Essay On The Conqueror Worm

Many people that Edgar Allan Poe loved and cared about died, and his feelings about their deaths were reflected in his writings. Poe lost his wife and mother to tuberculosis, the Red Death, which spread like wildfire during Poe’s time. In “The Masque of the Red Death”, Poe writes of a Prince who built walls around his palace in an attempt to prevent the disease from getting inside. Through vivid descriptions and similes, Poe allows the reader to come to the conclusion that the Red Death got inside the walls anyway, and killed everyone in its path. In “The Conqueror Worm”, Poe writes of a worm that enters a theater during a play and eats the actors and the audience when they are least expecting it. In these writings, Poe emphasized the idea that death is inevitable, which he strongly

The people of the audience, in a sense, are attempting to postpone death by not thinking about it. Just like the partygoers of “The Masque of the Red Death”, these people watch the “play of hopes” to distract themselves and ignore the death around them. Also like the partygoers, the audience dies by the end of the writing. With this, Poe shows that even those who ignored death still died. The worm itself symbolizes death, because worms live in the ground, which is also where bodies are buried after they die. This may be why Poe chose the worm to be what causes the deaths of the audience in this poem. Poe again uses the metaphor of veils like in “The Masque of the Red Death” to show that the people deliberately limited their view of the world. In “The Conqueror Worm”, he wrote that angels were “in veils, and drowned in tears” (Poe). This goes with the fact that the veils prevented the wearer from seeing the deaths that were going on. Poe shows the fact that the conqueror worm, which represents death, has control of people’s