The Pale Blue Eye @thepaleblueeye - Tumblr Blog

hello yall!! (crickets)… um anyways, this is just a mini post to get this acc up and running! i may make a caard for this blog, im not sure yet …. but we push through

im super (hyper?) fixated on TPBE currently and i have been thinking about making this account forever! ill mostly be reposting my theories and notes from my personal account for now, and hopefully sharing my book annotations and new ideas later on!

a video essay about the novel and movie may be in the works currently (though it’s currently in very early notes app pages right now)

also as a little disclaimer i do mainly focus on poe and landor! both their characters and the ship! speaking of which i do Intensely ship poe and landor— BUT i completely understand those who dont and i hope this page can be a welcoming spot for all fans of the novel and movie :)

anyways if youve read this far heres poe being pretty

#kinda sad i procrastinated on this account because it would have been cool to do in the months the book takes place #BUT WHATEVER #look i know the fandom is tiny here #and non existent on twitter #but i cannot get them out of my head #the pale blue eye #louis bayard #ea poe #e. a. poe #edgar allan poe #novels #booklr #historical fiction

just woke up this morning thinking about them, all domestic and poetic. maybe ill reread early this year <3

#the pale blue eye

savpumpkinhead

OH MY GOD HARRY MELLING IS SO GORGEOUS.

the pale blue eye, 2022

#christian bale #harry melling #the pale blue eye

trying to be so kind to myself but these annotations from 2023 are insane

just finished my fifth read through of the novel, which is crazy. i love this book so dearly, it is so wonderfully crafted and beautiful. it will stick with me the rest of my life

“You’d be doing me a mercy,” I said whispered.

He looked at me with great tenderness, I will always remember that. He hated to disappoint.

“But you see, I am no angel, Landor, to be dispensing mercy. You must take it up with another authority.” He rested his hand on my arm. “I’m very sorry, Landor.”

#the pale blue eye #louis bayard

“All the same, Mr. Poe, I wish you’d…’ I shoved my hands into my pockets, gave the turf a light kick. ‘You see, the point is, I’ve come to depend on you in a fashion, and I’d hate to think you might lose your life over a young woman, however pretty she may be.’”

“I looked down at that sleeping head with its thin, rumpled hair, and I realized then that I had come to organize my days around—around Poe, I guess, or at least around these moments. They had become part of my mind’s calendar, and I depended on them, the way you depend on seasons to follow one another or the back door to stick or your cat to grab the same splash of sunlight every aftertoon.”

#the pale blue eye #hes so bashful

Poe and Landor are so intrinsically linked. Towards the middle of the novel, Poe is being manipulated by Lea. He believes he is in love with her, and to an extent I think he is, but it is manipulation. Despite Poe being wooed by Lea, it is so obvious to the reader that Landor and Poe are truly linked. Especially when Landor saves Poe from Ballinger, “I didn’t see him again until the next evening—and might never have seen him again at all but for chance. Poe himself would call it something grander, but for now, I’ll stand by my word. It was chance that made me halt in the midst of toiling over Leroy Fry’s diary and gave me the sudden hankering for air.”

#the pale blue eye

“Dinner came—I lived still. But to what avail?”

#hes so me #the pale blue eye #edgar allen poe #louis bayard

Even in the dark, I recognized the symptoms. Love. Love had carved out the heart of cadet fourth classman Edgar A. Poe.

It is easy to take this somewhat literally. Lea attempts to literally carve out Poe’s heart near the end of the novel, she does not succeed. However, going back to looking at it in a metaphoric sense, Landor is the one who does succeed. “‘Oh, Landor,’ he said. ‘I think you have broken my heart more- more comprehensively than anyone else.’”

#the pale blue eye #edgar allen poe #louis bayard

“He is reckoned extremely handsome, I believe, and a more susceptible soul might suppose that Byron himself had been reborn in all his beauty.”

#the pale blue eye #louis bayard

“And there was in his tone the sweetest form of absolution.”

#the pale blue eye #louis bayard

“He could have written it with his left hand, and I would have known.

‘Mr.Landor. I have made a most important discovery.’

And two inches below that, in smaller but no less urgent lettering:

‘May I call on you at your home? Tomorrow?’”

#the pale blue eye #louis bayard #literature

“And no one else can look in the way that Poe does.”

#the pale blue eye #louis bayard #uhhhh thats gay

“October 31st

‘Well,’ I said, standing. ‘Before I start firing on cadets myself, I should be getting on. I want to get home before nightfall.’

‘I’d like to see it sometime. Your home.’

He spoke lightly and never once looked at me. As though to say whether or not I honored his request was a matter of huge indifference to him.

‘It would give me the greatest pleasure,’ I said, watching him brighten.’”

Happy halloween to Landor and Poe specifically <3

#the pale blue eye #edgar allen poe #ea poe #augustus landor #literature #louis bayard #booklr #christian bale #edgar allan poe #happy halloween!!

It was a curious fact. Other cadets, when I spoke to them in private, would hold me roughly the same way they did the commandment. Poe never did. There was, from the start of our relations, something… I won’t call it familiar—familial, maybe.

#louis bayard #the pale blue eye #edgar allen poe #ea poe #augustus landor #literature

“That evening, for instance, we spent discussing the soul. I wasn’t so persuaded I had one; he was… round and round we went, until one day, he said, ‘Mr.Landor, there will come a time when your soul turns rounds and fronts you in the most empirical fashion possible—at the very moment it quits you. You will clutch for it, ah, in vain!”

Landor’s soul is Mattie, and I would argue, Landor’s soul is Poe.

#the pale blue eye #edgar allen poe #literature #louis bayard #booklr

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