edgar allan poe the conversation of eiros and charmion

Thanks to science, comets had been “divested of the terrors of flame.” They were thought to be composed of a very light gas, and unable to do much damage to the planet. But the scientists were confident that there was no cause for alarm. It all started when astronomers discovered a comet that is likely to pass dangerously close by Earth. For Eiros, the afterlife is no longer a speculative idea but a fact, and he is about to tell a story in which the “speculative philosophy” of the 19th century encounters the unanticipated brute fact of the world’s extinction. With this exchange, Poe has set up the End of the World as a story about speculation versus truth.

But, indeed, I knew little of the speculative philosophy of the day.” “I remember aright,” Charmion says, “the calamity which overwhelmed you was utterly unanticipated. His old friend Charmion, who died ten years earlier, is there to welcome him, happy to see Eiros “looking life-like and rational.” Charmion informs Eiros that their earthly names have been discarded, and that tomorrow he’ll induct his friend “into the full joys and wonders of your novel existence.”Įiros is overwhelmed to find himself confronting “the unknown now known.” His new state will take some getting used to, Charmion tells him, but first Eiros must relate how the world came to an end - because it did end, and that is why Eiros and all of the rest of humanity are now dead. The story starts with Eiros waking up to the startling realization that the afterlife is real, and that he (or she - Poe doesn’t say) is in it. In this early instance of the cataclysmic-collision-with-celestial-object tale, Poe makes an odd mix of science and prophesy to capture the moment of “the speculative Future merged in the august and certain Present.” “Eiros and Charmion” shows us what happens when the unknown becomes the dramatically revealed known.

Poe’s very short story about the End of the World is an apocalypse in both senses of the word. The word “apocalypse” not only means a cataclysm that ends the current world order, but also, from the word’s Greek root, a revelation of truth. Edgar Allen Poe’s The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion (1839)

Edgar allan poe the conversation of eiros and charmion