







































96

Edited by Shelby Hatfield, Rebekah Hobbs, & Jared Lynch

Multilayered Specter, Multifaceted Presence: A 
Critical Edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Tomb”

This edition examines “The Tomb” in depth, including the historical context in 
which Lovecraft was writing, as well as the social and technological changes 
that occurred. It exposes multilayered ghosts housed within the text. It also 
examines Lovecraft’s fascination with the supernatural and the development 
of the horror genre, which he modeled after Poe’s work.

General Introduction 

During the time H.P. Lovecraft was writing his essays 
and short stories (“The Tomb” was written in 1917 and 
published in 1922), 20th Century America was experi-
encing changes in the political and social realms, the 
result of an influx of Old World immigrants and tech-
nological changes such as the railroad, telegraph, and 
telephone. As Robert MacDougall states, “The pace of 
technological and economic change was indeed violent 
and wrenching to many Americans. Each advance in the 
technology of communication and transportation gave 
new powers to its users, yet it also compounded the 
ability of distant people and events to affect those users’ 
lives” (717). Things outside Americans’ immediate arc 
of influence—events, peoples, and ideas—from across 
the country could change their lives at any moment, 
thanks to these new technologies.

Many Americans found something unnerving in this 
new ability to travel more quickly than before because it 
seemed as if there was no transition from place to place. 
The telephone, whose name means literally “sound over 
distance,” seemed even more ghostly. To talk with some-
one you could not physically see, especially someone on 
another continent, would have been barely fathomable 
to most consumers. Indeed, early AT&T advertisements 
rarely described in detail what their customers were 
buying, preferring instead to leave the information as 
indecipherable as a tangle of wires. Few members of the 

public had a working grasp of the technology that was 
invading their homes. The public’s inability to under-
stand the technologies of their everyday life compound-
ed the knowledge gap between the educated few able to 
develop these new technologies, and those who merely 
existed around them. This resulting inequality and anx-
iety about the unknown was a common topic for Gothic 
writers, whose texts often featured a mysterious object or 
a system of magic that could be wielded by only a single 
or select few individuals. The tomb in Lovecraft’s story 
of the same name provides a perfect example of such an 
object, as it holds a mysterious power over the protago-
nist, with its allusion to dark histories and rituals that the 
narrator insists he comprehends. Readers are unable to 
understand the ghostly technologies presented to them, 
creating a chilling effect that mirrors the effects of tech-
nology they cannot understand. Although the settings 
might seem to allude to vastly different times, Gothic 
stories exist to capture the terror of the incomprehensi-
ble, and suggest that times can never change enough to 
alter our perception of what is scary.

These new technologies changed the American 
landscape in more nuanced ways as well. Because the 
telephone reached into the home, it affected the “sep-
arate spheres” ideology of the Victorian world (Mac-
Dougall 717). Men were able to “enter” the home, a 
woman’s domain, with their voices if not their presence. 
Women’s voices were allowed outside the home as well, 
raising questions about presence and absence and what 

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97“The Tomb”

was proper in society. New tensions further blurred the 
boundaries between the male and female worlds, and 
Gothic fiction reminded readers of the consequences 
when proper roles were not observed. For example, 
Lovecraft and Poe’s stories both feature protagonists 
who are secluded from other male society, often choos-
ing to self-educate and spend a majority of their time 
indoors reading or wandering fields and forests, behavior 
very similar to what was expected in the leisure time 
of wealthy young ladies. Lovecraft’s narrator in “The 
Tomb,” Jervas Dudley, spends copious amounts of time 
at the door of the tomb, sleeping alone in the woods and 
wandering about a charred mansion. His education con-
cerns ancient and obscure texts, no doubt too expensive 
to be accessible to the masses. Dudley’s function in the 
story adds little value to regular society, as he does not 
contribute to the economy or the public sphere through 
his presence, his time, money, or effort. In fact, Dudley 
functions as an aristocrat, contributing nothing, believ-
ing he has no need of society. Lovecraft uses his story 
“The Tomb” to comment on the dangers of men stepping 
outside their traditional gender and economic roles, and 
ultimately his protagonist is destroyed by this behavior.

America became increasingly concerned with the 
“politics of masculinity and transformation in child 
rearing, gender socialization, and the new sciences of 
human development” (Grant 829) in the late 19th Century, 
and the majority of this concern was directed towards 
effeminate or “sissy” boys. When a boy was judged to be 
too close to his mother or sickly, his masculinity or lack 
thereof became a problem for society, not merely a con-
cern for the parents. Men like Theodore Roosevelt, who 
practically “cured” himself of polio and allergies, were 
heroes, while “sissies bore a clinical and social stigma” 
(Grant 829). This trend coincided with general upheaval 
in the roles of adult men and women as a result of fem-
inism, industrialization, and urbanization. It is interest-
ing to note that H.P. Lovecraft himself may have fit the 
“sissy” mold, as he battled moderate illnesses throughout 
his adult life, one of the reasons he was able to read and 
enjoy movies so frequently. He mirrors his protagonist in 
“The Tomb” who also spends much of his developmental 
childhood and early adult years reading in seclusion. This 
story amplifies a common tension of the time, emphasiz-
ing the gap between those like Lovecraft in a more aristo-
cratic position—able to create content, and the common 
members of society who read that content. 

There was another reason for change in the late 1800s 
and early 1900s, as large floods of immigrants from 
Eastern and Southern Europe arrived to America. New-
comers had very little power as they mixed with more 
established immigrants who were already adjusted to 
American culture and secure in the industrial system and 
jobs. Scholar John Bukowczyk remarks on this strug-
gle for assimilation and cultural identity. “The struggle 
between popular belief and orthodoxy nonetheless rep-
resents an important moment in immigrant social history 
as it opens a window on class and power relations within 
the immigrant world and also between that world and the 
larger American society” (22). While immigrants were 
adjusting to an industrial economy, Lovecraft presented 
a character that held himself completely apart from that 
system, reviving Old World sentiments of entitlement, 
classicism, and aristocracy. In addition to class, family 
name also became a source of contention for immigrants. 
The workplace forced immigrant communities to interact 
with other groups and encouraged them to reach outside 
their own ethnic community for spouses. This allowed 
names and family lineage to blend, and families were no 
longer homogeneously Italian or German, for example. 
Through the archaic presence of Jervas Dudley, Lovecraft 
internalizes anxieties concerning societal changes result-
ing from the influx of immigration, and the increasingly 
blurred lines of familial lineage. His Old World character 
becomes obsessed with the grand old family of Hyde, 
holding onto a lineage that is extinct. He reacts with the 
fresh immigrant attitude to create tension in an America 
that supposedly no longer subscribed to class ideals.

With all the uncertainty immigrants experienced, reli-
gion was a way to explain and control some part of life. 
Threats of witchcraft and hexes were used to threaten, 
especially when actions were inconsistent with the values 
of the immigrant group or the new American culture. 
Groups such as the Kashubs (from Northern Poland) 
“used their belief in unnatural beings to single out—and 
stigmatize—those who seemed out of the ordinary” (Bu-
kowczyk 26), giving rise to legends such as the succubae, 
dwarves, and vampires. For example, in many European 
societies, it was common for a widowed woman to cede 
her house to her children when they married. In America, 
however, this practice became less common. Tensions ran 
high between the generations in the struggle for property 
and rightful ownership, and younger generations often 
reacted by suggesting that the older women, stubbornly 



98“The Tomb”

refusing to make way for them, were involved in witch-
craft or other unsavory activities to punish what they did 
not like or understand. Lovecraft makes a connection 
between generations and property through his character 
Jervas Dudley, who is caught in the ancient magic of his 
books and the old Hyde mansion. The tension his charac-
ter experiences between his time and that of the ancient 
Hyde mirrors the tensions Americans experienced as they 
reconciled customs of the newcomers.

At the same time, however, old religious customs were 
being challenged by new science and technology. Sec-
ularization gained ground, and religion and superstition 
became less powerful as life events like births and deaths 
occurred in hospitals instead of the home. With science, 
human health could be explained, and both religion and 
superstition were called upon less frequently. As religious 
divisions between immigrant groups decreased, they 
were less divided by regional superstitions and became 
united by American values of class and gender equality 
and politics.

Cultural upheaval created many opportunities for 
writers of gothic fiction like H.P. Lovecraft. The culture 
brought over by immigrants clashed with the culture 
America was trying to name its own, creating spaces of 
uncertainty that were ripe fodder for gothic minds like 
Lovecraft. The narrator of “The Tomb” is retreating from 
the increasingly complex new America, into anachro-
nism and an unnatural relation to the past, examining the 
ghostly consequences of not moving with time. 

Introduction to “The Tomb”

Born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, H.P. Love-
craft was a prolific writer of supernatural fiction. Aside 
from his poetry and fiction, Lovecraft was also known for 
his letter writing, through which he captured in great de-
tail his views on science, history, philosophy or any other 
subject which intrigued him. These letters are essential 
in chronicling the persona of the author, and the working 
force and creative being of the man behind the weird 
tales. In the introduction to Lord	of	a	Visible	World:	An	
Autobiography	in	Letters, a collection of letters written 
by Lovecraft, editors S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz 
reveal that the author inherited several intellectual and 
artistic interests early in life such as, “a natural sense of 
meter at the age of two; reading at the age of four; enthu-
siasm for the Arabian Nights at five, for classical myth at 

six, for music at seven, for chemistry at eight, and for as-
tronomy at eleven” (viii). Lovecraft possessed a creative 
instinct, which led him to write his first stories at the age 
of six. This inherent creativity continued throughout his 
life, fueling his poetry, letters, and fiction.

In commenting on the author’s work in his article “A 
Literary Copernicus,” Fritz Leiber, Jr., a correspondent of 
Lovecraft’s, writes that he “shifted the focus of supernat-
ural dread from man and his little world and his gods, to 
the stars and the black and unplumbed gulfs of interga-
lactic space…. When he completed the body of his writ-
ings, he had firmly attached the emotion of spectral dread 
to such concepts of outer space, the rim of the cosmos, 
alien beings, unsuspected dimensions, and the conceivable 
universes lying outside our own space-time continuum” 
(50). While this overarching theme of otherworldly super-
natural terror isn’t explicitly present within “The Tomb” 
(which was written in 1917, early in Lovecraft’s writing 
career), there are subtle glimpses of these larger concepts. 
At the beginning of the story the narrator states, “It is an 
unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in 
its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence 
those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psy-
chologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common 
experience.” In “The Tomb” Lovecraft begins to explore 
the worlds he believed lay beyond our visible world.

“The Tomb” marked H.P. Lovecraft’s return to fic-
tion after a nine-year absence. It details the story of 
Jervas Dudley, who discovers a tomb that belonged to 
the Hydes, an ancient family whose last descendant was 
buried decades before Jervas’s birth. He becomes fasci-
nated with the tomb, haunting the doors of the vault with 
a repetitive obsession, even though he finds his admit-
tance barred, the doors chained. Eventually he gains 
entrance, and he discovers the tomb filled with coffins, 
all occupied save one with the name “Jervas” written 
upon its lid. He lingers in the vault night after night, and 
he slowly begins to exhibit a new demeanor and manner 
of speech. Jervas tells us, “I suddenly acquired archaism 
of diction was soon remarked upon…. I unconsciously 
grew to possess the bearing of a man of the world despite 
my lifelong seclusion.” Jervas Dudley comes to believe 
that he has been possessed by Jervas Hyde, the last re-
maining member of the Hyde family, who perished in the 
fire that destroyed the Hyde estate. His body was burned 
to ashes. Unable to lie in the tomb that was prepared for 
him, his spirit was forced to seek “through the ages for 



99“The Tomb”

another corporeal tenement to represent it on that vacant 
slab in the alcove of the vault.” This possession of Jervas 
Hyde is the most obvious specter within the story, but the 
true ghostliness of the “The Tomb” is multilayered and 
multifaceted, represented in the several doublings present 
within the “corporeal tenement” of Jervas Dudley.

Through Jervas’s inheritance of the archaic demeanor 
of Jervas Hyde, Lovecraft was attempting to actualize 
and symbolize the essence of his own wandering spirit. 
In a letter to a friend, the author mused: 

“I am really a relic left over from Queen Anne’s age…
from the time of my earliest recollection, I have seemed 
to fall into the mental habits of two centuries ago. My 
constitutional feebleness kept me from regular attendance 
at school, so that I acquired what little knowledge I pos-
sess from a rather indiscriminate perusal of the volumes 
of the family library…I never felt at home save with 
the writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth 
centuries…In this manner my style was formed; not as 
a conscious archaism, but as though I had actually been 
born in 1690 instead of 1890” (64).

This short excerpt aids in examining a particular layer 
of ghostliness and doubling of Jervas Dudley/Hyde by 
illustrating Lovecraft’s sense of fitting into an older time 
period. This character duality emphasizes the presence of 
the author within the story because it can be posited that 
Lovecraft is modeling Dudley’s character after himself. 
Just as Lovecraft wishes he had been born centuries ear-
lier, Dudley integrates himself into an ancient family, the 
Hydes, from many years before.

Lovecraft himself had an upbringing similar to that 
of his protagonist. Due to high-strung nerves and other 
ailments, Lovecraft was unable to attend grammar school 
until he was eight, and even then his attendance was great-
ly affected by his prevailing illnesses, a consistent pattern 
throughout the remainder of his school career. Lovecraft 
led a solitary childhood, housed largely within books 
from his family library. This solitude is reflected in Jervas 
who, although not physically ill, remains distant from 
society, enveloped within volumes from the family library 
when not haunting the tomb. As Jervas Hyde begins to 
materialize, the reader is presented with a symbolic entity 
representing the author’s self-realized archaic presence. 
Through the creation and metamorphosis of the surface 
ghost, Lovecraft actualizes his own wandering spirit.

Lovecraft was also fascinated with genealogy, and 
wanted to discover and chronicle both his paternal 

and maternal lines (Joshi and Schultz 3). In a letter to 
a friend, Lovecraft detailed his disappointment in his 
genealogical exploration of his paternal line. Although 
the line was respectable and filled with well-to-do indi-
viduals, the author failed to discover “a damn thing to 
indicate a revolt against commonplace unintelligence or a 
taste for the weird and the cosmic. No philosophers—no 
artists—no writers—not a cursed soul I could possibly 
talk to without getting a pain in the neck” (Joshi and 
Schultz 4). His maternal line was filled largely with 
small, rural gentry. A similar fascination with genealogy 
is present within “The Tomb.” After Jervas encounters 
the story of Theseus, his drive and longing to enter the 
tomb dissipate, as he realizes that his time is not yet ripe. 
His thoughts never drift far from the vault, however, and 
his desire is rekindled when he stumbles across an “unex-
pected genealogical discovery that my own maternal an-
cestry possessed at least a slight link with the supposedly 
extinct family of the Hydes. Last of my paternal race, I 
was likewise the last of this older and more mysterious 
line.” This passage from the story reflects the author’s 
disappointment in his genealogical lines. Through Jervas 
he attempts to create an interesting point to counter the 
dullness of his paternal and maternal lines, and to discov-
er a sense of belonging within the horizontal progression 
of his familial timeline. Jervas Dudley is thus a repre-
sentation of the disconnection experienced by the author 
himself, solidifying Lovecraft’s ghostly presence within 
“The Tomb.”

Another presence entombed in the story is Edgar Allan 
Poe, by whom H.P. Lovecraft was conceptually, stylis-
tically, and characteristically influenced. Robert Bloch, 
another of Lovecraft’s correspondents, commented on the 
similarities between Poe and Lovecraft, writing that they 
“deliberately chose to turn their backs on contemporary 
style and subject-matter and create their own individ-
ual worlds of fantasy. In this above all else they were 
similar” (160). In our contextual documents, we have 
included an excerpt from Lovecraft’s essay “Supernat-
ural Horror in Fiction,” in which he dedicates an entire 
section to the analysis and discussion of Edgar Allan Poe 
and his influence on the world of supernatural fiction. In 
the essay, Lovecraft analyzes the mold of Poe’s typical 
protagonists, and it becomes apparent that Jervas Dudley 
fits perfectly into this mold: “More particular qualities 
appear to be derived from the psychology of Poe him-
self, who certainly possessed much of the depression, 



100“The Tomb”

sensitiveness, mad aspiration, loneliness, and extravagant 
freakishness which he attributes to his haughty and soli-
tary victims of Fate.” 

Our last contextual document is an excerpt from 
“Ligeia,” a story by Edgar Allan Poe that Lovecraft 
discusses in “Supernatural Horror In Fiction.” When 
he summarizes his perspective on the story, it becomes 
apparent that he has captured the spirit of Ligeia and 
reflected her within Jervas Dudley in “The Tomb.” 
Through Jervas Dudley, Lovecraft embodies his own ar-
chaic presence while capturing echoes of Poe’s essence, 
specifically that of Ligeia. The ghost within “The Tomb” 
is multifaceted, representing the author and his desire to 
emulate Poe. Through the juxtaposition of new and old, 
Lovecraft creates a specter that extends far beyond linear 
placement of the tomb, and the spatial limits of the page.

“The Tomb”1

In relating the circumstances, which have led to my 
confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am 
aware that my present position will create a natural doubt 
of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate 
fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental 
vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those iso-
lated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically 
sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. 
Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp 
distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things 
appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual 
physical and mental media through which we are made 
conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the 
majority condemns as madness the flashes of supersite 
which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood 
I have been a dreamer and a visionary. Wealthy beyond 
the necessity of a commercial life, and temperamentally 
unfitted for the formal studies and social recreation of 
my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from 
the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in 
ancient and little known books, and in roaming the fields 
and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not 
think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields 
and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw 

there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech 
would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect 
which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the 
stealthy attendants around me. It is sufficient for me to 
relate events without analyzing causes.

I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, 
but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human 
creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, 
he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things 
that are not, or are no longer, living. Close by my home 
there lies a singular wooded hollow, in whose twilight 
deeps I spent most of my time; reading, thinking, and 
dreaming. Down its moss-covered slopes my first steps 
of infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely gnarled 
oak trees my first fancies of boyhood were woven. Well 
did I come to know the presiding dryads2 of those trees, 
and often have I watched their wild dances in the strug-
gling beams of a waning moon but of these things I 
must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in 
the darkest of the hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of 
the Hydes,3 an old and exalted family whose last direct 
descendant had been laid within its black recesses many 
decades before my birth.

The vault to which I refer is of ancient granite, 
weathered and discolored by the mists and dampness of 
generations. Excavated back into the hillside, the struc-
ture is visible only at the entrance. The door, a ponderous 
and forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron 
hinges, and is fastened ajar in a queerly sinister way by 
means of heavy iron chains and padlocks, according to 
a gruesome fashion of half a century ago. The abode of 
the race whose scions are here inurned had once crowned 
the declivity which holds the tomb, but had long since 
fallen victim to the flames which sprang up from a stroke 
of lightning. Of the midnight storm which destroyed 
this gloomy mansion, the older inhabitants of the region 
sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy voices; alluding to 
what they call ‘divine wrath’ in a manner that in later years 
vaguely increased the always strong fascination which I 
had felt for the forest-darkened sepulcher. One man only 
had perished in the fire. When the last of the Hydes was 
buried in this place of shade and stillness, the sad urnful 
of ashes had come from a distant land, to which the family 
had repaired when the mansion burned down. No one 

Notes
1. This edition of this text was found in The Vagrant. The issue of the magazine was published in 1922.
2. A deity or nymph of the woods.
3. Lovecraft chose this name as an allusion to the novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Joshi and Schultz 182).



101“The Tomb”

remains to lay flowers before the granite portal, and few 
care to brave the depressing shadows which seem to linger 
strangely about the water-worn stones.

I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled 
upon the half-hidden house of death. It was in midsum-
mer, when the alchemy of nature transmutes the sylvan 
landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of 
green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the 
surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable 
odors of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings 
the mind loses its perspective; time and space become 
trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric 
past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.

All day I had been wandering through the mystic 
groves of the hollow; thinking thoughts I need not 
discuss, and conversing with things I need not name. In 
years a child of ten, I had seen and heard many wonders 
unknown to the throng; and was oddly aged in certain re-
spects. When, upon forcing my way between two savage 
clumps of briars, I suddenly encountered the entrance of 
the vault, I had no knowledge of what I had discovered. 
The dark blocks of granite, the door so curiously ajar, 
and the funeral carvings above the arch, aroused in me 
no associations of mournful or terrible character. Of 
graves and tombs I knew and imagined much, but had on 
account of my peculiar temperament been kept from all 
personal contact with churchyards and cemeteries. The 
strange stone house on the woodland slope was to me 
only a source of interest and speculation; and its cold, 
damp interior, into which I vainly peered through the 
aperture so tantalizingly left, contained for me no hint of 
death or decay. But in that instant of curiosity was born 
the madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to 
this hell of confinement. Spurred on by a voice which 
must have come from the hideous soul of the forest, I re-
solved to enter the beckoning gloom in spite of the pon-
derous chains which barred my passage. In the waning 
light of day I alternately rattled the rusty impediments 
with a view to throwing wide the stone door, and essayed 
to squeeze my slight form through the space already pro-
vided; but neither plan met with success. At first curious, 
I was now frantic; and when in the thickening twilight I 
returned to my home, I had sworn to the hundred gods 
of the grove that at any cost I would some day force an 

entrance to the black, chilly depths that seemed calling 
out to me. The physician with the iron-grey beard who 
comes each day to my room, once told a visitor that this 
decision marked the beginning of a pitiful monomania;4 
but I will leave final judgment to my readers when they 
shall have learnt all.

The months following my discovery were spent in 
futile attempts to force the complicated padlock of the 
slightly open vault, and in carefully guarded inquiries 
regarding the nature and history of the structure. With 
the traditionally receptive ears of the small boy, I learned 
much; though a habitual secretiveness caused me to 
tell no one of my information or my resolve. It is per-
haps worth mentioning that I was not at all surprised or 
terrified on learning of the nature of the vault. My rather 
original ideas regarding life and death had caused me 
to associate the cold clay with the breathing body in a 
vague fashion; and I felt that the great and sinister family 
of the burned-down mansion was in some way represent-
ed within the stone space I sought to explore. Mumbled 
tales of the weird rites and godless revels of bygone years 
in the ancient hall gave to me a new and potent interest 
in the tomb, before whose door I would sit for hours at 
a time each day. Once I thrust a candle within the nearly 
closed entrance, but could see nothing save a flight of 
damp stone steps leading downward. The odor of the 
place repelled yet bewitched me. I felt I had known it 
before, in a past remote beyond all recollection; beyond 
even my tenancy of the body I now possess.

The year after I first beheld the tomb, I stumbled 
upon a worm-eaten translation of Plutarch’s Lives5  in 
the book-filled attic of my home. Reading the life of 
Theseus,6 I was much impressed by that passage telling 
of the great stone beneath which the boyish hero was to 
find his tokens of destiny whenever he should become 
old enough to lift its enormous weight. The legend had 
the effect of dispelling my keenest impatience to enter 
the vault, for it made me feel that the time was not yet 
ripe. Later, I told myself, I should grow to a strength and 
ingenuity which might enable me to unfasten the heavily 
chained door with ease; but until then I would do better 
by conforming to what seemed the will of Fate.

Accordingly my watches by the dank portal became 
less persistent, and much of my time was spent in other 

Notes
4. An inordinate or obsessive zeal for or interest in a single thing, idea, or subject.
5. A series of books written in the 1st Century that are biographies of famous Greek and Roman nobles; also called Parallel Lives.
6. One of the most famous biographies in Plutarch’s Lives: Theseus was a Hero of Athens.



102“The Tomb”

though equally strange pursuits. I would sometimes rise 
very quietly in the night, stealing out to walk in those 
churchyards and places of burial from which I had been 
kept by my parents. What I did there I may not say, for 
I am not now sure of the reality of certain things; but 
I know that on the day after such a nocturnal ramble I 
would often astonish those about me with my knowledge 
of topics almost forgotten for many generations. It was 
after a night like this that I shocked the community with 
a queer conceit about the burial of the rich and celebrat-
ed Squire Brewster, a maker of local history who was 
interred in 1711, and whose slate headstone, bearing a 
graven skull and crossbones, was slowly crumbling to 
powder. In a moment of childish imagination I vowed not 
only that the undertaker, Goodman7 Simpson, had stolen 
the silver-buckled shoes, silken hose, and satin small-
clothes8 of the deceased before burial; but that the Squire 
himself, not fully inanimate, had turned twice in his 
mound-covered coffin on the day after interment.

But the idea of entering the tomb never left my 
thoughts; being indeed stimulated by the unexpected 
genealogical discovery that my own maternal ances-
try possessed at least a slight link with the supposedly 
extinct family of the Hydes. Last of my paternal race, I 
was likewise the last of this older and more mysterious 
line. I began to feel that the tomb was mine, and to look 
forward with hot eagerness to the time when I might 
pass within that stone door and down those slimy stone 
steps in the dark. I now formed the habit of listening very 
intently at the slightly open portal, choosing my favorite 
hours of midnight stillness for the odd vigil. By the time 
I came of age, I had made a small clearing in the thicket 
before the mold-stained facade of the hillside, allowing 
the surrounding vegetation to encircle and overhang the 
space like the walls and roof of a sylvan bower. This 
bower was my temple, the fastened door my shrine, and 
here I would lie outstretched on the mossy ground, think-
ing strange thoughts and dreaming strange dreams.

The night of the first revelation was a sultry one. I 
must have fallen asleep from fatigue, for it was with 
a distinct sense of awakening that I heard the voices. 
Of these tones and accents I hesitate to speak; of their 
quality I will not speak; but I may say that they presented 
certain uncanny differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, 

and mode of utterance. Every shade of New England di-
alect, from the uncouth syllables of the Puritan colonists 
to the precise rhetoric of fifty years ago, seemed repre-
sented in that shadowy colloquy, though it was only later 
that I noticed the fact. At the time, indeed, my attention 
was distracted from this matter by another phenomenon; 
a phenomenon so fleeting that I could not take oath upon 
its reality. I barely fancied that as I awoke, a light had 
been hurriedly extinguished within the sunken sepulcher. 
I do not think I was either astounded or panic-stricken, 
but I know that I was greatly and permanently changed 
that night. Upon returning home I went with much di-
rectness to a rotting chest in the attic, wherein I found the 
key which next day unlocked with ease the barrier I had 
so long stormed in vain.

It was in the soft glow of late afternoon that I first 
entered the vault on the abandoned slope. A spell was 
upon me, and my heart leaped with an exultation I can 
but ill describe. As I closed the door behind me and 
descended the dripping steps by the light of my lone 
candle, I seemed to know the way; and though the candle 
sputtered with the stifling reek of the place, I felt singu-
larly at home in the musty, charnel-house air. Looking 
about me, I beheld many marble slabs bearing coffins, 
or the remains of coffins. Some of these were sealed and 
intact, but others had nearly vanished, leaving the silver 
handles and plates isolated amidst certain curious heaps 
of whitish dust. Upon one plate I read the name of Sir 
Geoffrey Hyde, who had come from Sussex9 in 1640 and 
died here a few years later. In a conspicuous alcove was 
one fairly well preserved and untenanted casket, adorned 
with a single name which brought me both a smile and 
a shudder. An odd impulse caused me to climb upon the 
broad slab, extinguish my candle, and lie down within 
the vacant box.

In the gray light of dawn I staggered from the vault 
and locked the chain of the door behind me. I was no 
longer a young man, though but twenty-one winters 
had chilled my bodily frame. Early-rising villagers who 
observed my homeward progress looked at me strangely, 
and marveled at the signs of ribald revelry which they 
saw in one whose life was known to be sober and soli-
tary. I did not appear before my parents till after a long 
and refreshing sleep.

Notes
7. Goodman or Goody refers to Pilgrims and is a way to say Mr. or Mrs.
8. Undergarments.
9. A county in England.



103“The Tomb”

Henceforward I haunted the tomb each night; seeing, 
hearing, and doing things I must never recall. My speech, 
always susceptible to environmental influences, was 
the first thing to succumb to the change; and my sud-
denly acquired archaism of diction was soon remarked 
upon. Later a queer boldness and recklessness came 
into my demeanor, till I unconsciously grew to possess 
the bearing of a man of the world despite my lifelong 
seclusion. My formerly silent tongue waxed voluble with 
the easy grace of a Chesterfield or the godless cynicism 

of a Rochester. I displayed a peculiar erudition utterly 
unlike the fantastic, monkish lore over which I had pored 
in youth; and covered the fly-leaves of my books with 
facile impromptu epigrams which brought up suggestions 
of Gay, Prior,10 and the sprightliest of the Augustan wits 
and rimesters.11 One morning at breakfast I came close 
to disaster by declaiming in palpably liquorish accents 
an effusion of Eighteenth Century bacchanalian12 mirth, 
a bit of Georgian playfulness never recorded in a book, 
which ran something like this:

Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,
And drink to the present before it shall fail;
Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef,
For ‘tis eating and drinking that bring us relief:
So fill up your glass,
For life will soon pass;
When you’re dead ye’ll ne’er drink to your king or your lass!
Anacreon13 had a red nose, so they say;
But what’s a red nose if ye’re happy and gay?
Gad split me! I’d rather be red whilst I’m here,
Than white as a lily and dead half a year!
So Betty, my miss,
Come give me a kiss;
In hell there’s no innkeeper’s daughter like this!
Young Harry, propp’d up just as straight as he’s able,
Will soon lose his wig and slip under the table,
But fill up your goblets and pass ‘em around
Better under the table than under the ground!
So revel and chaff
As ye thirstily quaff:
Under six feet of dirt ‘tis less easy to laugh!
The fiend strike me blue! l’m scarce able to walk,
And damn me if I can stand upright or talk!
Here, landlord, bid Betty to summon a chair;
I’ll try home for a while, for my wife is not there!
So lend me a hand;
I’m not able to stand,
But I’m gay whilst I linger on top of the land!14 

Notes
10. Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773),  John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), John Gay (1685-1732), and Mathew Prior ( 1664-
1721)  are all 18th-Century poets who are known for the witty style.
11. Poets.
12. A festival in honor of Bacchus; a drunken feast; an orgy.
13. A famous Greek poet.
14. This is a poem titled “Gaudeamus” that Lovecraft used for a previous story and later added to “The Tomb” (Joshi 127). “Gaudeamus,” also known as 
“Gaudeamus Igitur,” is a poem that was written in the 13th century and is known as the “student song,” which was commonly sung by college students at 
their graduations (“Gaudeamus Igitur” n.p.).



104“The Tomb”

About this time I conceived my present fear of fire and 
thunderstorms. Previously indifferent to such things, I 
had now an unspeakable horror of them; and would retire 
to the innermost recesses of the house whenever the 
heavens threatened an electrical display. A favorite haunt 
of mine during the day was the ruined cellar of the man-
sion that had burned down, and in fancy I would picture 
the structure as it had been in its prime. On one occasion 
I startled a villager by leading him confidently to a shal-
low subcellar, of whose existence I seemed to know in 
spite of the fact that it had been unseen and forgotten for 
many generations.

At last came that which I had long feared. My parents, 
alarmed at the altered manner and appearance of their 
only son, commenced to exert over my movements a 
kindly espionage which threatened to result in disaster. I 
had told no one of my visits to the tomb, having guarded 
my secret purpose with religious zeal since childhood; 
but now I was forced to exercise care in threading the 
mazes of the wooded hollow, that I might throw off a 
possible pursuer. My key to the vault I kept suspended 
from a cord about my neck, its presence known only to 
me. I never carried out of the sepulcher any of the things 
I came upon whilst within its walls.

One morning as I emerged from the damp tomb and 
fastened the chain of the portal with none too steady hand, 
I beheld in an adjacent thicket the dreaded face of a watch-
er. Surely the end was near; for my bower was discovered, 
and the objective of my nocturnal journeys revealed. The 
man did not accost me, so I hastened home in an effort 
to overhear what he might report to my careworn father. 
Were my sojourns beyond the chained door about to be 
proclaimed to the world? Imagine my delighted astonish-
ment on hearing the spy inform my parent in a cautious 
whisper that I had spent the night in the bower outside 
the tomb; my sleep-filmed eyes fixed upon the crevice 
where the padlocked portal stood ajar! By what miracle 
had the watcher been thus deluded? I was now convinced 
that a supernatural agency protected me. Made bold by 
this heaven-sent circumstance, I began to resume perfect 
openness in going to the vault; confident that no one could 
witness my entrance. For a week I tasted to the full joys of 
that charnel conviviality which I must not describe, when 
the thing happened, and I was borne away to this accursed 

abode of sorrow and monotony.
I should not have ventured out that night; for the taint 

of thunder was in the clouds, and a hellish phosphores-
cence rose from the rank swamp at the bottom of the 
hollow. The call of the dead, too, was different. Instead 
of the hillside tomb, it was the charred cellar on the crest 
of the slope whose presiding demon beckoned to me with 
unseen fingers. As I emerged from an intervening grove 
upon the plain before the ruin, I beheld in the misty 
moonlight a thing I had always vaguely expected. The 
mansion, gone for a century, once more reared its stately 
height to the raptured vision; every window ablaze with 
the splendor of many candles. Up the long drive rolled 
the coaches of the Boston gentry, whilst on foot came 
a numerous assemblage of powdered exquisites from 
the neighboring mansions. With this throng I mingled, 
though I knew I belonged with the hosts rather than with 
the guests. Inside the hall were music, laughter, and wine 
on every hand. Several faces I recognized; though I should 
have known them better had they been shriveled or eaten 
away by death and decomposition. Amidst a wild and 
reckless throng I was the wildest and most abandoned. 
Gay blasphemy poured in torrents from my lips, and in 
shocking sallies I heeded no law of God, or nature.

Suddenly a peal of thunder, resonant even above the 
din of the swinish revelry, clave the very roof and laid a 
hush of fear upon the boisterous company. Red tongues 
of flame and searing gusts of heat engulfed the house; 
and the roysterers,15 struck with terror at the descent of 
a calamity, which seemed to transcend the bounds of 
unguided nature, fled shrieking into the night. I alone 
remained, riveted to my seat by a groveling fear which 
I had never felt before. And then a second horror took 
possession of my soul. Burnt alive to ashes, my body 
dispersed by the four winds, I might never lie in the tomb 
of the Hydes! Was not my coffin prepared for me? Had 
I not a right to rest till eternity amongst the descendants 
of Sir Geoffrey Hyde? Aye! I would claim my heritage of 
death, even though my soul go seeking through the ages 
for another corporeal tenement to represent it on that 
vacant slab in the alcove of the vault. Jervas Hyde should 
never share the sad fate of Palinurus!16

As the phantom of the burning house faded, I found 
myself screaming and struggling madly in the arms of 

Notes
15. One who partakes in merry-making.
16. A person in Roman mythology, in Virgil’s Aeneid, who was the Helmsmen of the ship and was to to sleep by a God so that he would fall overboard and 
be sacrificed to Neptune, God of the Sea



105“The Tomb”

two men, one of whom was the spy who had followed me 
to the tomb. Rain was pouring down in torrents, and upon 
the southern horizon were flashes of lightning that had so 
lately passed over our heads. My father, his face lined with 
sorrow, stood by as I shouted my demands to be laid with-
in the tomb, frequently admonishing my captors to treat 
me as gently as they could. A blackened circle on the floor 
of the ruined cellar told of a violent stroke from the heav-
ens; and from this spot a group of curious villagers with 
lanterns were prying a small box of antique workmanship, 
which the thunderbolt had brought to light.

Ceasing my futile and now objectless writhing, I 
watched the spectators as they viewed the treasure-trove, 
and was permitted to share in their discoveries. The box, 
whose fastenings were broken by the stroke, which had 
unearthed it, contained many papers and objects of value, 
but I had eyes for one thing alone. It was the porcelain 
miniature of a young man in a smartly curled bag-wig,17 
and bore the initials ‘J. H.’ The face was such that as I 
gazed, I might well have been studying my mirror.

On the following day I was brought to this room with 
the barred windows, but I have been kept informed of 
certain things through an aged and simple-minded ser-
vitor, for whom I bore a fondness in infancy, and who, 
like me, loves the churchyard. What I have dared relate 
of my experiences within the vault has brought me only 
pitying smiles. My father, who visits me frequently, 
declares that at no time did I pass the chained portal, and 
swears that the rusted padlock had not been touched for 
fifty years when he examined it. He even says that all the 
village knew of my journeys to the tomb, and that I was 
often watched as I slept in the bower outside the grim 
facade, my half-open eyes fixed on the crevice that leads 
to the interior. Against these assertions I have no tangible 
proof to offer, since my key to the padlock was lost in 
the struggle on that night of horrors. The strange things 
of the past which I have learned during those nocturnal 
meetings with the dead he dismisses as the fruits of my 
lifelong and omnivorous browsing amongst the ancient 
volumes of the family library. Had it not been for my old 
servant Hiram, I should have by this time become quite 
convinced of my madness.

But Hiram, loyal to the last, has held faith in me, and 

has done that which impels me to make public at least 
part of my story. A week ago he burst open the lock which 
chains the door of the tomb perpetually ajar, and descend-
ed with a lantern into the murky depths. On a slab in an 
alcove he found an old but empty coffin whose tarnished 
plate bears the single word: Jervas. In that coffin and in 
that vault they have promised me I shall be buried.

Contextual Documents

Excerpt from a letter18 from H.P. Lovecraft  to the 
Gallomo19

In this letter addressed to the Gallomo, Lovecraft discuss-
es his inspiration for writing “The Tomb.” The letter sheds 
light upon some of the layers of ghostliness within the story, 
specifically Lovecraft’s presence in Jervas Dudley/Jervas 
Hyde and Poe’s presence within “The Tomb.”  The scene 
depicted in the letter—Lovecraft encountering a gravestone 
from 1711, through which he discovers a mental doorway 
to his “favourite era of periwigs” (and ultimately his chosen 
age)—is reflected eerily within “The Tomb” in the scene in 
which Jervas recovers an antique porcelain figure from the 
ruins of the Hyde mansion and, upon examining it, decides 
he “might well have been studying [his] mirror” (14). When 
these two scenes are juxtaposed, the latter inherits an uncan-
ny eeriness, and the ghostly presence of Jervas Hyde further 
serves as a manifestation of Lovecraft’s antiquated spirit.  In 
a separate letter addressed to an unrelated correspondent, 
Lovecraft explains, “at length I wrote only as a means of 
re-creating around me the atmosphere of my 18th century 
favourites…everything succumbed to my one intense pur-
pose of thinking and dreaming myself back into that world 
of periwigs and long s’s which for some odd reason seemed 
to me the normal world. Thus was formed a habit of imita-
tiveness which I can never wholly shake off. Even when I 
break away, it is generally only through imitating something 
else! There are my ‘Poe’ pieces and my ‘Dunsany’ pieces—
but alas—where are any Lovecraft pieces?” (65-66).

When Lovecraft wrote “The Tomb” he fueled the story 
with his inspiration from Poe, and he filled the tale with 
his presence. Through channeling this style of the past 
Lovecraft attempted to inhabit that space in time, which 

Notes
17. An 18th-century man’s wig.
18. Lovecraft, H.P. Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters. Ed. S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. 63-67. Print.
19. The Gallomo was a circle of literary correspondents composed of Alfred Galpin, H.P. Lovecraft, and Maurice W. Moe. The name is composed of the first 
syllable of each last member’s last name (Joshi and Schultz).



106“The Tomb”

is also expressed multiple times throughout “The Tomb” 
(most notably the inheritance of Jervas Hyde’s demean-
or). The archaic language of the letter was commonplace 
for Lovecraft, an attempt to inherit his chosen age. The 
dated diction further emphasizes the presence of his wan-
dering, out-of-time spirit.

T’anks fer de remarks on “Dagon,” kid! I rather liked that 
thing myself. It was written in 1917, and is the second tale 
I wrote after resuming my fictional pen after a nine years’ 
lapse. I think I told youse ginks that I quit writing fiction in 
1908, despairing of my ability to shape anything with the 
grace of a Poe…For a long time I was too indolent to do 
anything, but one June day in 1917 I was walking through 
Swan Point Cemetery with my aunt and saw a crumbling 
tombstone with a skull and crossbones dimly traced upon 
its slaty surface; the date, 1711, still plainly visible. It set 
me thinking. Here was a link with my favourite aera of 
periwigs—the body of a man who had worn a full-bottom’d 
wig and had perhaps read the original sheets of The Spec-
tator. Here lay a man who had lived in Mr. Addison’s day, 
and who might easily have seen Mr. Dryden had he been 
in the right part of London at the right time! Why could I 
not talk with him, and enter more intimately into the life 
of my chosen age? What had left his body, that it could no 
longer converse with me? I looked long at the grave, and the 
night after I returned home I began my first story in the new 
series—“The Tomb.” My narrative pen was very rusty—
believe me, boys, very rusty indeed! To drop back into the 
forms of fiction was exceedingly hard after nine quiescent 
years, and I feared that the result would be the limit of 
absurdity. But the spell of the gruesome was upon my, and I 
finally hammered out the hideous tale of Jervas Dudley. At 
last—a Poe again!

Excerpt from “Supernatural Horror in Literature” 20 

In the 1920’s, H. P. Lovecraft composed a lengthy es-
say explaining why we need horror. His book is dedicat-
ed to the history of horror stories and why we love them, 
and to the authors who embodied this genre of literature. 
In this chapter, titled “Edgar Allan Poe,” Lovecraft 
argues that Poe is among the principal and most influen-
tial horror writers. Specifically, he discusses Poe’s story 

“Ligeia,” an excerpt from which is also included further 
on. Lovecraft considered Poe as a literary role model, 
which is why he dedicated an entire chapter to him in this 
essay. “Supernatural in Literature” is a first-hand account 
to Lovecraft’s idea of what horror is.

Certain of Poe’s tales possess an almost absolute 
perfection of artistic form, which makes them verita-
ble beacon-lights in the province of the short story. Poe 
could, when he wished, give to his prose a richly poetic 
cast; employing that archaic and Orientalized style with 
jeweled phrase, quasi-Biblical repetition, and recurrent 
burthen so successfully used by later writers like Oscar 
Wilde and Lord Dunsany; and in the cases where he has 
done this we have an effect of lyrical phantasy almost 
narcotic in essence—an opium pageant of dream in the 
language of dream, with every unnatural colour and 
grotesque image bodied forth in a symphony of corre-
sponding sound. The Masque of the Red Death, Silence, 
a Fable, and Shadow, a Parable, are assuredly poems in 
every sense of the word save the metrical one, and owe 
as much of their power to aural cadence as to visual 
imagery. But it is in two of the less openly poetic tales, 
Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher—especially 
the latter—that one finds those very summits of artist-
ry whereby Poe takes his place at the head of fictional 
miniaturists. Simple and straightforward in plot, both of 
these tales owe their supreme magic to the cunning de-
velopment which appears in the selection and collocation 
of every least incident. Ligeia tells of a first wife of lofty 
and mysterious origin, who after death returns through a 
preternatural force of will to take possession of the body of 
a second wife; imposing even her physical appearance on 
the temporary reanimated corpse of her victim at the last 
moment. Despite a suspicion of prolixity and top heavi-
ness, the narrative reaches its terrific climax with relentless 
power. Usher, whose superiority in detail and proportion is 
very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inor-
ganic things, and displays an abnormally linked trinity of 
entities at the end of a long and isolated family history—a 
brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house 
all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolu-
tion at the same moment.

These bizarre conceptions, so awkward in unskillful 

Notes
20. This portion of text was taken from the book Supernatural Horror in Literature, written by H.P. Lovecraft



107“The Tomb”

hands, become under Poe’s spell living and convincing 
terrors to haunt our nights; and all because the author un-
derstood so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology 
of fear and strangeness—the essential details to empha-
sise, the precise incongruities and conceits to select as 
preliminaries or concomitants to horror, the exact inci-
dents and allusions to throw out innocently in advance 
as symbols or prefigurings of each major step toward the 
hideous dénouement to come, the nice adjustments of 
cumulative force and the unerring accuracy in linkage 
of parts which make for faultless unity throughout and 
thunderous effectiveness at the climactic moment, the 
delicate nuances of scenic and landscape value to select 
in establishing and sustaining the desired mood and 
vitalising the desired illusion—principles of this kind, 
and dozens of obscurer ones too elusive to be described 
or even fully comprehended by any ordinary commenta-
tor. Melodrama and unsophistication there may be—we 
are told of one fastidious Frenchman who could not bear 
to read Poe except in Baudelaire’s urbane and Gallically 
modulated translation—but all traces of such things are 
wholly overshadowed by a potent and inborn sense of 
the spectral, the morbid, and the horrible which gushed 
forth from every cell of the artist’s creative mentality and 
stamped his macabre work with the ineffaceable mark of 
supreme genius. Poe’s weird tales are alive in a manner 
that few others can ever hope to be.

Like most fantasists, Poe excels in incidents and broad 
narrative effects rather than in character drawing. His 
typical protagonist is generally a dark, handsome, proud, 
melancholy, intellectual, highly sensitive, capricious, in-
trospective, isolated, and sometimes slightly mad gentle-
man of ancient family and opulent circumstances; usually 
deeply learned in strange lore, and darkly ambitious of 
penetrating to forbidden secrets of the universe. Aside 
from a high-sounding name, this character obviously 
derives little from the early Gothic novel; for he is clear-
ly neither the wooden hero nor the diabolical villain of 
Radcliffian or Ludovician21 romance. Indirectly, however, 
he does possess a sort of genealogical connection; since 
his gloomy, ambitious and anti-social qualities savour 
strongly of the typical Byronic22 hero, who in turn is 
definitely an offspring of the Gothic Manfreds, Montonis, 

and Ambrosios.23 More particular qualities appear to be 
derived from the psychology of Poe himself, who certain-
ly possessed much of the depression, sensitiveness, mad 
aspiration, loneliness, and extravagant freakishness, which 
he attributes to his haughty and solitary victims of Fate.

Excerpt from “Ligeia” by Edgar Allan Poe24 

“Ligeia” was published in 1838, and it details the 
tragic story of the narrator and his betrothed Ligeia, who 
died shortly after their marriage. He remarries, but he is 
enamored with Ligeia, and he is haunted by her presence; 
he finds no joy in his second marriage to Lady Rowena 
Trevanion, of Tremaine. Shortly after they are married, 
Rowena becomes terribly ill, and dies, and the narrator 
is left grieving for both of his lost brides. On the night of 
her death, the narrator mourns Rowena, and sits by her 
body, “when a sob, low, gentle, but very distinct, startled 
me from my revery… At length it became evident that 
a…barely noticeable tinge of color had flushed up within 
the cheeks….[it appeared] that Rowena still lived...In a 
short period it was certain, however, that a relapse had 
taken place; the color disappeared from both eyelid and 
cheek.” The narrator settles again into his mourning, until 
he notices movement again.

There are definite parallels between “Ligeia” by Edgar 
Allan Poe and “The Tomb,” and the influence of Poe’s 
work on Lovecraft’s is evident. When Jervas Dudley 
exclaims, “I would claim my heritage of death, even 
though my soul go seeking through the ages for another 
corporeal tenement to represent it on that vacant slab in 
the alcove of the vault,” he eerily echoes the conclusion 
of “Ligeia,” in which the narrator’s deceased first wife 
inherits her proper representation as his betrothed on the 
deathbed of his second wife. In both stories the specters 
become mirrors of their original physical embodiments. 
Ligeia wanders until she can return to the living, but the 
spirit of Jervas Hyde wanders until he can properly cross 
over into death.

Structurally, there is further evidence alluding to the 
influence of “Ligeia” on “The Tomb.” Shortly before her 
death, Ligeia asks the narrator to recite a string of verses 
she has composed, which begins:

Notes
21. Reference to Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823) and Anthony Ludovici (1882-1971), both authors known for their romantic style of writing
22. Lord George Byron (1788-1824), a poet known for romantic plays and writing styles.
23. All characters from plays and poems; “Manfred” is a poem written by aforementioned Lord Byron, Montoni is a character from the play The Mysteries of 
Udolpho, written by aforementioned Anne Radcliffe, and Ambrosios from the play The Monk, written by Matthew Lewis.
24. This excerpt came from the anthology of work by Edgar Allan Poe, titled The Essential Poe: Tales of Horror and Mystery.



108“The Tomb”

Lo! ‘tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Jervas Dudley also channels a fit of verse (“The 
Gaudeamus”), shortly before he uncovers what he 
believes to be the actuality of his existence. While both 
instances deal with the transition from life to death, they 
each exhibit a very different voice. Ligeia is melancholy, 
aware of the differing spheres of existence, although 
unaware of her impending return to the living. Jervas 
Dudley, unaware that he is a wandering spirit, makes 
light of his perceived totality of death, reciting, “So fill 
up your glass /For life will soon pass /When you’re dead 
ye’ll ne’er drink to your king or your lass!”

An hour thus elapsed when (could it be possible?) I 
was a second time aware of some vague sound issuing 
from the region of the bed. I listened—in extremity of 
horror. The sound came again—it was a sigh. Rushing 
to the corpse, I saw—distinctly saw—a tremor upon the 
lips. In a minute afterward they relaxed, disclosing a 
bright line of the pearly teeth. Amazement now struggled 
in my bosom with the profound awe which had hither-
to reigned there alone. I felt that my vision grew dim, 
that my reason wandered; and it was only by a violent 
effort that I at length succeeded in nerving myself to the 
task which duty thus once more had pointed out. There 
was now a partial glow upon the forehead and upon the 
cheek and throat; perceptible warmth pervaded the whole 
frame; there was even a slight pulsation at the heart. The 
lady lived; and with redoubled ardor I betook myself to 
the task of restoration. I chafed and bathed the temples 
and the hands, and used every exertion which experience, 
and no little medical reading, could suggest. But in vain. 
Suddenly, the color fled, the pulsation ceased, the lips re-
sumed the expression of the dead, and, in an instant after-
ward, the whole body took upon itself the icy chilliness, 
the livid hue, the intense rigidity, the sunken outline, and 
all the loathsome peculiarities of that which has been, for 

many days, a tenant of the tomb.
And again I sunk into visions of Ligeia—and again, 

(what marvel that I shudder while I write,) again there 
reached my ears a low sob from the region of the ebony 
bed. But why shall I minutely detail the unspeakable 
horrors of that night? Why shall I pause to relate how, 
time after time, until near the period of the gray dawn, 
this hideous drama of revivification was repeated; how 
each terrific relapse was only into a sterner and appar-
ently more irredeemable death; how each agony wore 
the aspect of a struggle with some invisible foe; and how 
each struggle was succeeded by I know not what of wild 
change in the personal appearance of the corpse? Let me 
hurry to a conclusion.

The greater part of the fearful night had worn away, 
and she who had been dead, once again stirred—and now 
more vigorously than hitherto, although arousing from 
a dissolution more appalling in its utter hopelessness 
than any. I had long ceased to struggle or to move, and 
remained sitting rigidly upon the ottoman, a helpless prey 
to a whirl of violent emotions, of which extreme awe 
was perhaps the least terrible, the least consuming. The 
corpse, I repeat, stirred, and now more vigorously than 
before. The hues of life flushed up with unwonted energy 
into the countenance—the limbs relaxed—and, save that 
the eyelids were yet pressed heavily together, and that the 
bandages and draperies of the grave still imparted their 
charnel character to the figure, I might have dreamed 
that Rowena had indeed shaken off, utterly, the fetters 
of Death. But if this idea was not, even then, altogether 
adopted, I could at least doubt no longer, when, arising 
from the bed, tottering, with feeble steps, with closed 
eyes, and with the manner of one bewildered in a dream, 
the thing that was enshrouded advanced boldly and pal-
pably into the middle of the apartment.

I trembled not—I stirred not—for a crowd of unutter-
able fancies connected with the air, the stature, the de-
meanor of the figure, rushing hurriedly through my brain, 
had paralyzed—had chilled me into stone. I stirred not—
but gazed upon the apparition. There was a mad disor-
der in my thoughts—a tumult unappeasable. Could it, 
indeed, be the living Rowena who confronted me? Could 
it indeed be Rowena at all—the fair-haired, the blue-eyed 
Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine? Why, why should 
I doubt it? The bandage lay heavily about the mouth—
but then might it not be the mouth of the breathing Lady 
of Tremaine? And the cheeks-there were the roses as 



109“The Tomb”

in her noon of life—yes, these might indeed be the fair 
cheeks of the living Lady of Tremaine. And the chin, 
with its dimples, as in health, might it not be hers?—
but had she then grown taller since her malady? What 
inexpressible madness seized me with that thought? One 
bound, and I had reached her feet! Shrinking from my 
touch, she let fall from her head, unloosened, the ghast-
ly cerements which had confined it, and there streamed 

forth, into the rushing atmosphere of the chamber, huge 
masses of long and disheveled hair; it was blacker than 
the raven wings of the midnight! And now slowly opened 
the eyes of the figure which stood before me. “Here then, 
at least,” I shrieked aloud, “can I never—can I never 
be mistaken –these are the full, and the black, and the 
wild eyes—of my lost love—of the lady—of the LADY 
LIGEIA.”



“The Tomb”

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Joshi, S.T., and David E. Schultz. An	H.P.	Lovecraft	Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. Print.

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Ohio University Press, 2000. 63-67.  Print.

---. Supernatural	Horror	in	Literature. New York: Profile Press, 1927. Print.

---. “The Tomb.” The	Vagrant, March 1922: 50–64. Print.

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