POE: The Raven-Winged Hours
A macabre multimedia fever-dream envisioning the surreal final hours of Edgar Allan Poe
The Raven-Winged Hours is a Gothic horror audio play with art songs and poetry, inspired by the real-life mystery of Poe’s tragic death.
A grim darkness overspreads the earth, with vast sable wings over all. The doom presses in around me, an overwhelming sea of Silence. How have I come to be here, alone at the end of the world?
I rush into the heart of a Mystery, some secret whose unveiling will be my destruction... something at the Antarctic Pole. Within the clouds of icy particles arise a chaos of flitting phantoms, who come and go at the bidding of vast, formless Things...
If just once more I could see the sun, though my eyes were dazzled with looking! Behind my eyelids gleam flowers of light, and sparks of dew like twinkling stars.
A woman’s voice is singing. And she, a ghost within the full-orbed Moon, glides away. She is my siren, and I her slave. How dark a woe, yet how sublime a hope!
Ah, what demon has tempted me here?
Listen: A Song and Poem from The Raven-Winged Hours
O Human Love
A song based on Poe’s poetry, composed by Lawrence Rush and sung by Amy Justman, lyrics by Blue Bliss. A beautiful dirge for love and life, where earthly sorrow deepens into cosmic mystery.
The Conqueror Worm
A poem by Edgar Allan Poe, performed by Louis Biggie, soundscapes by Blue Bliss. A spectral theatre-piece in miniature, where human striving becomes performance and the final actor is Death.
The Raven-Winged Hours Audio Theatre
An episode from the complete audio play. All characters are performed by Lawrence Rush, with Poe’s poetry performed by Louis Biggie.
The dying Poe drifts into one of the strangest realms of his delirium. Professor Feather presides over an uncanny demonstration, an ancient mummy is unwrapped, and what should have remained dead rises to pronounce a curse. The nightmare mingles with Poe’s half-conscious terror in the hospital room, where every sound may be memory, hallucination, or prophecy.
Words With A Mummy
The Imp of the Perverse mocks Poe’s dream of an afterlife. Poe becomes lost inside a nightmare, where he encounters another monster from his writings. This episode includes Poe’s poem “Dream-Land.”
