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Symbols
Body parts are obviously part of the gory, gothic nature of Poe’s world, but eyes are especially noticeable as the medallion of many of the haunting figures in the stories. Ligeia is at first known to us by her large, strangely powerful eyes and it is these ‘orbs’ that come back to haunt us at the end. In The Black Cat, it is the cat’s gouged eye that begins the spiral of crime that eventually condemns the narrator. And in The Tell-Tale Heart, without any further explanation of the narrator’s moral opposition to the old man, it is his evil, vulture-like eye that provokes the whole grisly tale. Eyes appear often as part of the other-worldly realm of Poe’s stories and suggest a window to the soul gone-wrong.
Eyes Quotes in Poe's Stories
The Poe's Stories quotes below all refer to the symbol of Eyes. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Manuscript Found in a Bottle
Quotes
The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their fingers fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of Allan columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin.
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Ligeia
Quotes
They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad. Yet it was only at intervals – in moments of intense excitement – that this peculiarity became more than slightly noticeable in Ligeia.
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The Murders in the Rue-Morgue
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The modes and sources of this kind of error are well typified in the contemplation of the heavenly bodies. To look at a star by glances -- to view it in a side-long way, by turning toward it the exterior portions of the retina (more susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the interior), is to behold the star distinctly -- is to have the best appreciation of its lustre -- a lustre which grows dim just in proportion as we turn our vision fully upon it.
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The Tell-Tale Heart
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I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture.
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The Black Cat
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I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.
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Eyes Symbol Timeline in Poe's Stories
The timeline below shows where the symbol Eyes appears in Poe's Stories. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Ligeia
...Greek Goddesses to the narrator. But one aspect shines above the rest – Ligeia’s large eyes.
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These eyes are larger than human eyes usually are – there is something animal about them. They...
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...the most thrilling human feelings. He has felt this way about the expression of Ligeia’s eyes. Sometimes an image will come to his mind that is an exact analogy for the...
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...calm but has outbursts of temper like no other, and at these moments, her large eyes became huge and her voice took on a melodious, powerful energy.
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...lost child. As illness took her strength away, she read less and her once wild eyes grew dim. The narrator knew that she was about to die and struggled to reckon...
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...that enshrouds her, letting loose raven-colored hair, and then revealing a pair of large, wild eyes. The narrators shrieks. It is Ligeia.
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The Fall of the House of Usher
...see that the man is completely changed, has become very pale and thin and his eyes have a strange luster. Usher's features are so fearful that the narrator doesn’t even recognize...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
...was a strange feature of the old man he lives with, that one of his eyes was different from the other and had an evil, vulture-like appearance, which convinced him to...
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...he opens the shutter of the lantern so that a single ray falls on the eye. Every night, he is annoyed to find the eye closed, because it is its stare...
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...shutter a tiny bit and emits a ray upon the man, and sees that the eye is open! The narrator's old fury is stirred at the sight. The narrator reminds us...
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The Black Cat
...is ashamed to write it, he attacked the cat and gouged out one of his eyes with a quill pen.
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...also hates a particular coincidental feature of the cat: that it too only has one eye, though this only endears the cat to his wife. As the narrator’s loathing for the...
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