906. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe 🖤😱 (Learn English with a Short Story)
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Hello listeners, welcome back to Luke's English Podcast. I hope you're doing well today. So, brand new episode, and there's a PDF for this one, by the way, which includes the script of the story that I'm going to read to you, plus some of my notes and other bits and pieces. You can download the PDF completely free. Just check the link that you'll find in the description of this episode in your podcast app of choice, or on YouTube if you are watching the video version.

You'll see a link in the description. You can just directly download the PDF from there. Okay. All right, then I'm actually going to start reading from the PDF right now. So let's do that. Here we go. Hello and welcome back to Luke's English podcast. This is episode 906 and it's one of those episodes where I tell you a short story and use it to help you learn English. It's nearly Halloween.

It's just the end of October, so this time I've decided to tell you a creepy old story. This is The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, a classic short story of gothic horror fiction, first published in 1843.

And so, The Telltale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. Do you know this author? Have you ever read any of his work? Are you familiar with this particular story? Edgar Allan Poe is known for his dark, gothic writing style and for being one of the pioneers of modern horror, mystery and detective fiction. It's just my cup of tea and perfect for Halloween. So first I'll tell the story from start to finish, see if you can follow it all.

The story should be about 15 minutes long, I think. After I've told you the whole story, I'll summarise what happens in the story to make sure you've got it all, and I'll give some comments about what it all means. Then I'll go through the story again, line by line, and we'll explain a lot of the vocabulary, helping you to understand it all much more clearly. I'll also show which bits of English are old-fashioned, because...

As I said, this story was written in the middle of the 19th century. So I will highlight the things that are old fashioned and just generally explain bits of vocabulary. So learn English with a short story. The short story will be, I don't know, 15 to 20 minutes. And then the rest of the episode will be the learn English part. So it might be a short story, but long episode. We'll see.

Anyway, let's get started. Now, if you don't like psychological horror stories or scary stories in general, you might not like this. It might not be for you. Also, you might want to know in advance that there are one or two slightly graphic and violent moments in this story. So if you are squeamish, meaning if you don't like kind of disgusting things, if you're very sensitive to those sorts of things...

If you're squeamish or maybe if you're listening to this with children, please be cautious. OK, just before I start reading, here is one thing to consider as you listen. So one question. What do you think of the mental state of the person telling the story? And I don't mean me.

I mean, what do you think of the mental state of the narrator of this story, the person who wrote the story? You know what I mean? Right, so what do you think of the mental state of the person telling the story? Is he or she mad or quite sane? How would you describe the mental state of the person narrating this story? Okay, so let's get started. This is the Telltale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, and this is where I have to do some acting now.

I'm going to have to try and act my way through this. Okay? Ready? Sitting comfortably? Yes? Let's begin. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. True, nervous, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am. But why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.

I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken and observe how healthily, how calmly I can tell you the whole story. It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain, but once conceived it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none.

I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He'd never given me insult. For his gold, I had no desire. I think it was his eye. Yes, it was this. One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture. A pale blue eye with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me...

My blood ran cold, and so, by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind to take the life of the old man and thus rid myself of the eye forever. Now, this is the point. You fancy me mad. Mad men know nothing, but you should have seen me.

you should have seen how wisely i proceeded with what caution with what foresight with what dissimulation i went to work i was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before i killed him and every night about midnight i turned the latch of his door and opened it oh so gently

And then, when I'd made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed so that no light shone out. And then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in. I moved it slowly, very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep.

It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening, so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha! Would a madman have been so wise as this? And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously, oh, so cautiously, cautiously, for the hinges creaked.

I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye, and this I did for seven long nights, every night just at midnight. But I found the eye always closed, and so it was impossible to do the work, for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his evil eye. And every morning, when the day broke,

"'I went boldly into the chamber and spoke courageously to him, "'calling him by name in a hearty tone, "'and inquiring how he'd passed the night. "'So, you see, he would have been a very profound old man indeed, "'to suspect that every night, just at twelve, "'I looked in upon him while he slept. "'Upon the eighth night, "'I was more than usually cautious in opening the door. "'A watch's minute hand moves more quickly than did mine.'

Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers, of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph to think that there I was opening the door little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly chuckled at the idea, and perhaps he heard me, for he moved on the bed suddenly, as if startled.

Now, you may think that I drew back, but no. His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness, for the shutters were close fastened through fear of robbers, and so I knew that he could not see the opening of the door, and I kept pushing it on steadily, steadily. I had my head in and was about to open the lantern,

when my thumb slipped upon the tin fastening and the old man sprang up in his bed, crying out, "'Who's there?' I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed, listening, just as I have done night after night, hearkening to the death-watches in the wall."

Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief. Oh no, it was the low, stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight...

when all the world slept it has welled up from my own bosom deepening with its dreadful echo the terrors that distracted me i say i knew it well i knew what the old man felt and pitied him although i chuckled at heart i knew that he'd been lying awake ever since the first slight noise when he'd turned in his bed his fears had been ever since growing upon him

He'd been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He'd been saying to himself, Oh, it is nothing but the wind in the chimney. It's only a mouse crossing the floor. Or it is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp.

Yes, he's been trying to comfort himself with all these suppositions, but he'd found all in vain, all in vain because death in approaching him 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. When I had waited a long time, very patiently, without hearing him lie down, I resolved to open a little, a very, very little crevice in the lantern. So I opened it,

You cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily, until, at length, a single dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot out from the crevice and fell upon the vulture eye. It was open.

wide wide open and i grew furious as i gazed upon it i saw it with perfect distinctness all a dull blue with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones but i could see nothing else of the old man's face or person for i had directed the ray as if by instinct precisely upon the damned spot

And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses? Now I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.

But even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed. I held the lantern motionless. I tried how steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eye. Meantime, the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker and louder and louder every instant.

"'The old man's terror must have been extreme. "'It grew louder, I say, louder every moment. "'Do you mark me well? "'I have told you that I am nervous, and so I am. "'And now, at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, "'so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror. "'Yet for some minutes longer I refrained and stood still.'

But the beating grew louder, louder. I thought the heart must burst, and now a new anxiety seized me. The sound would be heard by a neighbour. The old man's hour had come. With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leapt into the room. He shrieked once, once only. In an instant, I dragged him to the floor and pulled the heavy bed over him.

I then smiled gaily to find the deed so far done. But for many minutes the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not vex me. It would not be heard through the wall. At length it ceased. The old man was dead. I removed the bed and examined the corpse. Yes, he was stone, stone dead.

I placed my hand upon the heart and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation. He was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more. If you still think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all, I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.

I then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber and deposited all between the scantlings. I then replaced the board so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye, not even his, could have detected anything wrong. There was nothing to wash out, no stain of any kind, no blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught all. When I had made an end of these labours, it was four o'clock.

still dark as midnight as the bell sounded the hour there came a knocking at the street door i went down to open it with a light heart for what had i now to fear there entered three men who introduced themselves with perfect suavity as officers of the police

A shriek had been heard by a neighbour during the night. Suspicion of foul play had been aroused. Information had been lodged at the police office, and they, the officers, had been deputed to search the premises. I smiled, for what had I to fear? I bade the gentleman welcome. The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream. The old man, I mentioned, was absent in the country.'

I took my visitors all over the house. I bade them search, search well. I led them at length to his chamber. I showed them his treasures, secure, undisturbed.

In the enthusiasm of my confidence I brought chairs into the room, and desired them here to rest from their fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim. The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was singularly at ease.

They sat, and while I answered cheerily, they chatted of familiar things. But earlong I felt myself getting pale and wished them gone. My head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my ears. But still they sat and still chatted. The ringing became more distinct. It continued and became more distinct.

I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling, but it continued and gained definitiveness until at length I found that the noise was not within my ears. No doubt I now grew very pale, but I talked more fluently and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased, and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound, much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.

I gasped for breath, and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly, more vehemently, but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles in a high key and with violent gesticulations, but the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone?'

I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men, but the noise steadily increased. Oh God, what could I do? I foamed, I raved, I swore. I swung the chair upon which I'd been sitting and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder, louder, louder.

and still the men chatted pleasantly and smiled was it possible they heard not almighty god no no they heard they suspected they knew they were making a mockery of my horror this i thought and this i think but anything was better than this agony anything was more tolerable than this derision

I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer. I felt that I must scream or die. And now, again, hark, louder, louder, louder. Villains, I shrieked. Dissemble no more. I admit the deed. Tear up the planks. Here, here. It is the beating of his hideous heart. Acting on Luke's English Podcasts. Right, so that's the end of the story. How did you get on with that, everybody?

Did you manage to follow it? I understand it's quite old-fashioned in its style. It might not be completely clear what was going on, but I will explain everything, right? I'm going to explain every single detail, so you'll definitely understand this. Now, this is considered to be a classic short story. It's a very well-known short story that's been studied over the years. And Edgar Allan Poe is a very, very well-known and considered to be a very influential writer.

So what's this all about? Here are some comments about themes in the story. Well, actually, before I do that, I need to give a quick summary of the story. OK, so here's my summary of this story, The Telltale Heart. So basically, it's described by this person. And in literature, there's this concept of the unreliable narrator.

Okay, the unreliable narrator. This is a story that's narrated by someone from their point of view and they describe the things that happen. But as the reader, you kind of have to read between the lines and you don't entirely trust the account that's being given by this narrator. So the story is revealed to you.

in what the narrator is not saying or the fact that you know that the narrator is perhaps lying about some of the things or is not a truly reliable storyteller. And that is definitely the case here, that the person telling the story is trying to convince us that he's not mad, but clearly this person is quite disturbed and it's not quite clear why this person is disturbed, what it is that's

that's making them so paranoid, so anxious, so nervous and so homicidal. But it appears to be just complete sort of a form of madness. Right. So the storyteller describes how, first of all, I'm assuming this is a man. I don't know why. I mean, it could be a woman could easily be a woman. But let's just say for the sake of argument that this is a man telling the story.

So I'll be using, I'll just be saying he, him, you know, during the story, right? So he starts by trying to convince us that he's not mad, right? He's saying, I'm absolutely not mad. I just was sure I was feeling very nervous, but I wasn't mad. And he explains that madness seems to be...

His definition of madness is where your senses are not very clear or that your thoughts are not clear, like you don't know what you're doing or you don't have any clarity in your thoughts. He argues that he's completely sane, meaning not mad, not insane. He's sane because his thoughts were so clear and his senses were so acute, especially his sense of hearing. And he describes hearing all these different things as,

And at times during the story, he talks about hearing this heartbeat, which drives him quite mad. So anyway, he talks about this old man that he decides to kill. He decides to murder this old man, not because he hates the old man, not because the old man has said or done anything against him. And it's not because he wants to steal the old man's money.

and apparently the old man does have money. It's not for those reasons. It's because of the old man's eye. He's very disturbed by one of the eyes of the old man. And he says this eye looks like the eye of a vulture. So a vulture is a large bird, a sort of scary, frightening-looking bird. They fly very high in the sky. They're very large.

They fly really high in the sky and they look for dead animals. And when there's an animal that's on the ground that's died, the vultures come down and they've got these hooked beaks and these long, ugly necks. And they eat the flesh of the dead animals that are lying on the ground. So they're really ugly, disgusting birds, really quite horrible animals.

And he says that this old man's eye looks like the eye of a vulture. He describes the eye as being sort of pale blue with a film over it. So there's a cloudy, it has a kind of cloudy layer over it. I guess he's describing the fact that the old man has a cataract on his eye, which is a condition that happens in people's eyes when they get old. And it just means that the, I guess the lens of the eye becomes clouded.

So this old man's got this kind of cloudy, pale eye, which is disturbing this narrator. And that's his reason for deciding to kill the man, in order to get rid of this eye so it doesn't disturb him anymore. And he talks about how carefully and how cleverly he plans the deed. And essentially what he does is for seven nights he...

sneaks into the old man's room, he opens the door a little bit and he puts in a lantern which is covered. A lantern is a light and it's covered up and he opens the cover of the lamp a little bit and it sends out a ray of light onto the old man's face. And he does this very, very slowly so the old man doesn't notice.

But every time he shines the light on the old man's eye, the eye is closed. And so he can't bring himself to actually commit the murder. On the eighth night, he does it again very carefully, very slowly, sneaks his head and this lantern into the room in the darkness.

um and uh but he makes a noise while he's doing it and the old man sits up and he can't see anything because it's pitch black but the old man sits up and for an hour the the old man is sitting there uh wide awake um and the narrator stays completely motionless with the lantern closed and um basically he

and after a while he can't take it anymore he decided he decides to open the lantern and the light shines out onto the eye and the eye is open this time and so with the eye open the narrator decides this is his moment to actually do the deed to do the act and he leaps into the room in a sort of frenzy and i guess he smothers the the man to death he kind of

drags him onto the floor and shoves the bed on top of him. I suppose he kind of smothers him so that the old man can't breathe. He's maybe under the pillow, under the covers and can't breathe. And the narrator describes hearing this noise. That's the thing, actually.

While he's waiting for the old man to move or do something, he can hear, he says he can hear the sound of the old man's heart beating. It's this sort of what he describes as a low muffled sound, like the sound of a watch that's wrapped in cotton wool or something like that. He can hear this beating sound and it gets louder and faster.

And it's this beating heart that drives the narrator quite mad. And that's when he chooses to leap in and murder the old man. And even after the old man has died, he can still hear the heart beating. And eventually it stops. The old man is dead. And...

It's still the middle of the night, it's totally dark, and he decides to hide the body, and he chops up the body. He chops the head off, cuts the legs and arms off, and actually hides the bits of the body under the floorboards of the old man's room. So he opens up the wooden boards of the floor and puts these body parts into the floor and then closes the floor again.

And he does it without leaving any trace. There's no bloodstains anywhere. He does it all very carefully without leaving any evidence. And just as he's finished doing this, there's a knock at the door and it's the police because a neighbor heard the sound of the old man scream briefly just before he was murdered. And

And this person is called the police. And so the police turn up to investigate. And the narrator is quite happy to show them around because he's very proud of himself for having hidden any evidence of the crime. He shows the police around the place, shows them the money that the old man has that hasn't been stolen. He says the old man is out of the city. He's in the country for a few days. And he's so confident, he sets up a couple of chairs in the old man's room and he says,

And he sits on the very spot where the man's body is buried under the floorboards and they talk. But slowly, the narrator starts to lose his mind again. And he slowly starts getting bothered by this beating heart, this sound that

that only he can hear, no one else can hear it. So he's imagining this sound, the sound of this beating heart that gets louder and louder and louder, and it starts to drive him crazy. He starts kind of speaking very quickly and very loudly in front of the police officers, and he starts to get very, very agitated, and he's being driven crazy by this beating heart sound that they can't hear. And he's driven so mad, and he's made so anxious...

by it that eventually he confesses the crime he tells them that he did it and he he orders them to um you know tear up the planks and shows them the dismembered corpse of the old man okay what a lovely story um

Alright, so I'm going to go through the story line by line in a second so you can understand perhaps some of the words or phrases that you didn't get before. I'll do that now. I've got some comments about what the story means. That essentially it's all about madness. It is about guilt.

It's about the unreliable narrator, as I said. It's also about the nature of reality, the blurring of the distinction between the narrator's internal reality and the reality outside and the way these two things don't quite match up together. And it's, you know, really talking about what is it? How do we really know what's real and what's imagined?

what is a hallucination and what's reality. And, you know, this is psychological horror. So let's look at vocabulary then. And maybe I'll come back to those themes at the end. But really what we need to do is focus on understanding the story. So let's have a look at some vocabulary. And so let's read through the story again. And I'm going to clarify all the details line by line, especially certain items of vocabulary which are highlighted in

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So here are some things to consider. So what does the word or phrase mean? What does each highlighted word or phrase actually mean? How is it used in the story? And is this word or phrase still used today or is it old-fashioned? If it's not still used today, what modern equivalent would work? So we'll start with the title of the story, the telltale heart. So telltale in this case is an adjective. It's the... So...

Telltale heart. We would also say things like the telltale signs of something. For example, I don't know, what would it be? Like the telltale signs that your partner is cheating on you or the telltale signs that your children are smoking cigarettes, for example. These little signs that reveal the truth, little signs that kind of give away the truth, okay?

For example, telltale signs that your children are smoking. You know, maybe you can smell the smell or you get the sense they're hiding something in a drawer or they wash their hands every time they come in. You know, things like that. So these are telltale signs. In this case, the telltale heart, it's the heart which gives away the man's guilt. Okay. All right. So let's...

Let's begin. So true, nervous, very dreadfully nervous I had been. So I want to mention the word nervous and the word angry, okay? Yeah, so we've got the word nervous, we've got the word angry, we've also got the word stressed, okay? And I've noticed from being a teacher for many years that learners of English often get these words mixed up actually. So generally you feel nervous when

before you go to the dentist, you feel nervous before you have an exam, right? And you bite your fingernails, you know, you can't relax. That's nervous. Angry is when, I don't know, what's happened. Let's say you're trying to find a parking space. You've gone to Ikea,

to buy some furniture on a Saturday and you're in the Ikea car park, you're driving around and around trying to find a parking space. You find a parking space, but suddenly someone else zooms into the space and steals the space in front of you. You'd feel angry in that case, right? And then stressed. Stressed is if you're under a lot of pressure.

For example, you've got a lot of work to do, you've got a deadline to meet, or maybe you're late. You're late for a very important appointment and you're rushing through the train station. Oh God, that's stressed. Okay. So I just wanted to make a distinction between those things. You've also got pissed off as well, which is a slightly rude slang expression, which is similar to angry, frustrated, annoyed, pissed off.

God, I can't stand going to Ikea on a Saturday. God, it's just so crowded. That's annoyed or pissed off. Okay, but nervous is that feeling that you would have like anxious anxiety.

before you have an exam or before going to the dentist. So the narrator describes themselves as being nervous, dreadfully nervous. Dreadfully is like saying very nervous, but you can use dreadfully before some negative adjective and it really sort of emphasises it. So dreadfully boring, dreadfully ignorant,

So what disease is he talking about? I don't know. There's backstory, I suppose, but apparently this person had some kind of disease. What was it? I don't know.

There are certain little indications that tell us why this man has lost his mind. And it seems that maybe he has spent a lot of time on his own. Maybe he's been locked in his room, recovering from a disease, an illness, a sickness.

It's not clear, but it seems that this person has recently recovered from some sort of physical illness or maybe a mental illness. We don't know. But according to him, the disease sharpened his senses. So to sharpen your senses, if your senses are sharp and your senses are sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing,

So his senses had become very sharp. So he's very sensitive, very precise. So his ability to hear things had become very clear. His vision was very sharp. He could see things very clearly. He could hear things very clearly. The disease had sharpened his senses, not dulled them. So the opposite in this case of sharp is dull.

Sharp also is for, you know, things like a knife could be sharp, right? A knife or a pair of scissors could be very sharp, in which case it would cut things very easily. And the opposite of that is blunt. So, for example, a knife that doesn't cut is blunt. Or dull as well. You might say that a knife is dull. More common to say that it's blunt. But anyway, he's saying that this disease had made his...

Senses more sensitive not the opposite so it had sharpened the senses not dulled them Dull yeah, we also say dull and boring dull can also be a synonym of boring as well, right? Okay above all was the sense of hearing acute if something is acute It means it's again very sensitive very specific kind of very keen very sharp right synonym of those things and

So his sense of hearing was very acute. And the narrator believes that he's hearing all these things and his ability to hear has become so powerful. I mean, we believe that he's probably imagining a lot of it. A lot of these things will be hallucinations, right? I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth.

I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken and observe how healthily I can tell you the whole story. Hearken. This is an old-fashioned word. We don't use it anymore. It's basically a way of saying listen. Listen carefully. Hearken means listen. Listen to me. Listen and observe or...

see how healthily, how calmly I can tell you the whole story. So he says that he's going to tell us the story in a very healthy and calm way, but he doesn't. He becomes very agitated and quite animated while telling the story. So he's not healthy or calm at all. It's impossible to say how

First, the idea entered my brain. It's impossible to say how the idea first entered my brain is how I would say it these days. But once conceived, meaning once the idea had been initially created, right? It haunted me day and night. Haunted. Now, normally a ghost haunts something. It haunts a building.

meaning the ghost stays in the building and sort of, you know, scares people regularly. But an idea can haunt you as well, meaning it stays with you and is constantly in your mind and disturbing you. So he had the idea to murder the old man and the idea stayed in his head and sort of bothered and disturbed him. It haunted him day and night.

Objects, there was none, meaning there was no real thing that he wanted from doing it. Passion, there was none. So it wasn't that he's saying this was a completely cold and premeditated murder, which is not, I think, in his defense. Right. This is not in his defense. Normally in a murder trial in a courtroom, if someone is being tried for murder, they

And thinking about the crime in advance and planning it carefully in a sober and clear-minded way, this makes it worse for you. You spend more time in prison if you think about it very carefully, if you premeditate the murder. But anyway, he's saying there was no passion involved in it, meaning there was no strong sense of emotion. It was all coldly calculated. Yeah.

He said, I loved the old man. So there was no sense of like strong hatred or anything for this old man. He loved him. And the old man had never wronged me. He'd never wronged me. To wrong someone means to do something wrong against them, you know, like maybe stealing something from him or betraying him in some way. So the old man had never wronged me, never done anything wrong to me.

We still use the phrase, I suppose. It sounds a bit old-fashioned, but it's not completely unused today. He'd never given me insult. I would say he'd never insulted me. For his gold, I had no desire, meaning I didn't want any of his gold. And then I think it was his eye. Yes, it was this. One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture.

So one of his eyes looked like a vulture's eye. We talked about what a vulture is, one of those animals in the sort of the plains of Africa, I understand. They probably exist in lots of other places too. They fly very high in the sky. They soar in the sky, looking down upon the earth, looking for dead animals. And then they come down and eat the remains of the corpse of the dead animal.

Um, so one of his eyes looked like a vulture's eye, a pale blue eye with a film over it. A film in this case. Well, a film is like a thin layer, a thin layer. Um, I guess he's describing the cataract of this old man's eye. Um, so there was like a thin layer over the lens of like a kind of cloudy stuff. I don't know what.

but the eye was not completely clear. There was a layer of cloudy something over the eye. So a film, obviously we think of a film as like a movie, right? But the origin of the word film is from the actual film tape. Is it tape? You know, the film that would be used to project images

the movie onto a screen, right? The light is projected through the film. We used to put film in cameras.

It's a kind of long material that when light is applied to it, it leaves a trace. And that's how photographs and movies were originally made with film, like a thin sort of plasticky layer, not actually plastic. So that's film in terms of a movie. But a film is just like a thin layer, let's say. So the eye had a film over it.

Whenever it fell upon me, meaning whenever I looked at it, um,

Whenever it looked at me or, you know, whenever the eye pointed at me, whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold, which is quite a nice idiom. If your blood runs cold, it means you just get that feeling of like a horrible, uncomfortable, disgusting feeling. Like maybe when you think about something very scary and it makes you you get a shiver down your spine. Yeah.

My blood ran cold. It's like your blood runs cold through your body. And so by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind. By degrees means little by little, very gradually. I made up my mind or I decided. I mean, that's a common expression. I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, to take someone's life. Again, this is still a commonly used expression, meaning to kill, to take the life of the old man, to kill the old man.

And thus, meaning and so, in this way, rid myself of the I forever. I wouldn't put it like that these days. I think we would say to get rid of, to get rid of the I forever, right? So that it's no longer here. So it's gone. Now, this is the point. You fancy me mad. Now, fancy is quite an interesting word because I can think of three different meanings of it. Here, it's used as a verb.

So I'll talk about fancy as an adjective, and then I'll talk about two meanings of fancy as a verb. So let's start with fancy the adjective, which is not how it's used here. So fancy the adjective would be like, oh, this is a fancy restaurant. You know, that's a fancy car. I like that you're wearing a very fancy dress.

So that word fancy means kind of very nice looking, quite expensive looking, nicely decorated. So this is a very fancy restaurant, isn't it? I love really fancy hotel you're staying in. There will be an expensive hotel with, you know, decorated very richly. That's fancy. Or a fancy car would be like a nice, expensive or very interesting looking car.

And fancy clothes would be very nice looking clothes, maybe very shiny clothes that you might wear to a party or something like that. So that's one meaning of fancy as an adjective, but that's not how it's used here. Then we've got fancy as a verb. So we'll start with this meaning. You fancy me mad, don't you? So this is slightly probably the old-fashioned use of the word fancy. And in this case, it means you think that I am mad.

You believe that I'm mad. You reckon that I'm mad, don't you? Okay, you fancy me mad, meaning you think I'm mad. So that's old-fashioned. I wouldn't say that now. I would say you think I'm mad. You reckon I'm mad. So that's that. And then there's another use of the verb fancy, which means want, basically, or you want to have something. Like, oh, it's hot today. I really fancy an ice cream. Or I fancy, do you fancy a cup of tea?

Anyone fancy a pint? Meaning, does anyone want to have a pint of beer in the pub? Anyone fancy a pint? There's a pub round the corner. Does anyone want to have a pint of beer? Do you fancy a cup of tea? Would you like to have a cup of tea? Oh, I fancy an ice cream. I'd like to have an ice cream. So that's another meaning of fancy, and that's commonly used today. Do you fancy a cup of tea? Right, but this one is old-fashioned use of the word fancy, meaning believe or think. You fancy I'm mad. You fancy me mad.

Also, the grammar of that is quite old-fashioned as well. I would say, you think that I am mad or you think I'm mad. Mad men know nothing, but you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded, meaning how wisely, how cleverly I continued, how cleverly I acted. With what caution, so caution with what care when you're being very careful about

With what? Foresight. Foresight is like forward planning. When you see, when you kind of act very carefully because you're thinking in advance, planning in advance with foresight, do something with foresight.

with what dissimulation I went to work. This is a very old-fashioned word, very formal word that is very rarely used today. So you probably don't need to worry about it really, but it means it's like deception. It's where you're maybe lying or concealing the truth, doing something without people realising you're doing it, right? So with deception, with secrecy, let's say. Okay.

I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him, which is an interesting line from any story. I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him. So clearly he's trying to make the old man feel a false sense of security, right? Kind of being very kind to him so that the old man has no idea that he's actually plotting to kill him.

And every night about midnight, I turned the latch of his door. So the latch of the door is the thing that keeps the door closed. These days, you know, doors have door handles or door knobs and you turn the handle or turn the knob of the door. But some old buildings would have latches, which is like a little metal bar that sits on a hook and you kind of push the bar up

you unlatch the door. So the latch is the little metal bar that's on a hook. And to open the door, you lift the latch of the door to open it, to release it from the hook. So that's the latch. I turned the latch, turned something to lift the latch to open the door. I turned the latch of his door and opened it oh so gently. And then when I'd made an opening sufficient for my head, so sufficient, again, it's quite a formal word,

A more general word would be enough, E-N-O-U-G-H, enough. So if it's sufficient, it's enough. So when he'd opened the door enough for his head, so it was big enough for his head, he then put in a dark lantern. So as I said before, a lantern is like an old-fashioned light. It probably has a candle in it or maybe there's oil in it that burns.

He puts in a dark lantern. This is a lantern that's covered up. Okay, so it's actually dark. And if you open up one of the doors or one of the, I don't know what it would be, openings on the lantern, it can reveal light. So he put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed so that no light shone out. Shone is the past form of shine, of course. Shine, shone, shone. Yes, S-H-O-N-E, so that no light shone out.

And then I thrust in my head. So thrust in, move in kind of quickly, right? He moved his head in quickly. He thrust it in. So to thrust something is to move something quickly forwards. Okay. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in. So to be cunning is to be clever and kind of evil. We often say that a fox...

The animal, a fox, is cunning. So cunning is like careful in a very evil sort of way. He thrusts his head cunningly. I don't know how you actually thrust your head into a room cunningly, but you can imagine him kind of like... putting his head in the room with an evil look on his face.

I moved it slowly, very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening, so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. So he put the... It took him an hour to get his head into the room enough so that he could see the old man lying down on his bed.

And then he, you know, he says, ha, would a madman have been so wise as this? So again, there he is trying to prove that he's not mad by saying, look, look how clever and wise and careful I was. You know, I'm not mad. Look, look how careful, carefully I'm acting. He's like, don't know, mate. I think you're acting extremely in an extremely disturbed way. So his definition of, as I said before, his definition of madness is,

someone who can't think straight doesn't think clearly. But you can still be very premeditated in your actions and still be quite mad, I think. And then when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously. So he opened the lantern. Oh, so cautiously, for the hinges creaked. The hinges are the things that connect a door that swings open.

to whatever it's attached to. Normally the wall, right? So the door is attached to the wall by hinges and the hinges allow the door to swing open and closed. So those are the hinges. So he opened the lantern cautiously because the hinges creaked. Creaked means they made a noise like that. The door creaks on its hinges.

I undid it, meaning I opened it, just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye. Ray, R-A-Y, means a little beam of light, a ray of light.

A ray of light comes down from the sky through the clouds. A ray of light comes through the window. Or a ray of light comes from the lantern and fell upon the vulture eye. So it shone onto the vulture eye, this particular eye that disturbed the narrator so much. And this I did for seven long nights. So that structure, this I did, is old-fashioned literature.

And we would just say, and I did this for seven long nights, every night, just at midnight. But I found the eye always closed. And so it was impossible to do the work for it was not. So here for here for it was not the old man who vexed me. So this for means because normally for F.O.R. is used as a time expression, like for five minutes, for 10 hours, for three days, because

But here, 'for' means 'because'. We can get a few different words that mean 'because'. You've got, obviously, 'because', you've got 'for', you can have 'since' as well. 'Since' can mean 'because'. You know, 'I sat down since I was tired'. Or 'as' can also be 'because'. 'I sat down as I had been working so hard'. Yes. So, 'it was impossible to do the work'.

For it was not the old man who vexed me, but his evil eye. Vexed me means bothered me, disturbed me, annoyed me. Right. It's quite a nice word, although we don't use it that much these days. It would be bothered me, I suppose, would be the better one, would be the more modern one. But it's quite a nice word. So it wasn't the old man that bothered him, but it was his evil eye.

And every morning when the day broke, so daybreak or when the day breaks or when the day broke, this means when the day begun, when the sun came up. So daybreak is that moment when the sun comes up at dawn. Every morning when the day broke, so this is after the night has finished.

Every morning I went boldly into the chamber. So he walked confidently into the chamber, into the room, and spoke courageously to him. So he spoke to him confidently and boldly without any sort of shyness or without being reserved at all. He just walked into the room and spoke confidently to the old man, calling him by name in a hearty tone.

Good morning, William, or whatever his name would be, in a hearty tone. Hearty is kind of like strong and friendly and pleasant. Good morning, William. How are you this morning?

He spoke in a hearty tone. That's an old-fashioned word as well. We would say maybe friendly, warm, something like that these days. And inquiring how he'd passed the night. So that's formal and old-fashioned. Just asking would be how we'd put it today. So I just walked around.

confidently into the room, calling him by name in a friendly, warm tone and asking how he'd passed the night. Good morning, William. Did you sleep well? So you see, he would have been a very profound old man indeed to suspect that every night I looked in upon him while he slept. Profound, I suppose, in this case, meaning sort of very clever, very deep, deep and clever. He would have been very deep and clever to suspect me,

Right. To believe that something was going wrong. To suspect that every night, just at 12, I looked in upon him. Looked in upon him. The upon part of that is old fashioned. We would say looked in on him. To look in on someone is to like open the door, look in. You're right.

to check in on someone or look in on someone. Like, for example, if my daughter's doing her homework in her bedroom or she's supposed to be doing her homework, I might look in on her, just knock, knock, knock. Everything all right? How's her homework going? Yeah, it's okay. Good. Are you finished yet? I looked in on her. Here it's looked in upon him.

On the eighth night, I was more than usually cautious. There's that word cautious again, meaning careful in opening the door. A watch's minute hand moves more quickly than did mine. So a watch...

has several hands on it, right? Certainly the old-fashioned analogue watches, not the digital ones. But watches have hands. There's the hour hand, there's the minute hand, and the second hand. The second hand goes tick, tick, tick, tick, tick every second. And the minute hand...

moves very slowly. If you look at it carefully, you can see the minute hand very slowly moving as the time passes from one minute to the next. The hour hand moves even more slowly. But anyway, that's a watch's minute hand. It's the hand that moves round every minute, right? From one minute to the next, right?

So basically it moves very slowly. So a watch's minute hand moves more quickly than did mine. So he's saying that when he opened the door, his hand moved even more slowly than the minute hand of a watch. Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers.

So this is, you know, this structure, never before had I done something, is quite a formal sounding structure. We still use that kind of negative inversion today. And it's quite an emphatic structure, right? Never before had I seen such fantastic, such a fantastic football match.

It sounds old fashioned and quite formal. So I guess a more normal way of putting it would be, I'd never felt the extent of my own powers before that night. I'd never done something before. Here it's never before had I done something. Okay.

Um, all right. So never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers. So the extent of something we use this a lot these days to what extent and to an extent. So the extent of something is how much. Right. So if someone says, to what extent did you understand the text? It means how much did you understand it?

And I agree with you to an extent, but means I agree with you a little bit. Like I agree with part of what you said, but not completely. I agree with you to an extent, but blah, blah, blah. Right. So the extent or an extent means a certain amount or how much. OK. Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers, meaning never before that night had I felt how much, you know, my powers had developed. Right.

or I'd never felt the amount of my powers, of my sagacity. All right, I'll be honest, it's not a word that's, it's not a word I use. It's an old-fashioned formal word. Good judgment or understanding. Good judgment, understanding. Maybe we would say shrewd, shrewdness, s-h-r-

S-H-R-E-W-D-N-E-S-S, or the adjective shrewd, is a more common word. It means your careful judgment. Yeah. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. Slightly old-fashioned formal language again. I could hardly contain. Scarcely is the old-fashioned part there, and we would say hardly, meaning almost couldn't.

I could hardly contain my feelings of triumph. So he's opening the door going, yeah, I'm doing it. How brilliant I am. I'm so fantastic. And he's holding on to those feelings. Right. I could scarcely contain. I could hardly hold on to my feelings of triumph. So he wanted to go, yes. But he had to hold on to them. He had to contain them.

And he almost couldn't do it. To think that there I was opening the door little by little and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. Your deeds are the things you do, your actions. I fairly chuckled at the idea. So to chuckle is, again, still a common word. It means to laugh in a certain way. So that's to chuckle. So if you tell someone a joke, they might chuckle.

That's to chuckle. So we know laugh. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. That's to laugh. And to chuckle is to kind of go, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Hmm. It's kind of like a low, a low, small laugh. Right. And there's also giggle, which is hee, hee, hee, hee, hee. Like schoolgirls giggle is the sort of stereotype. And chuckle is ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

I chuckled at the idea. So he was so delighted that the old man had no idea what was going on that he was like, he chuckled at the idea and perhaps he heard me. So maybe the old man heard him for any, because he moved on the bed suddenly as if startled, startled means surprised by something. Now you may think that I drew back, meaning you may think that I moved back out of the room.

But no, his room was as black as pitch. It was pitch black. Still a phrase we use today. Pitch is like an oily, a black oily paint. And it's very, very dark black. So pitch black or as black as pitch means extremely black. Pitch black means very dark. So you can't see anything. His room was as black as pitch or as we would say today, pitch black with the thick darkness of

For the shutters were close fastened. Shutters are like doors on the outside of a window. You close the shutters at night to get total darkness in your room. Or maybe if there's a storm coming, you close the shutters and you can lock or fasten the shutters, maybe from the inside. Fasten them means lock them tight, right? So the shutters were close fastened through fear of robbers.

So the shutters on the window were totally closed and locked. So it was pitch black. And so I knew that he couldn't see the opening of the door and I kept pushing it on steadily, steadily. So he knows that the room is completely dark. And despite the fact the old man has apparently just woken up in bed because he heard something,

The narrator knows the room is pitch black, so he continues entering the room. I had my head in and was about to open the lantern when my thumb slipped on the tin fastening. So he's about to open the lantern and his thumb, that's like one of, it's not technically a finger, but it's one of the digits on your hand. You know, the most important one, the one that you use to play computer games and do plenty of other things. But you know, you know your thumb.

You know your own thumb. I hope you do anyway. Right, anyway, his thumb slipped on the tin fastening. So I guess this is like the little lock on the lantern. His thumb slipped on it and it made a noise and the old man sprang up. Sprang is the past form of the verb spring, meaning suddenly jump up. So, boing, the old man sprang up in the bed.

So he suddenly sat up in the bed, crying out, meaning shouting, who's there? Okay, the narrator continues, I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour, I did not move a muscle. It's quite a nice expression, to move or didn't move a muscle, meaning he didn't move at all. He stayed perfectly still. And in the meantime, I didn't hear him lie down. So during that hour, he didn't hear the old man lie down. So the old man was sitting up,

very intently. Meanwhile, the narrator is standing there completely motionless. He didn't move a muscle. The old man was still sitting up in the bed listening, just as I have done night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall. Now, this is an interesting line in the story. So he's saying that the old man was sitting up in the bed listening. And then he says, just as I have done night after night. So he refers to

It refers back to what he's done. So apparently there have been many nights when the narrator himself has sat up in bed listening, right? Harkening to the death watches in the wall. Harkening meaning listening. Now the death watches, this is interesting because he does talk about this noise that's been disturbing him.

He describes it as the noise of a watch going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, or maybe the beating of a heart, which he compares it to. The death watches in the wall, this actually refers to death watch beetles. These are insects that can live in walls and they make a sound. They make a tapping sound in the wall. So if you have an infestation of death watch beetles that live in the walls of old homes...

they can actually make this tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap sound. And I think there's old superstitions that say that if you hear the sound of the Death Watch beetle in the wall, that it's a sign that somebody is going to die. You know, there's like superstitions about them. But this is interesting because it suggests that maybe this narrator has been...

Driven mad by these repetitive sounds that have kept him up at night. He's been hearing these tapping sounds in the walls. So it's kind of revealing of the narrator's mental state that he's been hearing the sounds of these beetles making these noises in the walls and it's kept him up at night. And maybe it's been driving him insane or has contributed to it.

Presently, meaning just then, I heard a slight groan. A groan is a noise that a person would make, like... Like that. And I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. So the old man is terribly afraid, deeply disturbed and scared. So he's like... Something like that. And...

It was not a groan of pain. I suppose that's a groan of pain, isn't it? Something like that would be a groan of pain. Or a groan of grief. So grief is a feeling of deep sadness. Normally after someone you love has died, there's a groan of grief which would be like... How about my sound effect skills?

different groaning sounds. That would be a groan of grief. But no, it was the low stifled sound. So stifled means that it's kind of like if something is stifled, it means someone is trying to cover it so it doesn't make too much noise. The low stifled sound that arises, meaning that comes up from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. A-W-E. Awe is a sort of

feeling of amazement when faced with something profound. So in this case, maybe the old man suddenly realized that he was in danger, that there was mortal danger, that his life was in danger. And so that sense of awe, that sense of profound sort of profundity, that sense that like there was something really, really dangerous about to happen.

This groan just came out from him. And the narrator says, I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom.

To well up, meaning to come up. Now, a well is a hole in the ground where water comes up, like drinkable water. That's a well. So water wells up.

it means it comes up. And we actually say, I was welling up, meaning I was starting to cry. But in this case, it was a sound that has welled up from his own bosom, meaning his chest. So this is a sound that's come up from his own body.

deepening with its dreadful echo the terrors that distracted me so this narrator is a very disturbed person and he talks about the fact that he knows this this groaning sound because it's come from his you know he's made that sound himself in the middle of the night um

because of terrors that distracted him. So he's, you know, he's on one hand saying, I'm not mad, you know, I'm totally sane. And then on the other hand, he's saying, but I'm deeply disturbed by the sounds of these frightening sounds in the middle of the night and terrors which distract me or distracted me. So clearly this person is very disturbed because

terrors. They have like fearful thoughts and feelings in the middle of the night that cause him to make these groaning sounds. I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt and pitied him, meaning felt sorry for him. Although I chuckled at heart.

So on one hand, he feels sorry for the old man. But on the other hand, he's again laughing because he knows how clever he is.

I chuckled at heart. I knew that he'd been lying awake ever since the first slight noise when he turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. So he's kind of delighted because he knows exactly how the old man is feeling and he's relishing this feeling of being in control of this old man, this poor old man. He'd been trying to fancy them causeless. So his fears, the old man had been

there in the bed with his fears growing. And the old man had been trying to consider them to be causeless, meaning that there was no reason, no cause for him to have those fears, those worries or doubts. He'd been in bed going, oh, no, no, no, it's fine. I'm sure it's nothing. So he'd been trying to fancy his fears causeless. Oh, I'm not scared of anything. It's not real.

But he couldn't. So he'd been struggling to come to terms with his fear. He'd been saying to himself, it's nothing but the wind in the chimney. So the wind in the chimney, the chimney is what is the long thing that connects the fireplace window.

all the way up to the roof so that the smoke from the fire goes up the chimney and out of the top of the chimney into the air. So the wind in the chimney, as you might know, on a windy day, you get the sound of sounds in the chimney. So he's saying to himself, oh, it's nothing but the wind in the chimney, or it's only a mouse crossing the floor. So you might hear a kind of like a quick kind of

little sound or something which could be, he might think, oh, it's just a mouse crossing the floor or it's merely a cricket. Merely meaning only, just. Just a cricket, which is like a little insect that might make a noise in the middle of the night. They normally make that, right? So maybe, oh, it was just a cricket, just merely a cricket which has made a single chirp. So a chirp is a sound like an insect or a little bird would make, like a...

So it's just a cricket that made a single chirp, like a little noise from a cricket. It's just nothing. Yes, he's been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions. Suppositions are things that you suppose. Well, I suppose it was just a little cricket or maybe a mouse or the wind in the chimney. These are suppositions. But he'd found all in vain, meaning pointless, useless. They didn't work.

That's quite old-fashioned language. If you do something in vain, you do it and it doesn't work. It was pointless to do it because it didn't work. All in vain. And this is pretty dark, what he says now. He says, because death in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him. So as death...

while approaching him, while going towards the old man, had stalked, meaning sort of walked very carefully like a hunter, slowly stalking the animal it wants to kill. So death had stalked him with his black shadow before him. So death is approaching him and the shadow of death is in front of death and it's covering the old man.

and it's enveloped the victim, so covered him. Like an envelope, you put a letter in an envelope. In this case, the shadow has enveloped the victim, covered him, so that the victim doesn't know what's going on. He can't see what's happening. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel like this. The mournful, meaning the dreadful, sad, um,

dark feeling, right? This dark, depressing, sad influence of the unperceived shadow. So the shadow that covered him made him feel fearful and frightened and hopeless. And the shadow was unperceived, meaning the old man didn't realise that the shadow was there. He didn't notice it. He didn't perceive it, meaning see it or feel it.

It was unperceived. So this dark influence of this unnoticed shadow that caused him to feel, although he neither saw nor heard, to feel the presence of my head within the room.

So somehow it was the shadow of death that caused the old man to feel that the narrator was in the room, although he couldn't see or hear him. So the old man had this dark premonition and he knew something was going on. When I'd waited a long time, very patiently, without hearing him lie down, I resolved, meaning finally decided, to open a little door.

a very little crevice in the lantern. So he decided to open a little crevice, a little crack in the lantern, a tiny little, just open it a tiny little bit, so a little piece of light could come out. So I opened it. You cannot imagine how stealthily, if you do something stealthily, it means you do something secretly, like a ninja. You can't imagine how stealthily until at length, meaning until eventually,

A single dim ray, remember a ray is like a beam of light, a dim ray, not very bright, so dim is the opposite of bright. So a single dim ray, like a very small, not very bright shaft of light, like the thread of the spider.

Why is it the spider? I would say the thread of a spider. But I suppose it's the thread of the spider, meaning the spider as a species. Sometimes we use the with animals when we're talking about the species, like the cheetah is the fastest land animal.

The blue whale is the largest animal on earth. The African elephant is the largest land animal, you know? So we do use the before species of animals like that to refer to the whole species. So a single dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot out from the crevice, meaning came out of the crack in the lantern, and fell upon the vulture eye, landed on the vulture eye. And it was open, wide open, and

completely open and I grew furious so he became very angry as I gazed upon it as I as I looked at it that eye I saw it with perfect distinctness meaning perfect clarity so he saw the eye perfectly clear all a dull blue meaning a sort of not very clear blue colour with a hideous veil over it hideous meaning horrible disgusting

yuck, hideous veil, like a covering or layer. Normally a veil covers a person's face, like a woman when she's getting married. We had the word veil in the Sherlock Holmes story not too long ago. With a hideous veil over it, like a very ugly, disgusting sort of layer over the eye, that film that we talked about before, The Cataract.

that chilled the very marrow in my bones. Meaning it's made his bones feel deeply cold. The marrow is the soft part in the middle of the bones. So the bone marrow is the core of a bone. It's the soft stuff in the middle, right? So it made his bones feel cold to the very core.

But I could see nothing else of the old man's face or person, for I had directed the ray as if by instinct precisely upon the damned spot. So he couldn't see anything else. He could only see the eye. And it's almost by instinct that as he opened the lantern, the light went directly onto the eye and nowhere else. He sort of seemed to do it by instinct.

And now, have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses? So this, again, we've got the word acute or in this case, acuteness, the noun over-acuteness, meaning sensitivity, precision of the senses. So he's saying what you think is madness is in fact just very clear sense of vision and hearing, right?

So here's that sound that he hears, and we think it's a hallucination. He suddenly starts to hear this low, something like that.

He can hear this sound like a watch. So again, a watch that you used to tell the time, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. But as if the watch has been covered in cotton. So it might make a sort of sound, a sort of beating sound. I knew that sound well too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. So he believes at this moment that he can hear the old man's heart beating. But it's interesting that...

He's already mentioned the fact that he's been bothered in the past by these repetitive sounds. When he talked about the sounds of the Beatles in the wall, the Death Watch Beatles with their tapping sounds. And now we've got a similar sound that's bothering him again. But maybe he's hallucinating it. The sound of the old man's heart. It increased my fury. So his anger increased.

as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage. So as we know, like beating drums can stimulate a soldier, make soldiers in a battle feel more courageous. In the same way, the beating of the old man's heart suddenly made the narrator feel more courageous.

But even yet, meaning, but still, I refrained, meaning I held myself back. I scarcely breathed. Again, hardly breathed, I would say. So I hardly breathed. So he's like, hardly even breathing, just breathing a tiny amount. I held the lantern motionless, motionless meaning completely still. I tried how steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eye. So he tried his best to keep the light back

Perfectly steady on the eye. Meantime, the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. Is it use of the word tattoo that I'm not really familiar with? Because obviously normally a tattoo is something that people have on their skin, right? Like you get tattoos on your arm or on your legs or other parts of your body, right? You think of like David Beckham, he's got all those tattoos on.

But here he's talking about a tattoo as a sound. So I've never heard of the word tattoo being used to refer to a sound before, but that's what's happening here. Meantime, the hellish tattoo, meaning this horrible sound of the heart, increased. It grew quicker and quicker and louder and louder every instant. The old man's terror must have been extreme. It grew louder, I say, louder every moment. Do you mark me well? Meaning, are you listening carefully? Listening carefully.

I have told you that I am nervous, so I am. And now, at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, amid meaning in the middle of, in the middle of the dreadful silence, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror. So the narrator, the sound makes him like so terrified. Right?

Yet for some minutes longer I refrained, meaning I held back and stood still. But the beating grew louder, louder. I thought the heart must burst. So in his mind, this heart is beating louder and louder, like this. And he thought that the heart was going to burst like a balloon, pop, right?

He's getting more and more anxious. And now a new anxiety seized me, meaning a new anxiety grabbed him, held him. The sound would be heard by a neighbour. So he was concerned that maybe one of his neighbours would hear the sound of the beating heart. The old man's hour had come, meaning this was the old man's moment, meaning this was the moment he was going to die, with a loud yell. A yell is when you shout. Ah!

I threw open the lantern, opened the lantern completely and leapt into the room. So he jumped into the room. The old man shrieked once. To shriek is to scream like that. He shrieked once, once only. In an instant, I dragged him to the floor. So he pulls the old man out of the bed onto the floor and pulled the heavy bed over him.

So I suppose he's, he pulls the man onto the floor and then he pulls the bed on top of the man. And I suppose he's at this point, he smothers him or something. I then smiled gaily. So this again is the old fashioned use of the word gay, meaning happy, carefree and happy. Uh, in the adverb form here, I smiled gaily. Ah,

to find the deed so far done. The deed meaning the action that he did. So he then smiles in relief when he realises that he's done it. But for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound so he can still hear the sound of the heart with a muffled sound. So it's not completely clear. So if something's muffled, it's like,

If I say, hello, how are you? And then I say the same thing muffled. Hello, how are you? Right. I muffled my voice by putting something over my mouth. It's like when you're trying to speak when you've got a mask on. So I can't hear you. Your voice is muffled by that mask.

Like, I can't take off the mask, I've got COVID-19. What? Sorry, you're going to have to take off the mask. No, I'm saying I can't take off the mask, I've got COVID-19. Look, it's all right, just take off the mask and just, it's fine. Okay, look, I can't take off the mask, I've got COVID-19. Oh, sorry, all right, put the mask back on then. Oh, okay. Anyway, muffled, so you can still hear the heart with a muffled sound. So...

This, however, did not vex me. I mean, it didn't bother me. It would not be heard through the wall. So he's not worried because the neighbour wouldn't be able to hear it. At length, meaning eventually, after a long time, it ceased. It stopped. The old man was dead. I removed the bed. So he removed the bed from the body and examined the corpse. The corpse is a dead body.

Yes, he was stone, stone dead. So stone dead is still an expression we use today, meaning completely dead. He was stone dead. I placed my hand upon the heart. So he placed his hand on the man's chest and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation. These days we would just say pulse, meaning the heart.

feeling of the heart beating there was no pulse normally if you know if someone has passed out or something you check their pulse put your fingers on their neck put your fingers on their wrist or something to check their pulse you can feel your pulse if you put your fingers on your neck right pulsation is what the the narrator says here he was stone dead his eye would trouble me no more

If you still think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. So precautions are things you do in order to prevent problems. You take precautions.

For example, if you're travelling to a foreign country, you might maybe have certain injections to protect yourself from diseases or, you know, you take out insurance. These are precautions that you take before you travel somewhere, right? In this case, it's the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body, to conceal the body, meaning to hide the body properly.

So he's saying, you won't think I'm mad when I tell you about the careful way that I hid the body. The night waned, meaning the night started to end, and I worked hastily. I worked quickly, but in silence. First of all, I dismembered the corpse, meaning he chopped it up. He chopped off the head and the arms and legs.

Then I took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber. So planks are wooden boards. We use planks to, you know, the floor of your bedroom if you've got a wooden floor.

hammered down with nails. We describe those pieces of wood as planks, like a plank of wood, a long, flat, thin piece of wood is a plank of wood. So he removed, he took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, the chamber being the room, and deposited, meaning put in,

uh all meaning all the parts of the body between the scantlings scantlings are just pieces of wood that go across the floor and the planks of wood are then laid on top of them

So basically he's saying, I removed three planks from the floor of the room and put all the bits of the body in there and then replaced the board so cleverly, so cunningly that no human eye, not even his, so referring again to the old man's eye, could have detected anything wrong.

right? There was nothing to wash out, no stain of any kind. So no stain, no blood stain. A stain is when, for example, if you spill coffee on your t-shirt, you might have a brown stain. If you spill blood, if you're chopping up a man's body, blood might come out and land on your shirt or something, and then you'd have a blood stain on your shirt, which is not going to look very good, is it? But apparently there was no stain, no blood spot,

I'd been too wary, meaning too careful, too cautious for that. A tub had caught all, so he did it in a bathtub. It's like something out of Breaking Bad.

When I had made an end of these labours, meaning when I'd finished the work, it was four o'clock in the morning, still dark as midnight. As the bell sounded the hour, so this is clang, clang, clang, clang, the bell sounded the hour, four o'clock. There came a knocking at the street door. Knock, knock, knock, knock. I went down to open it with a light heart. So he feels light-hearted. La-da-da-da-da-da.

Who could this be calling on me at four in the morning? Yes, good morning. How can I help you? So he goes down with a light heart. For what had I now to fear? What could he be afraid of now? Everything was perfectly taken care of. There entered three men. So three men entered who introduced themselves with perfect suavity. So if you're suave, this is an old fashioned word. Suave is suave.

fairly, fairly commonly used. But if you're suave, it means you're kind of relaxed and charming, a bit like James Bond. The name's Bond, James Bond. I'll have a vodka, I'll have a vodka martini, shaken, not stirred. Very suave. My name's James Bond, played by Roger Moore, or maybe Sean Connery. Very suave.

I'm extremely schwaaf. I can't actually say the word, but I am the word. Does that make sense? Hello. So the officers introduced them. Hello, we are the police officers from the local police station. We were just wondering if we might be able to search the building. We'd had reports of a very sinister sounding shriek. And, you know, to be honest, your neighbours have told us that you're extremely shwaaf.

strange man and probably a bit murdery sort of guy who might murder an old man for no particular reason and then chop up his corpse and think that it's all normal so if you wouldn't mind we'd like to search your home would that be okay so they introduce themselves with perfect suavity as officers of the police

A shriek had been heard, a scream had been heard by a neighbour during the night. Suspicion of foul play. Suspicion meaning people suspected that something had happened. I think that maybe someone has been attacked. It sounded like the old man has been attacked in his room. Foul play is still a word or phrase that we use today. You read it in the news. Foul play means evil.

um more or less murder so you know when someone is found dead you know like uh actor john john stevenson was found dead in his home a police have investigated it and do not suspect foul play so foul play in this case means criminal activity like murder

Suspicion of foul play had been aroused. So people were like, hmm, did you hear that? It sounds like he's been attacked. I think we better call the police. Information had been lodged at the police office. Quite formal language. Again, information had been given, formally given to the police. A report had been made. And they, the officers, had been deputed. So they'd basically been sent there.

given the authority to come and search the premises. So deputed, again, is a very specific word that I've never really heard used before. But you imagine it's like a deputy. You've got the sheriff,

of the police, and then the deputies. Deputies would be people who are given authority by the person in charge. So they've basically been given, they've been delegated the job of coming to search the premises. This is a word that we still use a lot today, meaning the building. So the premises is always the building, basically. "'I smiled, for what had I to fear? "'I bade the gentleman welcome.'"

I bid you welcome. Of course you can come in. So this is old fashioned language to bid someone welcome, bid someone farewell. Bade is the past form. It just means to say like a formal welcome or a formal goodbye. Bid someone welcome, bid someone goodnight, bid someone goodbye. But we don't really use it anymore. The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream. So he said that he he screamed in a dream.

The old man I mentioned was absent in the country. So he was away in the countryside. I took my visitors all over the house. I bade them search, meaning offered them. It basically said they could search and search. Well, please go ahead and search. I led them.

So he's the leader. He's leading them. So I led them at length to his chamber. Eventually, I took them to his room. I showed them his treasures. Look, here's all his gold. It's perfectly secure. It's undisturbed. No one's tried to steal it. In the enthusiasm of my

confidence, I brought chairs into the room. Here, let me get some chairs. Let's have a sit down. And desired them here to rest from their fatigues. You must be very tired. Let me allow you to sit down. I'll just, hold on, I'll get some chairs. Meanwhile, the police are probably going, what do you think? He's very suspicious, isn't he? Don't you think? Let's just wait a while and talk to him and see what he's got to say. Please, officers. Yes, of course. Sit down. Sit down. Why not? Let's sit here in the old man's room.

while I myself in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph. So he's feeling so audacious, so confident and strident, right? In the wild audacity of his perfect triumph, audacity, bravery, confidence, maybe overconfidence of his perfect triumph. He's feeling so overconfident after his victory, right?

he placed his own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim. So he put the chair right on the spot where underneath it was where the body was reposed or was resting. Okay. The officers were satisfied. Apparently, my manner had convinced them. The officers, well, okay, there seems to be nothing out of the ordinary here. Thanks very much for your help.

And the man, the narrator said, I was singularly at ease. Singularly meaning in a unique way. So he felt very, very comfortable and confident. Well, yes, of course, if there's anything else I can do to help, then don't hesitate to ask. But I have no idea what's been going on. I was singularly at ease, so particularly comfortable feeling. They sat and while I answered cheerily, they chatted a familiar thing. So they started making small talk.

Oh, the weather's been a bit cold recently, hasn't it? Well, I hope you're able to keep warm in this house. Tell you what, our fireplace, we need to get the chimney cleaned. It's a bit of a nightmare. Do you know any good chimney sweeps? You know, but ear long, meaning after a long time, I felt myself getting pale and wished them gone. So as the officers were talking, the narrator starts to feel, he starts to feel pale in his face and he wants them to go. My head ached.

He starts to get a headache. And I fancied a ringing in my ears. There's that word fancied again in the old fashioned sense, meaning he thought that he had a ringing in his ears, a ringing in your ears, like a ringing sound. But still they sat and chatted. The ringing became more distinct. It continued and became more distinct. I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling. So he starts talking to try and get rid of this ringing in his ears.

Oh, yes, the weather's been awfully, awfully cold recently. But, you know, if you wrap up warm, it's not so bad. You know, he tried to get rid of the feeling by talking more. But it continued and gained definitiveness, meaning gained clarity.

So the ringing gets louder and clearer until at length I found that the noise was not within my ears. So he suddenly believes that the noise that he can hear is actually coming from outside. It's not just in his ears. He's convinced that there's a ringing sound in the room. No doubt I now grew very pale, meaning very like the colour had gone out of his skin.

but I talked more fluently and with a heightened voice. So his voice is getting higher and he says he's talking more fluently, but clearly the guy is starting to ramble in probably quite a disturbed way. Yes, well, certainly, you know, what would it be like? I don't know. He's starting to sound very manic and disturbed. Yet the sound increased and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound.

Much such as a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. There again is that sound, this repetitive sound. First it's the...

Sound of the old man's heart, and then he refers back to the sound of the Beatles in the wall. And now this disturbing noise that he can hear is like this repeating sound. I gasped for breath, so he's like that. And yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly, more vehemently, with more passion, right?

But the noise steadily increased. I arose. So he stood up and argued about trifles. So he starts arguing about trivial things in a high key and with violent gesticulations. So he's kind of he's walking around and gesticulating with his hands and his voice is very high and loud and he's arguing about very unimportant things.

But the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor. So he walked. If you pace, it means you walk fast. So he's I paced the floor to and fro. So he's walking up and down with heavy strides, stepping heavily. A stride is like a long step. So he's like walking up and down in the room, ranting and raving and gesticulating because he's so bothered by this noise.

as if excited to fury by the observations of the men. So as these men are sitting back looking at him, he's getting more and more furious.

But the noise steadily increased. Oh God, what could I do? I foamed, meaning that the foam starts coming out of his mouth. You know, normally in your mouth you have saliva, but if you get very agitated or furious, it might start to form foam, which is like little bubbles, white bubbles that appear in the sides of his mouth.

So he's foaming at the mouth. I raved, meaning I spoke in a very, very sort of animated and agitated way. I raved, I swore, meaning he starts using rude language. I swung the chair upon which I'd been sitting. So he picks up the chair and starts swinging it around.

and grated it upon the board. So he's dragging it along the floorboards and swinging it in the air. But the noise arose overall and continually increased. This noise gets louder and louder and louder. And still the men chatted pleasantly and smiled. So as he's getting more and more agitated, the men are still very pleasant and chatting and smiling. And he starts to believe that they are tricking him

that they know what's going on and that they're pretending to be normal. And we still don't even know, actually, if the narrator is doing these things. Maybe he's just sitting in the chair quite normally talking about whatever, but in his mind he's so...

He's so insane that his perception is that he's ranting and raving and it's going to be incredibly obvious to these men what's going on and that he's so disturbed that it must be obvious. But maybe in reality, he's just sitting there. You know, we don't know.

Was it possible that they heard not? Meaning, was it possible that they didn't hear the sound? Almighty God, no, no, they heard. They suspected. They knew. So he's so paranoid now. He's certain that they know what's going on, that they can hear the sound. They were making a mockery of my horror, meaning they were mocking him. They were making a joke out of it by pretending not to notice. This I thought and this I think.

But anything was better than this agony. So agony is like very acute pain. Anything was more tolerable than this derision. So derision is like where people are making fun of you. And he felt like the two police officers were deriding him, making fun of him by sitting there pretending that everything was normal. Meanwhile, he's completely going out of his mind with this sound.

Anything was more tolerable than this. Tolerable meaning possible to tolerate. I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer. I mean, I just couldn't stand it. I couldn't bear it. Those hypocritical smiles. They're smiling, but they know the truth. They know that something's going on, but they're still smiling. So he sees them as hypocritical smiles.

I felt that I must scream or die and now again, hark, meaning listen, louder, louder, louder. So the sound that he can hear is getting louder. Villains, I shrieked. Villains are bad guys. Villains, dissemble no more. Dissemble meaning to hide your true feelings.

"Dissemble no more! I admit the deed!" Meaning, I admit it, I admit doing it, doing the deed, doing the action. "Tear up the planks!" Right, meaning rip up the planks or remove the floorboards. "Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!" Hideous meaning horrible, disgusting.

So he gets more and more crazy and he's convinced that the sound that he can hear is the beating of the old man's heart. So what is this sound? It's like it drives him mad. The guilt that he feels eventually reveals the truth.

And he gives himself away and is convinced that they understand, that they know, they can see the truth. And finally, he can't take it anymore. And he basically says, OK, pull up the floorboards. Look here. I did it. Look, here's the body. And can you hear the sound? It's the beating of his heart. So, yeah, there's no doubt at this point that the guy is completely insane.

So there you go. That's my explanation of the words that are in the story. Let me go back now, though, to just some of those comments about what this story actually means. Some of the themes of the story. OK, so first of all, we have the idea of madness. So the man spends a lot of time trying to convince us that he's not mad as if this is in question.

His main arguments for this are that he knew exactly what he was doing when he planned this murder and the fact that he felt his senses were incredibly sensitive. So these are reasons for him not being mad. However, his actions show that he is clearly insane. Firstly, his justification for the murder, the eye, which is not really a rational reason for killing someone, and then the manner in which he shows the police that he is guilty, hearing something that nobody else can hear.

It's about insanity and the fact that truly mad people don't know they are mad. The true insanity is believing you're rational and sane, but having no connection to the real world in which you are behaving in a very mad way, which is quite a disturbing thing that you might be completely insane, but not even know it, not even be aware of it. Guilt.

is a theme. The sound of the beating heart is often interpreted as a symbol of the narrator's guilty conscience. Even though the old man is dead, the narrator cannot escape the psychological weight of his crime. The heartbeat becomes a manifestation of his inner torment, growing louder until it drives him to confess. And then, as I said before, the unreliable narrator. The story is told in the first person,

and the narrator's account is full of contradictions. His insistence on his sanity, despite his obvious madness, highlights Poe's fascination with unreliable narrators who mislead or confuse readers about what is real. Which leads us to another theme of this story, which is the nature of reality.

By blurring the lines between the external world and the narrator's internal experiences, Poe questions what can truly be known as real. Is the heartbeat real or is it a hallucination?

The story plays with the tension between perception and reality. The Telltale Heart reflects Edgar Allan Poe's broader interest in psychological horror, delving into the darker corners of the human mind where guilt, fear and madness converge.

Now, I've mentioned this before, but here's a theory. Several times he mentions the sound of a low muffled beating, like a clock muffled by cotton. And once he mentions listening to the sound of Death Watch Beatles in the wall. Could the sound of the Beatles have driven him insane? And that's the sound of the Beatles, meaning the insects, not the band. I don't think he's been listening to Abbey Road over and over again until he's gone completely round the bend.

Right. Anyway, that's the end of this episode of Learn English with a Short Story, The Telltale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. How are you doing, listeners? Are you all right? I hope you haven't been driven completely round the bend by this episode. I hope you've enjoyed it and that it's been interesting to explore this classic, scary short story. What did you think? What did you think of it? Leave your comments in the comments section as usual.

What could we have as our code word? You can leave a hashtag what? I don't know. What should we have? Heart, heart. Let's say the word heart could be the word that you can try to include in your comments. Something like, you know, thanks for explaining the vocabulary. It'll really help me learn it all by heart. Something like that. Or I didn't have the heart to...

uh you know uh read uh scary stories like this before but thank you very much for introducing us to one in this episode i don't know something like that um so yeah i hope you're okay and you haven't become a skeleton with headphones on um i hope you enjoy this story i'll speak to you again in the next episode but for now it's just time to say goodbye bye bye bye bye bye

Thanks for listening to Luke's English Podcast.

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