Polaris (short story)
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"Polaris" is a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, written in 1918 and first published in the December 1920 issue of the amateur journal the Philosopher. It is noteworthy as the story that introduces Lovecraft's fictional Pnakotic Manuscripts, the first of his arcane tomes[1].
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[edit] Inspiration
Critic William Fulwiler writes that "'Polaris' is one of Lovecraft's most autobiographical stories, reflecting his feelings of guilt, frustration, and uselessness during World War I. Like the narrator, HPL was 'denied a warrior's part', for he 'was feeble and given to strange faintings when subjected to stress and hardships'".[2]
Like many Lovecraft stories, "Polaris" was in part inspired by a dream, which he described in a letter: "Several nights ago I had a strange dream of a strange city--a city of many palaces and gilded domes, lying in a hollow betwixt ranges of grey, horrible hills.... I was, as I said, aware of this city visually. I was in it and around it. But certainly I had no corporeal existence."[3]
Lovecraft remarked on the peculiar similarity of the story's style to that of Lord Dunsany, whose work Lovecraft would not read for another year. An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia suggests that Lovecraft and Dunsany were mutually influenced by the prose poems of Edgar Allan Poe.[4]
[edit] Synopsis
The story begins with narrator describing the night sky as observed over long sleepless nights from his window, in particular that of the Pole Star - Polaris, which he describes as "winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey".
He then describes the night of the aurora over his house in the swamp and how on this night he first dreamt of a city of marble lying on plateau between two peaks, with Polaris ever watching in the night sky. The narrator describes after a while observing motion within the houses and seeing men beginning to populate the streets, conversing to each other in language he had never heard before but strangely understood. However, before he could learn any more of this city, he awoke.
Many times more would he dream of the city and the men who dwelt within. After a while the narrator tired of merely existing as an incorporeal observer and began to desire to establish his place within the city, simultaneously beginning question his conceptualization of what constituted reality, and thus whether this was just a dream or whether it was real.
Then one night, while listening to discourses of those who populate the city, the narrator obtains a physical form--not as a stranger, but as an inhabitant of the city, which he now knew as Olathoe, lying on the plateau of Sarkia in the land of Lomar, which was besieged by an enemy known as the Inutos. While the other men within the city engage in combat with Inutos, the narrator is sent to a watchtower to signal if the Inutos gain access to the city itself. Within the tower, he notices Polaris in the sky and senses it as a malign presence, remembering a passage from his studies of the Pnakotic Manuscripts:
- Slumber, watcher, till the spheres,
- Six and twenty thousand years
- Have revolv'd, and I return
- To the spot where now I burn.
- Other stars anon shall rise
- To the axis of the skies;
- Stars that soothe and stars that bless
- With a sweet forgetfulness:
- Only when my round is o'er
- Shall the past disturb thy door."
Uncertain as to its meaning, he drifts off to sleep, thus failing in his duty to guard Olathoe. Upon awaking, the narrator finds himself back in the house by the swamp, except now the narrator is convinced that this life is not real but a dream from which he can not awake.
[edit] References
- Joshi, S. T., David E. Schultz (2001). An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-3133-1578-7.
- Lovecraft, Howard P. [1918] (1986). “Polaris”, S. T. Joshi (ed.) Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, 9th corrected printing, Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-870-54039-4. Definitive version.
- S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Joshi & Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, pp. 187.
- ^ William Fulwiler, "Mail-Call of Cthulhu", Black Forbidden Things, p. 171; citing H. P. Lovecraft, "Polaris", Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, p. 21.
- ^ H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Vol. I, p. 62; cited in Joshi and Schultz, p. 211.
- ^ Joshi and Schultz, p. 211.
[edit] External link
