Poe and Psyche

I was reading Poe's "Ulalume" again and again over the past few days and I quickly became curious about Poe's reference to Psyche. The poem takes place on a night in the "lonesome October" with a gray sky as the leaves are withering for the autumn season. In the region of Weir, by the lake of Auber, the narrator roams with a "volcanic" heart. He has a "serious and sober" talk with his soul, though he does not realize it is October or where his roaming is leading him. He remarks on the stars as night fades away, remarking on the brightest one, and wonders if it knows that the tears on his cheeks have not yet dried. His soul, however, mistrusts the star and where it is leading them. Just as the narrator calms his soul, he realizes he has unconsciously walked to the vault of his "lost Ulalume" on the very night he had buried her a year before.

Poe presents a narrator who is not aware of his return to the burial place of his beloved, unlike in the case of "Annabel Lee". Much work has been done by scholars to identify all of Poe's allusions, most notably by Thomas Ollive Mabbott. The narrator personifies his soul as the ancient Greek Psyche, representing the irrational but careful part of his subconsciousness. It is Psyche who first feels concerned about where they are walking and makes the first recognition that they have reached Ulalume's vault. I observe that whenever Edgar Allan Poe tries to delve into his inner self he always alludes to Psyche. See, for instance, "A Predicament" whose main protagonist is Psyche Zenobia; or "To Helen" where Poe attempts to identify true beauty and he does so by directly referring to Psyche in one of his lines. Did Poe make these allusions on purpose? Yes, in my view. Perhaps he did so to show us that his idea of the mind, the conscious and the subconscious was exactly as these are found in Hellenic thought.