The Conqueror Worm: Edgar Allan Poe at His Most Pessimistic

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm” is not only a fascinating piece of poetry, but also a undeniably stimulating piece of social commentary. The work in of itself is a blissfully well-written work complete with imagery and descriptors that would make even JRR Tolkien jealous, but upon a closer look? Well… it speaks for itself.

“An angel throng, bewinged, bedight/ In veils, and drowned in tears”

Yes, the lines are eloquent and yes, I wish I had been the first one to write them, but the fact of the matter is, they mean something. But what? And who cares what Poe had to say?

To answer the first question, it’s easiest to just… look for a moment at the poem, to carefully read over it. (Click here) You feel something, right? Something a little heavy but not exactly sad or hopeless. Something that’s just… weighted. And that? That’s exactly what Poe’s going for; the slight discomfort and strong sense of impropriety. The feeling that something about the work—maybe the meaning, maybe just the words—is inherently wrong.

And yes, there is, which is part of Poe’s point. The poem—which covers angels watching what is, essentially, the play (or tragedy, as Poe points out) of humanity—is fairly clear from the start. Humanity is not running their world right, isn’t properly considering the repercussions of their actions. They’re running through the world “hither and thither”, unable to really communicate or get their point across. He refers to them as mimes, which is incredibly significant, I think, because it just emphasizes the solidarity of their existence. When you think of mimes, how often do you think of a cluster of them? How often do we really even see several together at once? Almost never.

Mimes, as Poe refers to us, are distinctly solitary by nature. (Why spend time with someone you can’t speak to?) But this leads to an interesting point—we’re so wrapped up in ourselves that we not only don’t communicate with others, we can’t. Humanity isn’t just a set of mimes, though, they’re puppets as well—useless to their own bidding and reliant upon some “vast, formless things” to guide them.

What are these things?

I’ll tell you in one word: sin.

“And much of Madness, and more of Sin,   

   And Horror the soul of the plot.”

What other entity has connotations so strong as these? If we’re a play—if we’re entertainment and mindless and mute, what kind of story are we? A tragedy. Not a comedy, not a love story, a tragedy.

So what’s his point?

Self awareness. Humanity is so blind to its own flaws that it misses everything—the transformation to puppets and, in the end, the conqueror worm—SIN, as the angels sit back and watch humanity fall.

“That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”   

   And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.”