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Copywork
About This Passage
Here Poe's documentary eye becomes the instrument of the sublime. The prose climbs the island as the gaze does — from sheer cliffs that rise 'perpendicularly' a thousand feet, to a table-land, to a 'lofty cone like that of Teneriffe,' and finally to an upper region of 'barren rock' lost in cloud and snow. The measured, ascending clauses build a vertical immensity, and the closing antithesis between fertile lower slopes and barren, cloud-hidden summit gives the whole a tragic grandeur. Copying it trains the surveyor's exact, accumulating sentence and the art of turning fact into awe.
A part of the land toward the north rises more than a thousand feet perpendicularly from the sea. A table-land at this height extends back nearly to the centre of the island, and from this table-land ...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct the chapter's design: the Jane Guy's passage from Christmas Harbor to the towering islands of Tristan da Cunha, the documentary survey of their geography and their improvised, self-governed settlement under Glass, and the methodical, weeks-long search that converts a long-standing dispute over the phantom Auroras into the conclusion that no vestige of them remains. Mark the seam where chronicle gives way to investigation, and weigh what the shift accomplishes.
Discussion Questions
- How does the narrator turn weeks of not finding the Auroras into confidence that they are not there? What in the chapter makes that conclusion feel earned, and why might absence, when carefully searched, count as evidence? Use details from the chapter.
- Poe fills this chapter with exact coordinates, named ships, and a quoted report from the Royal Hydrographical Society of Madrid, yet the disputed Auroras seem not to exist. What might that documentary style add to the voyage, and why might Poe want an official source to be mistaken here? Use details from the chapter.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
A supreme ruler; one possessing royal authority.
Item 2
Healthfulness, especially of climate or air.
Item 3
Confined within bounds; enclosed.
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Critical Thinking
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