even precisely where I first
became acquainted with the lady Ligeia": and the story was begun.

It was more difficult to handle the second division of the tale,
which was to deal with the period between Ligeia's death and her
resurrection. The main stress of the story now ceased to be laid on
the element of character. The element of action, furthermore, was
subsidiary in the second part of the tale, as it had been already in
the first. All that had to happen was the resurrection of Ligeia;
and this the reader had been forced by the very theme of the story to
foresee. The chief interest in the second part must therefore lie in
determining where and when and how this resurrection was accomplished.
A worthy setting must be found for the culminating event. Poe could
lose no time in preparing a place for his climax; and therefore he
was obliged, as soon as he had laid Ligeia in the grave, to begin an
elaborate description of the stage settings of his final scene. The
place must be wild and weird and arabesque. It must be worthy to
receive a resurrected mortal revisiting the glimpses of the moon. The
place was found, the time--midnight--decided upon: but the question
remained,--_how_ should Ligeia be resurrected?

And here arose almost an insuperable difficulty. Ligeia had been
buried (_must have been_ buried, as we have seen), and her body had
been given to the worms. Yet now she must be revived. And it would
not be sufficient to let her merely walk bodily into the fantastic
apartment where her husband, dream-haunted, was waiting to receive
her; for the point to be emphasized was not so much the mere fact of
her being once more alive, as the fact that she had won her way back
to life by the exertion of her own extraordinary will. The reader must
be shown not only _the result_ of her triumph over death, but _the
very process of the struggle_ through which by sheer volition she
forced her soul back into the bodily life. If only her body were
present, so that the reader could be shown its gradual obsession by
her soul, all would be easily accomplished; but, by the conditions of
the story, her body _could not_ be present: and the difficulty of the
problem was extreme.

But here Poe hit upon a solution of the difficulty. Would not another
dead body do as well? Surely Ligeia could breathe her life into any
discarded female form. Therefore, of course, her husband must marry
again, solely in order that his second wife should die