The Slender Poe Anthology by Edgar Allan Poe Read Free Book Online Page A

termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.”
    This brings us to one of my favorite images in all of Poe, the ‘gigantic clock of ebony,’ which when it tolls the hour, silences the revel’s musicians, who might easily be imagined as having been playing “Reveries” from Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique .
    This tale could also be seen as cousin to Byron’s apocalyptic poem Darkness. Poe’s prose-poetry begs to read aloud, for there is a voluptuous and lyric use of English accorded the most wonderful variations of tempi. Don’t miss Basil Rathbone’s reading of it!

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH
    The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had everbeen so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — theredness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and suddendizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. Thescarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim,were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathyof his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination ofthe disease, were the incidents of half an hour.
    But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When hisdominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousandhale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames ofhis court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of hiscastellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, thecreation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong andlofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers,having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the suddenimpulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amplyprovisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance tocontagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantimeit was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all theappliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori,there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty,there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “RedDeath.”
    It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion,and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the PrinceProspero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the mostunusual magnificence.
    It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of therooms in which it was held. There were seven — an imperial suite. In manypalaces, however, such suites form a long and straight vista, while thefolding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so thatthe view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case wasvery different; as might have been expected from the duke’s love of the bizarre . The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the visionembraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn atevery twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To theright and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothicwindow looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings ofthe suite. These windows were of stained glass whose color varied inaccordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamberinto which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, forexample, in blue — and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamberwas purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes werepurple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. Thefourth was furnished and lighted with orange — the fifth with white — thesixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in blackvelvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the