a good interpretation of the final stanza, which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense initially--unless, of course, the point is not about Lenora but about the body-soul connection. If materialist philosophy insisted that the soul was nothing more than firing synapses in the brain, the end of the poem suggests that Burger (and Taylor) want to counter this view and insist that it is possible to have a soul separate from the body. This philosophical position (often associated with German idealism) allows Lenora to be saved even though she has chosen her love for William over God's love: her body goes into the grave with William, but her soul goes to heaven.
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