Summary
This fragment comes a few pages into the manuscript for "Siope," a
"transcendental prose poem" that Poe first published in the
Baltimore Book in 1838 (Silverman 131). In
the story, a Demon spins a fable about his attempts to terrify a
man who is sitting on a rock in the Congo.
As the demon summons up a decayed landscape,
terrfying hippopotamuses, and a tempest, the man trembles but refuses to
budge. Finally, the demon calls up a "curse of silence," and the man
"fled afar off." The story, which is included in
Tales
of the Grotesque and Arabesque" as "Siope: A Fable. In the
Manner of the Pyschological Autobiographists," was later re-titled
"Silence—A Fable." This manuscript fragment, which differs from the
version of the fable presented in Tales of the Grotesque
and Arabesque, bears the markings of printer; note the vertical black
bars that appear every few lines.
