John Valerio

Poe fills his ballad, Ulalume, with mystery and gloom. The narrator finds himself inexplicably drawn to a forest haunted by ghouls on an ashen October night. Astarte, the ancient Middle Eastern moon goddess of love and fertility, represented by the crescent moon, beckons him to follow her. As he does, Psyche, his soul, who is female, distrusts her and warns him not wander deeper into the forest. Finally, as they come upon the tomb of his lost love, Ulalume, the narrator realizing that he buried her there exactly one year ago is struck with grief and horror at the site of her tomb. As with all of Poe’s poems, Ulalume is musical on its own and the challenge was to heighten the mood and emotions of the text without interfering with or altering the inherent rhythms and sounds of the poetry. Poe conceived of the poem as an elocution exercise and makes much use of alliterations and quasi-repetitive lines and phrases while exploiting certain phonetic sounds during each stanza. The choir echoes these sounds while acting as ghoulish observers to the narrator’s nightmarish journey.