Polaris (short story)

"Polaris"
Author	H.P. Lovecraft
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Horror short story
Published in	Philosopher
Publication date	December, 1920

"Polaris" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, written in 1918 and first published in the December 1920 issue of the amateur journal The Philosopher. It is noteworthy as the story that introduces Lovecraft's fictional Pnakotic Manuscripts, the first of his arcane tomes.^[1]

Inspiration

Critic William Fulwiler writes that "'Polaris' is one of Lovecraft's most autobiographical stories, reflecting his feelings of guilt, frustration, and uselessness during World War I. Like the narrator, Lovecraft was 'denied a warrior's part', for he 'was feeble and given to strange faintings when subjected to stress and hardships'".^[2]

Like many Lovecraft stories, "Polaris" was in part inspired by a dream, which he described in a letter: "Several nights ago I had a strange dream of a strange city--a city of many palaces and gilded domes, lying in a hollow betwixt ranges of grey, horrible hills.... I was, as I said, aware of this city visually. I was in it and around it. But certainly I had no corporeal existence."^[3]

Lovecraft remarked on the peculiar similarity of the story's style to that of Lord Dunsany, whose work he would not read for another year. An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia suggests that Lovecraft and Dunsany were both influenced by the prose poems of Edgar Allan Poe.^[4]

Plot summary

The story begins with the narrator describing the night sky as observed over long sleepless nights from his window, in particular that of the Pole Star, Polaris, which he describes as "winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey".

He then describes the night of the aurora over his house in the swamp and how on this night he first dreamt of a city of marble lying on a plateau between two peaks, with Polaris ever watching in the night sky. The narrator describes after a while observing motion within the houses and seeing men beginning to populate the streets, conversing to each other in language that he had never heard before but still, strangely, understood. However, before he could learn any more of this city, he awoke.

Many times, he would again dream of the city and the men who dwelt within. After a while, the narrator tired of merely existing as an incorporeal observer and began to desire to establish his place within the city, simultaneously beginning to question his conceptualization of what constituted reality and thus whether this was just a dream or whether it was real.

Then, one night, while listening to discourses of those who populate the city, the narrator obtains a physical form: not as a stranger, but as an inhabitant of the city, which he now knew as Olathoë, lying on the plateau of Sarkis in the land of Lomar, which was besieged by an enemy known as the Inutos.

While the other men within the city engage in combat with Inutos, the narrator is sent to a watchtower to signal if the Inutos gain access to the city itself. Within the tower, he notices Polaris in the sky and senses it as a malign presence, hearing a rhyme which appears to be spoken by the star:

"Slumber, watcher, till the spheres,

Six and twenty thousand years^[5]

Have revolv'd, and I return

To the spot where now I burn.

Other stars anon shall rise

To the axis of the skies;

Stars that soothe and stars that bless

With a sweet forgetfulness:

Only when my round is o'er

Shall the past disturb thy door."

Uncertain as to its meaning, he drifts off to sleep, thus failing in his duty to guard Olathoë. Upon awakening, the narrator finds himself back in the house by the swamp, but the narrator now is convinced that this life is not real but a dream from which he cannot awaken.

Publication

"Polaris" was first published in the December 1920 edition of The Philosopher, an amateur journal. It was later reprinted the May 1926 edition of the National Amateur, the February 1934 issue of Fantasy Fan, and the December 1937 issue of Weird Tales.^[6]

Notes

↑ Joshi & Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, pp. 187.
↑ William Fulwiler, "Mail-Call of Cthulhu", Black Forbidden Things, p. 171; citing H. P. Lovecraft, "Polaris", Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, p. 21.
↑ H. P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Vol. I, p. 62; cited in Joshi and Schultz, p. 211.
↑ Joshi and Schultz, p. 211.
↑ The period of precession of the equinoxes is close to 25,765 years or approximately 26,000 years.
↑ Lovecraft, H.P. (2005). Joshi, S.T., ed. The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-118789-1.

References

Joshi, S. T.; David E. Schultz (2001). An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-31578-7.
Lovecraft, Howard P. (1986) [1918]. "Polaris". In S. T. Joshi (ed.). Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (9th corrected printing ed.). Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. ISBN 0-87054-039-4.

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Polaris

Full-text at The H. P. Lovecraft Archive
Polaris public domain audiobook at LibriVox

Works by H. P. Lovecraft

Cthulhu Mythos Dream Cycle

Novellas	The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath The Case of Charles Dexter Ward The Whisperer in Darkness At the Mountains of Madness The Shadow over Innsmouth The Shadow Out of Time

Short stories	"The Tomb" "Dagon" "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson" "Polaris" "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" "Memory" "Old Bugs" "The Transition of Juan Romero" "The White Ship" "The Street" "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" "The Statement of Randolph Carter" "The Terrible Old Man" "The Tree" "The Cats of Ulthar" "The Temple" "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" "Celephaïs" "From Beyond" "Nyarlathotep" "The Picture in the House" "Ex Oblivione" "Sweet Ermengarde" "The Nameless City" "The Quest of Iranon" "The Moon-Bog" "The Outsider" "The Other Gods" "The Music of Erich Zann" "Herbert West–Reanimator" "Hypnos" "What the Moon Brings" "Azathoth" "The Hound" "The Lurking Fear" "The Rats in the Walls" "The Unnamable" "The Festival" "The Shunned House" "The Horror at Red Hook" "He" "In the Vault" "Cool Air" "The Call of Cthulhu" "Pickman's Model" "The Silver Key" "The Strange High House in the Mist" "The Colour Out of Space" "The Descendant" "History of the Necronomicon" "The Very Old Folk" "Ibid" "The Dunwich Horror" "The Dreams in the Witch House" "The Thing on the Doorstep" "The Evil Clergyman" "The Book" "The Haunter of the Dark"

Collaborations	"The Green Meadow" "The Crawling Chaos" "The Horror at Martin's Beach" "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" "The Curse of Yig" "The Mound" "Medusa's Coil" "The Horror in the Museum" "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" "Out of the Aeons" "The Tree on the Hill" "Till A’the Seas" "In the Walls of Eryx" "The Thing in the Moonlight"

Juvenilia	"The Mystery of the Grave-Yard" "The Beast in the Cave" "The Alchemist"

Poetry	Fungi from Yuggoth

Essays	"Supernatural Horror in Literature" To Quebec and the Stars The Cancer of Superstition Autobiography: Some Notes on a Nonentity

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