The Horse in “Metzengerstein”: Roman Emblem and Poe’s Symbolic Imagination

This note argues that the horse in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Metzengerstein” derives not merely from Gothic convention but from ancient Roman funerary iconography. Drawing on *Pinakidia* 115, where Poe identifies the horse as a symbol of the soul’s passage to Elysium, it demonstrates that the tale’s central image functions as a psychopomp rather than a decorative Gothic motif. By reading the *Pinakidia* entry as a retrospective gloss on Poe’s earliest published tale, the article reveals the continuity of his symbolic imagination across fiction and notebooks. The horse thus emerges as Poe’s earliest sustained emblem of death and transmigration, anticipating the symbolic role later occupied by the raven.