“It was night, and the rain fell; and falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood.”

It is not unreasonable to say that a good half of our Dear Edgar’s out put over the years was poetry. As such an examination of his work that ignores the poetry is clearly a tad half-arsed. So to redress this glaring imbalance, ‘The Raven’ is quite good, though his lesser known poem ‘The penguin’ is better.

Okay, that’s poetry out of the way, back to prose… Almost.

While I’m not the worlds greatest lover of poetry, and certainly don’t profess to be a poet, I am much enamoured of poetic prose or as it is perhaps more correctly described, prose poetry. I delight in the use of certain repetitions and patterns in short prose. A good descriptive short story is often just that, poetry in prose form. When do well, a prose poem grips the reader and holds their attention in ways that a story in normal narrative prose could only dream.

There are reasons for this, not least that narrative poetry, with repetitions and rhythms is amongst the most ancient form of story telling. It is how our ancestors learnt and remembered the stories of their ancestors through the generations long before the words were written down. The epic tales of antiquity are all prose poems, to one extent or another. Something we remember in our souls, in our human memory, the crackle of the camp fire, the telling of the old tales. Repetition and rhythm, a beat to match the blood in our veins.

Earlier this year I was privileged to witnessed the first performance of ‘Mother Hode’ performed by the astounding Joanna Swan (written by the equally astounding Steven C Davis) which is a modern play of carefully crafted with those same repetitions and rhythm that hearkens back to those ancient campfires. The campfire around which the likes of Beowulf, Gilgamesh and bits of the Illiad would have been told. Prose poetry at its most profound, visceral and beautiful.

The same kind of prose poetry that HP Lovecraft should have written more often as its its some of his best. Certainly Memory and Nyarlathotep are among my favourites individual pieces of his work. When it came to his prose poetry ‘Old Tentacle Hugger’ wrote that it was Poe in particular that inspired him. Among the stories he referenced was the one we come to now. Silence: A fable.

This is the first story Dear Edgar wrote that I would describe as prose poetry. While there is the odd bit of poetic description in some of the other early stories, this is they first to use rhythm and repetition as a device, and he uses it to great effect. This is a story written to be told. It would not be out of place around the ancient campfires. It is also a story about fear, and what it is to fear. Which is apt considering it is a story told to use by a deamon.

The is a flow to it, a slightly dreamlike quality, and it makes no attempt to be anything but a fable. A story about fear as the daemon tells it. He seeks to find what most scares man and in the end that is silence in a place where silence could never be.

The tale is actually quite simple, and the moral, if there is one, is at tad opaque. That there should be a moral is perhaps only considered because Poe called this ‘a fable’ and fables by tradition should have morals. This causes some debate as to what the moral may be. To which your guess is as good as mine, and I am not inclined to speculate, as what I like about the story is not the story itself, but how it is told. Compared to the occasionally torrid descriptive passages that seem so laboured among Poes other early stores, this one has life and breath to it and left me thoughtful in a way that only his ‘Shadow: A parable’ previously managed.

This is not to say that the tale is profound. Humanity fears silence about all else, may seem a profound idea but I am not entirely convinced it is. But the telling of the tale will leave you believing it is a profound thought for a moment or two.

Till the silence of your own thoughts drives you to speak a word to break it…

A SILENT FLOCK OF RAVENS WATCHING YOU…

Should you read it: With only the ticking of the clock to disturb the silence… What you don’t have a clock? Well the almost imperceptible low hum of the wifi then…

Bluffers fact: The story takes place along the River Zaire, for no other reason I suspect than Zaire worked for the prose. The Zaire is the former name of the Congo. Dispite the Nile getting all the plaudits because it is the longest, the Congo is actually Africa’s most powerful river and the second most voluminous river in the world (after the Amazon) with a discharge of 1,500,000 cubic feet of water per second.

The Nile isn’t even in the top ten…