Interpretive Essay on "The City in the Sea" by Edgar Allen Poe

Edgar Allen Poe's "The City in the Sea", takes one into the depths of the ocean stanza by stanza, gently descending until reaching the bottom floor, "in a strange city, lying alone" (Poe 2). Imagination suggests this must be the lost city of Atlantis, mysterious now, but hauntingly beautiful with reflections of its former glory.

Stanza 1 describes the center of this supernatural city, the devil, as having raised himself "a throne". (Poe 1) "Time eaten towers that tremble not!" (Poe 7) encourage a vision of complacency and resignation, as if this city, still alive, is sleeping, waiting "resignedly beneath the sky".(Poe 10)

No light may enter it from heaven; it is dark, hopeless, and deathly silent. However, from the sea itself rises a light that "gleans up the pinnacles far and free-"(Poe 16), inferring that the sun pierces the devil's fortress with the light and hope that filters down from the surface of the earth.

The city lies in wait for freedom, the breaking of the spell that holds it to the deep. The author insinuates swells of water that cause a pulsing, shifting, beating movement deep beneath the waves, where no joy or hope abound.

Under the waves reigns death, despair, darkness, and the devil himself- alone, waiting, the ruler of nothing but an empty fortress. He has nothing to conquer except the time, endless and lifeless as Poe infers with the metaphor "sculptured ivy and stone flowers" (Poe 20) are all that are in his silent kingdom.

Stanzas 14-23 convince the reader that light and power enter this submerged dungeon with the power of hope, faith, strength and a persistence that the devil can never hope to defeat.

The poem's tone is dark and quiet, as if the reader should read in a whisper so as not to wake the devil. Almost consistently every other stanza rhymes, trapping the reader in a cadence that seems to step down inch-by-inch much like the city itself must have drowned. The irony is palpable, luring one into first imagining the power of the devil but in the end, perceiving the defeat and powerlessness this beast has over his dominion.

References

Poe, Edgar. The City in the Sea