Rather than one huge whirlpool as described in Poe's story, it is actually a system of whirlpools, currents and cross currents. Its worth noting, too, that he goes on to observe that his attempts to guess which object will next be pulled into the whirlpools currents all prove to be wrong: At length, after making several guesses of this nature, and being deceived in all this fact the fact of my invariable miscalculation, set me upon a train of reflection that made my limbs again tremble, and my heart beat heavily once more. Mans attempt at understanding and second-guessing nature has failed. These would have been of great assistance at such times, in using the sweeps, as well as afterward in fishing but, somehow, although we ran the risk ourselves, we had not the heart to let the young ones get into the danger for, after all is said and done, itwasa horrible danger, and that is the truth. It is recognized as the second most powerful whirlpool in the world. It took less than a single day to change these. Yonder are Islesen, Hotholm, Keildhelm, Suarven, and Buckholm. I was borne violently into the channel of the Strm, and in a few minutes was hurried down the coast into the grounds of the fishermen. summaries I called to mind the great variety of buoyant matter that strewed the coast of Lofoden, having been absorbed and then thrown forth by the Moskoe-strm. "You perceive that in crossing the Strm channel, we always went a long way up above the whirl, even in the calmest weather, and then had to wait and watch carefully for the slack -- but now we were driving right upon the pool itself, and in such a hurricane as this ! The sky was clear, the winds had gone down, and the full moon was setting radiantly in the west, when I found myself on the surface of the ocean, in full view of the shores of Lofoden, and above the spot where the pool of the Moskoe-strmhad been. The wind sometimes was not as strong as we thought it at starting, and then we made rather less way than we could wish, while the current rendered the smack unmanageable. Boats, yachts, and ships have been carried away by not guarding against it before they were within its reach. When I am reading and a book title is mentioned, I like to check and see if it is a real book. "It is now within a few days of three years since what I am going to tell you occurred. Although, at the time, so strong a gale was blowing landward that a brig in the remote offing lay to under a double-reefed trysail, and constantly plunged her whole hull out of sight, still there was here nothing like a regular swell, but only a short, quick, angry cross dashing of water in every direction -- as well in the teeth of the wind as otherwise. To see what your friends thought of this book, A Descent into the Maelstrom - an Edgar Allan Poe Short Story. In all violent eddies at sea there is good fishing, at proper opportunities, if one has only the courage to attempt it;but among the whole of the Lofoden coastmen, we three were the only ones who made a regular business of going out to the islands, as I tell you. It was on the tenth day of July, 18, a day which the people of this part of the world will never forget for it was one in which blew the most terrible hurricane that ever came out of the heavens. Excellent descriptive writing so much so I could almost taste, smell and hear the sounds of the sea. descent noun (RELATION) [ U ] the state or fact of being related to a particular person or group of people who lived in the past: She's a woman of mixed / French descent. summaries | Twice, during six years, we were forced to stay all night at anchor on account of a dead calm, which is a rare thing indeed just about here; and once we had to remain on the grounds nearly a week, starving to death, owing to a gale which blew up shortly after our arrival, and made the channel too boisterous to be thought of. quotes | The gyrations of the whirl grew, gradually, less and less violent. The boat made a sharp half turn to larboard, and then shot off in its new direction like a thunderbolt. I do believe that I blushed with shame when this idea crossed my mind. Each moment added to its speed to its headlong impetuosity. In this direction I was able to obtain an unobstructed view, from the manner in which the smack hung on the inclined surface of the pool. I muttered a hurried prayer to God, and thought all was over. It was not a new terror that thus affected me, but the dawn of a more excitinghope. If I had not known where we were, and what we had to expect, I should not have recognised the place at all. February 2nd 2004 If you have never been at sea in a heavy gale, you can form no idea of the confusion of mind occasioned by the wind and spray together. Round and round we swept -- not with any uniform movement -- but in dizzying swings and jerks, that sent us sometimes only a few hundred yards -- sometimes nearly the complete circuit of the whirl. I do believe that I blushed with shame when this idea crossed my mind. I was now trying to get the better of the stupor that had come over me, and to collect my senses so as to see what was to be done, when I felt somebody grasp my arm. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. We were behind the time of the slack, and the whirl of the Strm was in full fury! "I could not tell you the twentieth part of the difficulties we encountered 'on the grounds' -- it is a bad spot to be in, even in good weather -- but we made shift always to run the gauntlet of the Moskoe-strm itself without accident ;although at times my heart has been in my mouth when we happened to be a minute or so behind or before the slack. We had let our sails go by the run before it cleverly took us; but, at the first puff, both our masts went by the board as if they had been sawed off the mainmast taking with it my youngest brother, who had lashed himself to it for safety. There fish can be got at all hours, without much risk, and therefore these places are preferred. Whereas his two brothers succumb to the maelstroms alluring energies, the white-haired man manages to resist, as if he is resisting his own deeper libido or drives, in favour of quick-thinking and rational pragmatism. a descent into the maelstrm, edgar allan poes vertiginous short story of being swept into a huge and terrible whirlpool by a raging hurricane that the oldest seaman in norway never experienced was transformed into a musical dance/theatre piece by philip glass and collaborators, dancer/choreographer molissa fenley, set designer eamon darcy How my elder brother escaped destruction I cannot say, for I never had an opportunity of ascertaining. A fascinating tale of a man's near-death experience in a giant maelstrom or whirlpool at sea. js.src='https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js'; Descent TV Movie 2005 PG 1 h 30 m IMDb RATING 3.4 /10 1K YOUR RATING Rate Play trailer 0:58 1 Video 40 Photos Action Drama Sci-Fi When the Ring of Fire starts heating up with an unprecedented amount of volcanic activity a team of scientists are gathered to prevent a global catastrophe. It was the hour of the slack but the sea still heaved in mountainous waves from the effects of the hurricane. This is why I'm afraid of traveling by sea. "The island in the distance," resumed the old man, "is called by the Norwegians Vurrgh. Joseph Glanville. {js=d.createElement(s); The first example is that of which explaining the first, high class house when it had began to burn down, as the narrator exclaims, On the night of the day on which this cruel deed was done, I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire. See also Trivia | Goofs | Crazy Credits | Alternate Versions | Connections | Soundtracks Did You Know? Just opposite the promontory upon whose apex we were placed, and at a distance of some five or six miles out at sea, there was visible a small, bleak-looking island; or, more properly, its position was discernible through the wilderness of surge in which it was enveloped. Absolutely recommended! I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was going to make ;and my principal grief was that I should never be able to tell my old companions on shore about the mysteries I should see. Looking down from this pinnacle upon the howling Phlegethon below, I could not help smiling at the simplicity with which the honest Jonas Ramus records, as a matter difficult of belief, the anecdotes of the whales and the bears; for it appearedto me, in fact, a self-evident thing, that the largest ship of the line in existence, coming within the influence of that deadly attraction, could resist it as little as a feather the hurricane, and must disappear bodily and at once. With the wind that now drove us on, we were bound for the whirl of the Strm, and nothing could save us! Many of Edgar Allan Poes tales focus on protagonists who find themselves in trouble because of their own behaviour: so the murderer in The Tell-Tale Heart is driven mad by his own guilt (or, depending on how you read that ambiguous story, by the supernatural beating of his victims heart beneath the floorboards), while the cat-killer in The Black Cat also brings his subsequent haunting and bad luck upon his own head through his cruelty to his pet. Start by marking A Descent into the Maelstrom - an Edgar Allan Poe Short Story as Want to Read: Error rating book. Of foam there was little except in the immediate vicinity of the rocks. I called to mind the great variety of buoyant matter that strewed the coast of Lofoden, having been absorbed and then thrown forth by the Moskoe-strm. It likewise happens frequently, that whales come too near the stream, and are overpowered by its violence; and then it is impossible to describe their howlings and bellowings in their fruitless struggles to disengage themselves. A Descent into the Maelstrom Whirlpool October 18, 1845 London Journal (vol. [CDATA[ "Myself and my two brothers once owned a schooner-rigged smack of about seventy tons burthen, with which we were in the habit of fishing among the islands beyond Moskoe, nearly to Vurrgh. Director Talia Lugacy Writers Brian Priest Talia Lugacy Stars Rosario Dawson Chad Faust Marcus Patrick The oldest seaman in Norway never experienced any thing like it. I am not sure from what point of view the writer in question surveyed it, nor at what time; but it could neither have been from the summit of Helseggen, nor during a storm. Kircher and others imagine that in the centre of the channel of the Maelstrm is an abyss penetrating the globe, and issuing in some very remote part the Gulf of Bothnia being somewhat decidedly named in one instance. The theme, as in Moby Dick, is that a vast and pitiless natural force symbolises the At the same moment the roaring noise of the water was completely drowned in a kind of shrill shriek such a sound as you might imagine given out by the waste-pipes of many thousand steam-vessels, letting off their steam all together. The story of how he was caught during a storm in a maelstrom three years earlier with his brothers and how he survived. But these intervals of tranquility are only at the turn of the ebb and flood, and in calm weather, and last but a quarter of an hour, its violence gradually returning. I have already described the unnatural curiosity which had taken the place of my original terrors. An old looking man tells the story of how he survived when the fishing boat he was in with his brother enters the maelstrom. "So it is sometimes termed," said he. We put the boat on the wind, but could make no headway at all for the eddies, and I was upon the point of proposing to return to the anchorage, when, looking astern, we saw the whole horizon covered with a singular copper-colored cloud that rose with the most amazing velocity. Its name in Norse is Moskstraumen or Moske-stroom. * We set out with a fresh wind on our starboard quarter, and for some time spanked along at a great rate, never dreaming of danger, for indeed we saw not the slightest reason to apprehend it. Be the first to contribute! It might have been an hour, or thereabout, after my quitting the smack, when, having descended to a vast distance beneath me, it made three or four wild gyrations in rapid succession, and, bearing my loved brother with it, plunged headlong, at once and forever, into the chaos of foam below. the fall of the house of usher: silencea fable: the masque of the red death. He explained to me -- although I have forgotten the explanation -- how what I observed was, in fact, the natural consequence of the forms of the floating fragments -- and showed me how it happened that a cylinder, swimming in a vortex, offered more resistance to its suction, and was drawn in with greater difficulty than an equally bulky body, of any form whatever. I really dug (yeah, I'm using that word) Poe's inclusion of physics near the end of the story. These are the true names of the places but why it has been thought necessary to name them at all, is more than either you or I can understand. Edgar Allan Poe (A Descent into the Maelstrom - an Edgar Allan Poe Short Story) . }}(document,'script','twitter-wjs'); fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs); {var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; Now I could not account for this difference except by supposing that the roughened fragments were the only ones which had beencompletely absorbed that the others had entered the whirl at so late a period of the tide, or, for some reason, had descended so slowly after entering, that they did not reach the bottom before the turn of the flood came, or of the ebb, as the case might be. These, no doubt, were singular fancies to occupy a man's mind in such extremity -- and I have often thought since, that the revolutions of the boat around the pool might have rendered me a little light-headed. And then down we came with a sweep, a slide, and a plunge, that made me feel sick and dizzy, as if I was falling from some lofty mountain-top in a dream. descent noun (ARRIVAL) [ C usually sing ] the arrival of something or someone, esp. It is now within a few days of three years since what I am going to tell you occurred. descent , , descent : 1. the state or fact of being related to a particular person or group of people who lived in the. Harry a dval la descente qui mne au lac. In the year 1645, early in the morning of Sexagesima Sunday, it raged with such noise and impetuosity that the very stones of the houses on the coast fell to the ground." You perceive that in crossing the Strmchannel, we always went a long way up above the whirl, even in the calmest weather, and then had to wait and watch carefully for the slack but now we were driving right upon the pool itself, and in such a hurricane as this! It was my elder brother, and my heart leaped for joy, for I had made sure that he was overboard -- but the next moment all this joy was turned into horror -- for he put his mouth close to my ear, and screamed out the word 'Moskoe-strm'! "Our first slide into the abyss itself, from the belt of foam above, had carried us a great distance down the slope ;but our farther descent was by no means proportionate. It took less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so that I tremble at the least exertion, and am frightened at a shadow. Indeed, critics including Jules Zanger have highlighted that there are other symbols in A Descent into the Maelstrom which support such an idea: along with the mans white hair, we might seize upon his watch: At first I could not make out what he meant but soon a hideous thought flashed upon me. Poe learnt about the maelstrom from several sources, which included an 1834 story in Frasers Magazine titled The Maelstrom: A Fragment. Both are part of a 1960, fifteen story collection, "The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales." Format: CD. You have had a good look at the whirl now, said the old man, and if you will creep round this crag, so as to get in its lee, and deaden the roar of the water, I will tell you a story that will convince you I ought to know something of the Moskoe-strm.. The maelstrom, in its supernatural force, is a warning to man that he is helpless in the face of this outer world that can converge upon him at any moment, without warning. I conceived it possible, in either instance, that they might thus be whirled up again to the level of the ocean, without undergoing the fate of those which had been drawn in more early, or absorbed more rapidly. We might analyse the maelstrom as a symbol representing the force of time as well as nature. 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