23 pages • 46 minutes read
Edgar Allan PoeThe Conqueror Worm
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1843A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Inevitability of Death
Whether it is read as a serious and unsettling allegory for the absurdity of expecting life to mean something, or read as an ironic play, literally, on such pseudo-philosophizing, “The Conqueror Worm” ends up at the same thematic argument: death is forever waiting. Every organic life form ends with the gnawing and gnashing of insatiable worms. Whether the reader finds the image of the gaping maw of a monstrous red worm surreal or silly, whether in the end the reader cringes or smirks, the poem cannot escape the reality of death as an omnivorous creature whose appetite is insatiable and whose interests are catholic and terribly non-particular. The worms eat everything.
In the end, in literally the last line, the poet/speaker declares that the worm, the image of hungry death, is the hero of humanity’s spectacle-play. Given that the line provides no adverb to indicate the emotional direction for the theme, the reader is left to decide how to understand the poem’s theme about the inevitability of death. Keeping in mind that the poem is the creation of a young man, barely in his thirties, the theme lends itself to contradictory readings: yes, death is terrifying; yes, death is inescapable; and yes, death is monstrous in its absoluteness. But not today. Death is a carnival figure, a nightmare image we conjure and then pretend it is real and live in terror of its gaping jaws. We invent the menace and then pretend the menace is real, a strategy as provocative and as silly as a theatergoer taking as reality the busyness going on there on the stage.
The choice, Poe argues then, belongs to humanity. Death, of course, we do not control—the perception of death, however, we very much control. Allow death to become the absolute terror and buy into the absorbing drama of death as a monstrous fanged creature, or see it for what it is every day in our lives until our last day—a fanciful and entirely self-conceived, self-generating, and self-justifying threat.
The Uncertainty and of Life
The play that Poe stages as the emotional core of the gala he recreates offers a picture of life as full of energy and full of movement but without consequence, without purpose. The actors on the stage are “Mimes” whose shapes reflect God himself (a poke at the Judeo-Christian doctrine that we are created in God’s image). Despite that noble ancestry, however, the actors are mute, suggesting that humanity has no lines, no voice; they struggle to understand their powerlessness and to share that insight with others. That is the futility of life. We “flap” (Line 14) about the stage of our life, all the while angels themselves watching (literally there on the stage) helplessly, tearfully as we gracelessly stumble through our life certain it all must mean something but fearful that it does not.
Within the drama here, then, we are little more than crazy creatures who presume we are God-like and yet whose lives unwind with conspicuous absurdity. The mimes move about the stage clumsily running into stage sets, suggesting how decidedly unchoreographed are our lives, how we move blindly, crazily, without clear purpose or evident logic, all the while pretending that such antic crazy actions are somehow in control of “vast formless things” (Line 13), the gods we so diligently and ironically populate the skies with.
How, then, the poem asks, are we to handle such a painful reality? How can we continue to pretend that there is someone Up There, an entity, or entities, in charge of what are so obviously lives without purpose, direction, meaning, or fairness? Our lives, our every action, are directed by what we know are sins: greed, lust, selfishness, envy, jealousy. Sins, the poet says, are the very “soul” (Line 24) of the plot of our lives. To want that life, the poet argues, to reflect some purpose and in turn the design of some perfect deity is a kind of collective madness.
Again, the poet moves us to a choice: surrender to the despair of lives that clearly move about in tight and pointless circles or enjoy the circles, relish the movement, engage in the theater of it—because in the final act, we all know (cue the man-eating worm) that we are all of us on the road to nowhere.
Life as a Play
All the world’s a stage.
The son of two professional actors and himself a recognized personality in the bohemian theater world of both New York and Baltimore, Poe understood the implications of Shakespeare’s line from the comedy As You Like It. Here Poe uses all the accoutrements of a stage: the audience, the orchestra in the pit, the scenery and the sets, the costumes, the actors, the idea of a climax, and the final curtain drop. In this, Poe draws on the idea that dates back to Medieval drama that life itself is little more than an amusing play both carefully plotted and carelessly adlibbed. Relax, the poem argues, you are taking it all too seriously.
This notion of regarding life itself as a drama allows the poet to both create the existential horrors of a life without clear purpose and to simultaneously step apart from the implications of such existential horrors. In this split perspective, life’s very meaninglessness becomes amusing theater that allows for the saving distance of irony. Remove all the stage directions, all the theatrical vocabulary, all the dramatic trappings, and the poem is dark, disturbing, and unsettling. Make it a play and give the reader every opportunity to see the frame, to realize its artificial nature, and the poem becomes an entirely different experience. The frame perspective thus empowers the reader to make their own meaning of Poe’s nightmarish vision. It can be read as either a forbidding reminder that life’s meaning is itself the ultimate delusion, or it can be an amusing theatrical spectacle before humanity departs the theater happily and returns once again to being players on their own stage of life, imitating purpose and pretending logic. Either get caught up in the play and pretend it’s real or enjoy the entire crazy, terrifying spectacle both inside and outside of the theater.
Related Titles
By Edgar Allan Poe
