The Raven and Other Selected Poems

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Gerard Cheshire asserts his moral rights as author of the Life & Times section

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from Collins English Dictionary

Cover by e-Digital Design.

Cover image © Conceptor/iStock

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008180515

Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008180522

Version: 2016-09-23

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

History of William Collins

Life & Times

The Raven

The Raven

Selected Poems 1827–1849

A Dream

A Dream within a Dream

Dreams

Evening Star

“In Youth I Have Known One” (Stanzas)

Song

Spirits of the Dead

Tamerlane

“The Happiest Day, the Happiest Hour”

The Lake

Al Aaraaf

Alone

Elizabeth

Fairy-Land

Romance

Sonnet—To Science

To– – (“I heed not that my earthly lot”)

To– – (“The bowers whereat, in dreams, I see”)

To the River

A Pæan

Israfel

Lenore

The City in the Sea

The Sleeper

The Valley of Unrest

To Helen (“Helen, thy beauty is to me”)

Serenade

The Coliseum

To One in Paradise

Hymn

To F— — (“Beloved! amid the earnest woes”)

To Frances S. Osgood

Bridal Ballad

Sonnet—To Zante

The Haunted Palace

Sonnet—Silence

The Conqueror Worm

Dream-Land

Epigram for Wall Street

Eulalie—A Song

A Valentine

To Marie Louise Shew (“Of all who hail thy presence as the morning”)

Ulalume—A Ballad

An Enigma

To Marie Louise Shew (“Not long ago, the writer of these lines”)

To Helen (“I saw thee once—once only— years ago”)

Annabel Lee

Eldorado

For Annie

The Bells

To My Mother

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases

About the Publisher

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner; however, it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II, took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly “Victorian” in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and ThePilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases, and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of “books for the millions” was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published, and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time, and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.