Earlier today I spent the afternoon talking poetry with the kind folks at Charles House. Since it was his birthday last week, we read several poems by Edgar Allan Poe. We skipped The Raven, since we covered it during our Halloween session, but spent a lot of time on Annabel Lee, discussing not just the use of rhyme and alliteration but also Poe’s rather short and tragic life.

Among the other poems we spent time on were The City in the Sea, A Dream Within a Dream and A Valentine, which it is not a particularly memorable work until you see that it’s a fancy acrostic. In regular acrostics, the first letters of each line form another word, frequently a name. In A Valentine, Poe uses the first letter of the first line, the second letter of the second line, the third letter of the third line, etc. to spell out the name Frances Sargent Osgood, a fellow poet and someone with whom Poe had a “complicated” relationship.

This inspired us to write an Acrostic for Edgar.

Excited blood tingles
Down my veins while
Gripping a book of
Adventures trembling while
Rhyme marries illicit music

Awful thoughts stir and
Linger in my bones
Longing for a journey obscure
Alone and lost in the
Night starless and cold

Panic pounds my heart awake
Out of the clutches of my
Eerie dream within a dream