Night again

[justcarol67]

Catlady:> 
> Maybe "Plutonian" is capitalized only because of being named after Pluto, and maybe he meant 'plutonian shore', whose synonyms would not be capitalized, like hellish (as you said) or profoundly dark or secret...

Carol:
As I said upthread, it's a proper adjective and therefore capitalized, just as "American," derived from the proper noun "America," is capitalized, whether it's used as an adjective or a noun.
> 
I don't think that "Night" is a personification unless a being can have (literal or figurative) shores. However, I looked up Nyx (or maybe we should call her Nox, since Poe uses the Roman names) in Wikipedia (I know, I know; find a more authoritative source!) and found that Nyx/Night leaves Tartarus (the part of the underworld reserved for punishment; roughly, hell) at the same moment her daughter, Hemera (Day) enters it (and, presumably, vice versa). So *maybe* the Plutonian shore is the edge of Tartarus that belongs to Night or is used by her to enter or leave Tartarus, and our mad narrator imagines the bird as dwelling there. (What's your name on the Plutonian shore, you ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore?) Maybe it should be Stygian shore, as in the shore of the River Styx? Of course, Tartarus is an abyss and wouldn't border the River Styx, so maybe Poe is thinking of Hades (or whatever the Romans called the realm of Pluto) in general, or rather, the part bordering the Styx, which would be its "shore."

Or he's thoroughly mixing his images and metaphors so that Night is both a place and a being, not to mention a time of darkness, inseparable in his unstable brain from Tartarus, the part of Pluto's realm where the evil dead are punished (for our purposes, hell), or from Hades/the Underworld/the realm of Pluto in general, which he's not conceiving as a happy place.

Carol, who thinks that perhaps we shouldn't try to be too rational in our analysis given Poe's own mental instability