It writhes! — it writhes! — with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food.
At the end of the play, we discover that the poem is entitled "Man," and that the hero of the play is "The Conqueror Worm." Clearly, the poem is the key to the Lady Ligeia's obsession with life beyond death; that is, since the worm is mankind's most potent and horrible symbol of death, the poem deals with death in its most dreaded form — annihilation — a catastrophe that the Lady Ligeia believes is possible to defy. After the narrator has finished reading the poem, she fervently reaffirms the idea that man does not yield to death except "through the weakness of his feeble will."
After the death of Ligeia, the narrator can no longer endure the "lonely desolation" of his decaying dwelling on the Rhine. After months of weary and aimless wanderings, he settles in a remote part of England — in "the wildest and least frequented portion of England," and, significantly, the abbey which he purchases has a "gloomy and dreary grandeur." After a time, he marries "the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine." The bridal chamber is one of Poe's most masterful creations, filled with, among other grotesque specimens of the gothic setting, a "gigantic sarcophagus of black granite."
Lady Rowena is the antithesis of the Lady Ligeia. She is also beautiful, but she is blonde, simple, and unsophisticated. Whereas the Lady Ligeia was superior to this world, Lady Rowena is extremely earthly and temporal. In contrast to the metaphysical and spiritual qualities of the Lady Ligeia, Lady Rowena embodies the material and mortal qualities of this physical world. Thus, in one interpretation of the story, the narrator seems to be exchanging a world of beautiful, transcendent, ethereal reality for a world of material reality.
After a month, the narrator becomes aware of the fact that his wife does not love him — in fact, she is in dreadful fear of his fierce moodiness. In contrast, he ignores her and takes pleasure only in remembering the perfection of the Lady Ligeia. In the second month of their marriage, the Lady Rowena becomes very ill. She is nervous, feverish, and terribly excitable. She is constantly perturbed by strange sounds, motions, and "phantasmagoric influences" within their chambers. One night when the narrators sits by the bed of the dying Lady Rowena, he listens to her frail cries of fear and fright and, to his astonishment, he discovers that his wife is not so much afraid of death as she is afraid of strange and unknown presences in the room. The narrator then becomes aware of a "palpable although invisible" presence in the room and, moments later, senses a "gentle footfall upon the carpet."
