https://poestories.com/print/telltaleheart
Got looking into it since Eggars did a short movie free on youtube on it. Been so long since I read it, wondered how close his movie was to the orig. very close!
dissimulation - Hiding under a false appearance.
dissemble - same sort of meaning, but funny spelling with an E compared to the I in dissimulation.
sagacity - the pronunciation is (sa ga city) basically, no J sound is what caught my attention.
deputed = delegate - as in "deputy sheriff" as in... the guard was deputed to watch the gate.
tattoo - as in a drumlike beating
Death Watches - it's a dern beetle! = Deathwatch beetles. Any of various small beetles (family Anobiidae) that are common in old houses where they bore in woodwork and furniture and make a tapping noise as a mating call. See this cool write up, maybe he got the idea from Henry David Thoreau the poet/naturalist:
https://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1971105.htm
Some tidbits from eapoe.org :
Under the date of August 10, 1838, Henry David Thoreau recorded in his Journal a note on “The Time of the Universe” that includes an allusion to “the cricket’s chant, and the tickings of the deathwatch in the wall” (3). Thoreau incorporated a revision of this passage in his “Natural History of Massachusetts” published in the July 1842 issue of The Dial. The complete paragraph in The Dial reads as follows:
In the autumn days, the creaking of crickets is heard at noon over all the land, and as in summer they are heard chiefly at [column 2:] night-fall, so then by their incessant chirp they usher in the evening of the year. Nor can all the vanities that vex the world alter one whit the measure that night has chosen. Every pulse-beat is in exact time with the cricket’s chant and the tickings of the deathwatch in the wall. Alternate with these if you can (4).
The context reveals that Thoreau is writing with general optimism of man’s possible closeness to nature, in contrast to the anxiety which marks the usual literary reference to the deathwatch. “Entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction,” writes Thoreau, “so that I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom.”
I cannot show beyond question that Poe used Thoreau’s essay in writing “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Nevertheless, apparent relationships are so impressive that the facts should be reviewed and their implicit significance brought out.
In the first place, it is probable that Poe read the paragraph by Thoreau. The dates of publication are close enough to require careful examination. Emerson had just taken over the editorship of The Dial from Margaret Fuller, the July 1842 number, which contains Thoreau’s essay, being the first for which he assumed responsibility, and the issue was off the press by the first or second day of that month (5). “The Tell-Tale Heart” appeared in January 1843, in Lowell’s The Pioneer, and had been submitted before December 17, 1842 (6). It is impossible to determine how much earlier Poe may have written the story, but on the ground of his desperate need of money in the summer of 1842, as well as his habits of publication, it seems unlikely that he completed the tale before Thoreau’s essay was in print (7).
One can suppose that Thoreau and Poe, both masters of word-play, expect their readers to be aware of the common meaning of “deathwatch” as a vigil held over a person who is dying ot dead. Shortly after recalling the “death watches in the wall” Poe’s narrator declares that “Death, in approaching him [the old man] had stalked with his black shadow, before him, and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel — although he neither saw nor heard—to feel the presence of my head within the room.” Hence the murderer is holding a kind of macabre-”deathwatch,” and the victim one of “mortal terror,” as both wait, almost motionless, for a sound or sight that will end their vigil.
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