It has been suggested that there is a connection between John Donne’s Meditation XVII, in which he writes the immortal lines “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” and Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Bells. It has also been suggested that the Bible and Shakespeare’s The Tempest inspired Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death.
Poe knew the Bible well. The many references to Biblical Scripture and imagery in his works make this clear. However, there is not enough Biblical continuity in the story to make that his most obvious influence. Many writers use the Bible as a touchstone in their work as it is something that a large portion of their readers will be able to understand and identify, in which case most writer’s are influenced by the Bible.
The Influence of Shakespeare
The influence of The Tempest is more evident. The connection is clearly made at the beginning of the story. The second paragraph introduces us to Prince Prospero, whose name immediately recalls the main character in Shakespeare’s play.
In The Tempest, Prospero and his young daughter Miranda live on an island after being set-afloat in a boat by his brother and the Duke. Yet society finds him and pulls him back into the ‘real’ world but not before Prospero entertains them with a fantastic and fanciful masque that reveals his ideas of what the world could really be like.
In Poe’s story, Prospero isolates himself in an abbey (an island of safety) and creates his own revels and insubstantial visions. He, however, unlike his predecessor refuses to relinquish his fantasies and return to the ‘real’ world.
The early introduction of Prospero and the clear connections between the two stories seems to have halted the inquiries of most scholars. The idea of man isolated on an island does not belong only to Shakespeare. Perhaps the man who penned the most famous line about man and isolation has more influence on Poe than scholars realize.
The Passage of Time
The clock represents the passage of time in its immediacy. Every time a clock chimes, a bell tolls, or an alarm clock rings, we remember that time is passing. In the final room, the black room, in the suite of rooms described in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, The Masque of the Red Death, there was a clock made of ebony. This clock chimes the hour so loudly that it can be heard throughout the entire suite of rooms and when it is heard, everyone pauses to listen.
The Tolling of Bells
Poe’s description of the effect of the passage of time as betokened by the clock in the black room is profound:
“while the chimes of the clock yet rang it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation; ...after the lapse of sixty minutes (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the time that flies), there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.”
Poe echoes the sentiment of John Donne who, while gravely ill with what some believe was the plague, wrote “The bell doth toll for him that think it doth.” Clearly, the partiers are at least subconsciously aware that it tolls for them for they know that death surrounds them. In addition to the weird tolling of the ebony clock, they certainly hear the bells tolling the death toll of those outside their island of safety whenever they have a rare moment of silence during their revel.
Donne writes in his mediations that ‘the bell that rings a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all.” In Poe’s story, the sermon is death, the preacher the mummer, the congregation the partiers.
Clearly, the Poe owes Donne for the ideas of bells tolling out the moments of our lives, reminding us of our mortality.
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