A few weeks ago, I finished reading a collection of Edgar Allan Poe works. When I read "Ligeia" in March, this sentence caught my attention:
Or, perhaps, I cannot now bring these points [the circumstances under which the narrator met Ligeia] to mind, because, in truth, the character of my beloved, her rare learning, her singular yet placid cast of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical language, made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and stealthily progressive, that they have been unnoticed and unknown.At the time, I just noticed that a few of the phrases sound and look similar: "thrilling and enthralling," "steadily and stealthily," and "unnoticed and unknown." About two weeks later, I thought of a way that they fit with the plot of the story. I recently re-reading it so I could write this post.
At the end of the story, after Rowena - the narrator's second wife - dies, she comes to life again but looks like and apparently has become Ligeia. So those similar-sounding and similar-looking phrases from early in the story (it's the third sentence) act - in some ways - as an element of foreshadowing. As Rowena's body is transformed into Ligeia's, so does "thrilling" change into "enthralling," "steadily" into "stealthily," and "unnoticed" into "unknown." The words don't undergo as perfect a change as the body, but if they did, the same word would just appear twice.
Re-reading the story, I found a few other instances of foreshadowing. While the narrator is describing Ligeia's eyes (which eventually prove to be the attribute that convinces him that Rowena's body has become Ligeia's), he compares the feeling he gets from them to "one or two stars in heaven... [that are] double and changeable." When Ligeia falls ill, her eyes "blazed with a too - too glorious effulgence." As she's dying, the narrator is "entranced to a melody more than mortal - to assumptions and aspirations which mortality had never before known." Each of these descriptions foreshadows the later transformation. There's the narrator's inconsistent count ("one or two") of the "double and changeable stars," the double "too" - also a homophone for two, and an-other pair of similar-sounding and similar-looking words: "assumptions and aspirations."
It's very subtle foreshadowing that doesn't become apparent until re-reading the story with the knowledge that Ligeia reappears at the end, but with that knowledge, the phrases that describe doubles and changing become more significant and more meaningful.
