The Conqueror Worm

This is the way the world will end: not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with— wait for it—a huge worm that swallows everything in sight.

Even in a contemporary culture conditioned by the visual audacities of graphic novelists and routinely amazed by the wizards of CGI, Poe’s closing moments of his projected tragedy about humanity’s “hopes and fears” (Line 6) are ambitious. First, he conceives of a giant writhing worm that will invade the stage space, a stage already awhirl with robed actors running about wordlessly in crazy confusion all being watched by a faux-audience, rows of silent witnesses dressed as angels there on stage. And then to give the play an appropriately dramatic closure, he has this worm eats its way across the stage. Ambitious, perhaps; hallucinatory, certainty. The poem itself has fun with the spectacle effects of the stage gala with its gruesome, albeit Barnumesque, touches of hyperbolic drama. You can imagine Poe at his writing desk, yes, this is surely how the world will end, at once pointlessly dramatic and hopelessly ironic. No one would take seriously the conceptual of a giant red worm eating people—this is entertaining, over-the-top fun. And if they take it seriously, a snarky, smirking Poe might argue echoing Barnum himself, well, you know there is a sucker born every minute.

Because there is something morbid that hangs over everything Poe published (he was a professional writer, with his eye ever on the market, on what would sell, on what would find an audience), it’s tempting to read “The Conqueror Worm” through the morbid lens it seems to suggest: a woeful and terrifying allegory about the pointlessness of life, the cruel absence of a caring God, about our lives spent ingloriously chasing phantoms, driven only by lust and madness, closing in the final absolute (and terrifying) grip of death.

But in the end, the poem is also just about a worm. A giant worm with fangs.

The very observation provokes a Poe-like smirk. Poe could certainly have stage-managed a dark allegory about the meaninglessness of life and the inevitability of death, and he wouldn’t have needed a giant munching red worm to do it. But that giant red worm, the whole grand drama conceptual, catapults Poe’s poem into something intricate that can, and does, exist on two levels, suspended inevitably like the grandest conceived horror fictions from the masters of the genre from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King, from Bram Stoker to Clive Barker. “The Conqueror Worm” is suspended between the disturbing and the hilarious, between the macabre and the goofy, between pain and laugher, between horror and irony.

The poem sets up the idea of a staged drama—indeed, it begins with matter-of-fact account of a drama about to start amid the glitz typical then as now of the theatrical presentation: the audience gathers to the quiet mood music of an orchestra while on stage a mock-audience awaits the start of the play, an immersive effect that anticipates by nearly a century the experimental concepts of meta-theater: plays about plays. When the play itself begins, the action is decidedly abstract, even absurd: actors without identifying features, without names, without lines, move about the stage clumsily (they even bump into the scene sets), all the while suggesting in their stiff and ad-lib circular movements that they are being controlled, like puppets, from something vast and unseen. This dramatic concept would not be entirely out of place a century later in the theater of the absurd: actors moving about the stage in circles, always ending up back where they started, fiercely, intently chasing something they do not understand, each chasing some undefinable “Phantom” (Line 19). With Sisyphean dedication, the actors mime this chase that is at once noble and futile, or perhaps noble because it is futile.

So bring down the curtain—the poem could easily have ended there at Line 24, and Poe’s abstract theater piece would convey exactly that existential despair. The audience on stage, angels with wings, watch helplessly as humanity struggles to find some kind of purpose to life, trying valiantly to not concede that life is little more than motion without movement, a hard and hopeless diversion driven by our compulsions to sin; in short, an exercise in madness, a vision of horror.

But Poe was too much the ironist, too much the entertainer to let the poem, intended to appeal to a popular readership, end on such a despairing note. There is not much of a market for despair. So he introduces a giant red worm, a blood-red thing that can writhe about the stage (and the poem repeats “writhes” for effect and to insist on the validity of the image). Certainly, the worm as an image would play on mid-19th century uneasiness over death (burial techniques at the time virtually assured that the image of worms crawling into a corpse would create an uneasy reaction)—but Poe goes big: a giant worm that is able to eat everything on stage, beginning with the actors themselves. How this special effect would be realized, of course, Poe leaves to the stage managers. The whole scene is horrific and absurd to the point of being humorous; one can’t help but be horrified—and one can’t help but laught—at the idea of a free-roaming, fanged worm eating actors on stage.

By moving the spectacle drama to the point between horror and comedy, Poe closes the poem straight-faced, titling the play, or what he now terms a tragedy, as nothing less than Man, a suggestion that here is humanity’s existence, all pointless, all doomed, all inevitably surrendering to death. Poe’s quiet and sly irony is emphasized by the location of the last stanza. If the last stanza appeared at the beginning of the poem—long before the giant red worm chews up the stage, long before the whole thing morphs into grand-scale apocalyptic silliness—the poem would read very differently. It would be a poem that first explains what life is like; here is why angels weep watching us, here is the argument that whatever we do, we will end up worm-chow. Put that stanza first, and the poem is a sobering epiphany of life’s moral and spiritual emptiness. But put it after the giant red worm suddenly ravages the stage, and that lesson is suddenly tinged with a cartoonish irony. Like Barnum, Poe gives the audience what it wants—in this case a serious reflection on the meaning of life—and at the same time gives it what it needs—in this case, a good laugh at such over-the-top seriousness. That the poem can (and has) sustained both readings is a measure of Poe’s talent.