Al Aaraaf - Analysis

Analysis

"Al Aaraaf" is thick with allusions and, because of this, is often avoided by scholars because, as writer Arthur Hobson Quinn notes, it can be "unintelligible". Nevertheless, Quinn says it possesses qualities which are important to understand the development of Poe's skills as a poet. "Al Aaraaf" mixes historical facts, religious mythology and elements of Poe's imagination. The poem primarily focuses on the afterlife, ideal love, and ideal beauty in relation to passion. The majority of the poem focuses on this reaching for ideal beauty and aesthetics. Characters in the poem serve as representative symbols of personified emotions. The goddess Nesace is beauty, Ligeia represents the music in nature, Ianthe and Angelo are creatures of passion.

The poem draws from Sura 7 (Arabic الأعراف) in the Qur'an; Poe also drew upon the Qur'an in other works, including "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade". In "Al Aaraaf", Poe was probably less interested in the Qur'an itself and more interested in an atmosphere of the exotic or otherworldliness. The true setting of the poem is a sort of dreamscape or alternative world. As critic Floyd Stovall wrote, the theme of the poem is "one of disillusionment with the world and escape into some more congenial realm of dream or of the imagination".

The star which prompted Poe to write "Al Aaraaf" was believed to foretell disaster or that humanity would be punished for breaking God's laws. Poe may have gotten the idea to base a poem on Brahe's astronomical discovery from poet John Keats's use of the 1781 discovery of the planet Uranus in a poem called "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (1816). The name of the star has been changed from "Al Orf" to "Al Aaraaf" to become similar to the word arafa, which means distinguishing between things. Additionally, Poe was indebted to Irish poet Thomas Moore, whose poem Lalla-Rookh inspired, among other parts of "Al Aaraaf", the catalogue of flowers near the beginning. Another work by Moore, The Loves of the Angels, inspired Poe's idea of uniting mortal and immortal love.

Structurally, the 422-line "Al Aaraaf" has no discernible or consistent poetic rhythm, though the meter resembles a section of Lord Byron's Manfred. Instead of formal structure, the poem focuses on the flow of sound. Poet Daniel Hoffman analyzed the fluctuating meter and determined that Part I begins as octosyllabic couplets then shifts to pentameter couplets with occasional interludes of alternately rhymed trimeter-dimeters. Part II generally uses pentameter couplets with an interlude of anapestic dimeters.