Comparing Fear In Tell Tale Heart And Sonnet 100
Nighttime and Fear, the inseparable peanut butter and jelly sandwich of literature, have always went to together, in different situations, often to establish a chilling and fearsome tone to the text. Both of these ideas are brought up by many different authors, including the most prestigious, such as Edgar Allan Poe with his horror story, Tell Tale Heart, as well as Lord Brooke Fulke Greville, with his short poem,Sonnet 100. Both passages support the theme of night time and fear creating an ominous mood to the story, but both authors do it in slightly different ways. Greville, with his short and ‘sweet’ poem, uses short phrases coupled with extensive vocabulary, while Poe integrates explaining more than vocabulary, and instead of shortening
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phrases, makes them more drawn out to give more of a eerie effect as to what is happening the text. However, it is still plain that both the authors use the setting of night time to emphasize darkness and fear, which goes along with the chilling text that they are writing. Both, Tell Tale Heart, by Edgar Allan Poe, and Sonnet 100, by Lord Brooke Fulke Greville, use the setting of darkness to signify suspense and foreboding, creating fear for the object or person in question, which loosely appeals the reader and compels them to read more. Greville uses the flow of a poem to create an image in the reader's mind in the first stanza which portrays darkness and night time as a time when you are “Not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,”(4). This statement is fairly obvious, given that the setting is night time, in the dark, but it sets the stage for the next stanza, in which Greville describes the feeling that occurs in a situation in which there is ‘darkness’: “Gives vain alarums to the inward sense, Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny, Confounds all powers,”(5-7). Greville uses this clever phrase as a way to express that in darkness, evil manifests and prospers, as shown by the fear and tyranny, taking over all other sense. Greville portrays the idea of wickedness prospering in dark places by finally ending off by using darkness as a background in “Which but expressions be of inward devils,” (14). Poe’s short story, though in, obviously, a plot format, highlights the same idea, in which evil manifests in darkness, creating fear in the plot. Poe uses the sense of the narrator acting as if he is not mad coupled with the fact that the narrator sneaks up on the old man everyday at midnight to signify that, while the narrator is mad, in the night, “It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed.”(2). This, while it is a short excerpt of the behavior of the narrator watching the man sleep, nevertheless proves that the narrator is not in his right mind, and becomes evil and later commits a horrible deed plainly because of the way that someone looked on the outside. The thought of fear and night time also correlate in the portion of the text in which an evil frenzy takes over the narrator, and he commits the deed: “With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once—once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done,”(3). This quote, which is the final killing of the old man, shows how foreboding the sense of night time can be in a story, and makes the tale all the more creepy, just thinking about a bone chilling murder being committed hours past midnight. Taking everything into account it is concluded that both authors, Poe and Greville, use the nighttime to induce fear and make the readers feel emotions while reading the story. While the methods, as mentioned previously, of relating the night time setting to the feeling of fear are pretty similar, there are some differences, which mainly include the type of writing that it is.
Tell Tale Heart is told in a story with a plot, while Sonnet 100 is shown as a poem, talking in a completely omniscient manner, with no plot elements at all. The poem simply gives information in a way that is art, and shows what the author believes. The story however, is given in a more entertaining format, in which most elements that the poem gives straight out must be inferred from the plot elements within the story. This is most clearly portrayed when Greville, the author of Sonnet 100, includes that in darkness, when evil is let to prosper, people show shadows of themselves “Which but expressions be of inward devils,”(14). In contrast however, with Tell Tale Heart, the author includes everything from the narrator’s point of view, making it so that you have to infer rather than read out, as a great chunk of the story is the man sneaking into the old man’s room on the eighth night, making a mistake, and then committing the murder on that night itself. By using the information that the man had committed a hasty murder, you can infer that in settings such as this, the “inward devils”(14), are shown in the narrator himself, who had committed murder for the outward appearance of the old man. This is one massive difference between the poem and the short story; show, not tell. However, this difference is purely in the way that the connection between nighttime and fear is made, but there is a big difference in how the authors relate nighttime and fear themselves! Poe prefers illustrating the two by emphasizing timestamps of which the narrator sneaks into the man's room, when he “kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour…”(2). Poe’s narrator, as time moves on because increasingly frenzied, because of seeing the man’s eye in the light, and ‘hearing’ the old
man’s heartbeat. In the end, in one spasm of fury, the narrator suffocated the old man, thus ridding himself of the burden of the eye. On the contrary, the poem seems to suggest that darkness itself, and nothing else “Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,”(5), which is to say, alerts the “inward evils”(14), that causes evil. It is also suggested in the poem, through inferring from stanza 3, that darkness is the place in which evil ‘lives’, and being submerged in it makes one evil themselves. All this data goes to show that the ways that the authors portray the relationship between nighttime and fear are mostly similar, but are portrayed in different ways.
phrases, makes them more drawn out to give more of a eerie effect as to what is happening the text. However, it is still plain that both the authors use the setting of night time to emphasize darkness and fear, which goes along with the chilling text that they are writing. Both, Tell Tale Heart, by Edgar Allan Poe, and Sonnet 100, by Lord Brooke Fulke Greville, use the setting of darkness to signify suspense and foreboding, creating fear for the object or person in question, which loosely appeals the reader and compels them to read more. Greville uses the flow of a poem to create an image in the reader's mind in the first stanza which portrays darkness and night time as a time when you are “Not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,”(4). This statement is fairly obvious, given that the setting is night time, in the dark, but it sets the stage for the next stanza, in which Greville describes the feeling that occurs in a situation in which there is ‘darkness’: “Gives vain alarums to the inward sense, Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny, Confounds all powers,”(5-7). Greville uses this clever phrase as a way to express that in darkness, evil manifests and prospers, as shown by the fear and tyranny, taking over all other sense. Greville portrays the idea of wickedness prospering in dark places by finally ending off by using darkness as a background in “Which but expressions be of inward devils,” (14). Poe’s short story, though in, obviously, a plot format, highlights the same idea, in which evil manifests in darkness, creating fear in the plot. Poe uses the sense of the narrator acting as if he is not mad coupled with the fact that the narrator sneaks up on the old man everyday at midnight to signify that, while the narrator is mad, in the night, “It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed.”(2). This, while it is a short excerpt of the behavior of the narrator watching the man sleep, nevertheless proves that the narrator is not in his right mind, and becomes evil and later commits a horrible deed plainly because of the way that someone looked on the outside. The thought of fear and night time also correlate in the portion of the text in which an evil frenzy takes over the narrator, and he commits the deed: “With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once—once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done,”(3). This quote, which is the final killing of the old man, shows how foreboding the sense of night time can be in a story, and makes the tale all the more creepy, just thinking about a bone chilling murder being committed hours past midnight. Taking everything into account it is concluded that both authors, Poe and Greville, use the nighttime to induce fear and make the readers feel emotions while reading the story. While the methods, as mentioned previously, of relating the night time setting to the feeling of fear are pretty similar, there are some differences, which mainly include the type of writing that it is.
Tell Tale Heart is told in a story with a plot, while Sonnet 100 is shown as a poem, talking in a completely omniscient manner, with no plot elements at all. The poem simply gives information in a way that is art, and shows what the author believes. The story however, is given in a more entertaining format, in which most elements that the poem gives straight out must be inferred from the plot elements within the story. This is most clearly portrayed when Greville, the author of Sonnet 100, includes that in darkness, when evil is let to prosper, people show shadows of themselves “Which but expressions be of inward devils,”(14). In contrast however, with Tell Tale Heart, the author includes everything from the narrator’s point of view, making it so that you have to infer rather than read out, as a great chunk of the story is the man sneaking into the old man’s room on the eighth night, making a mistake, and then committing the murder on that night itself. By using the information that the man had committed a hasty murder, you can infer that in settings such as this, the “inward devils”(14), are shown in the narrator himself, who had committed murder for the outward appearance of the old man. This is one massive difference between the poem and the short story; show, not tell. However, this difference is purely in the way that the connection between nighttime and fear is made, but there is a big difference in how the authors relate nighttime and fear themselves! Poe prefers illustrating the two by emphasizing timestamps of which the narrator sneaks into the man's room, when he “kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour…”(2). Poe’s narrator, as time moves on because increasingly frenzied, because of seeing the man’s eye in the light, and ‘hearing’ the old
man’s heartbeat. In the end, in one spasm of fury, the narrator suffocated the old man, thus ridding himself of the burden of the eye. On the contrary, the poem seems to suggest that darkness itself, and nothing else “Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,”(5), which is to say, alerts the “inward evils”(14), that causes evil. It is also suggested in the poem, through inferring from stanza 3, that darkness is the place in which evil ‘lives’, and being submerged in it makes one evil themselves. All this data goes to show that the ways that the authors portray the relationship between nighttime and fear are mostly similar, but are portrayed in different ways.