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Edgar Allan PoeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The theatrical piece Poe describes here centers on mimes who move about the stage restlessly, “hither and thither” (Line 11), their apparent lack of clear direction suggesting nothing less than how our lives unfold in chaos, without logic or purpose. The stage description is vague, of course: the mimes are “in the form of God on high” (Line 9). That draws on the theological premise of Judeo-Christianity itself, that we are each made in God’s image. There we are, Poe says, adorable little godlings, running about the world like anxious puppets uncertain of where we go and where these distant and unapproachable gods move us.
Although the figure of the mime has become something of a pop culture punchline, the art of mime dates back to the spectacle theater of Antiquity. Given the sense of theater as symbolic, even as religious ritual, the function of the mimes, whose elaborate dancing on stage created an atmosphere of rich suggestion, was to present in their elaborate and artful movements symbols of life’s own complex dynamics. They presented difficult-to-understand abstracts right there on stage, physically creating the idea of, for instance, love, or courage, or pride, or even death.
By Edgar Allan Poe
A Dream Within a Dream
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Annabel Lee
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Berenice
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Hop-Frog
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Ligeia
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Tamerlane
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The Black Cat
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The Cask of Amontillado
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The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
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The Fall of the House of Usher
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The Gold Bug
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The Haunted Palace
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The Imp of the Perverse
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The Lake
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The Man of the Crowd
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The Masque of the Red Death
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The Murders in the Rue Morgue
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The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
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The Oval Portrait
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The Philosophy of Composition
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