“Before I let him come between me and my heart’s desire, I will kill him”

Edgar Allan Poe’s threat against Randolph Ballinger becomes significant not only for its explicit intent, but because it returns as evidence after Ballinger is found dead. Spoken to Augustus Landor, the declaration binds a personal rivalry to the investigation and leaves Landor confronting the distance between a threat and what it might portend.

The Threat and Its Immediate Context

When Landor asks who Poe believes will lose his life, Poe names Ballinger and says, "Before I let him come between me and my heart's desire, I will kill him." He describes killing Ballinger as both pleasurable and, in his formulation, moral. The statement makes the conflict sound deliberate: Ballinger is framed as an obstacle to something Poe desires, and Poe presents violence as a choice he is prepared to make.

Landor takes Poe by the elbow and walks him gently up the slope toward the hotel. After a minute, he answers lightly, questioning whether Poe could take pleasure in killing. His response acknowledges the gravity of the declaration without treating Poe’s words as proof that he will act on them.

Recalled as Evidence

The threat returns when Captain Hitchcock recounts that Poe had told his dinner companions of his intention to kill Ballinger if they crossed swords again. Landor recognizes the statement as the same one he heard on the Plain, mentally repeating Poe’s words. What had been a private exchange is now part of a broader account of Poe’s enmity with Ballinger.

Hitchcock gives the threat new weight by placing it beside the timing of Ballinger’s death: this is the first time, he says, that a person Poe threatened has turned up dead within twenty-four hours. Landor tries to reduce the declaration to one of Poe’s characteristically foolish threats and asks whether Hitchcock can honestly believe Poe subdued Ballinger. The exchange leaves the question of what the threat proves unresolved, while making its timing difficult to dismiss.

Repetition and Dramatic Function

The expression changes force through repetition. In the first scene, Poe’s declaration is direct and alarming, but Landor answers with a measure of skepticism. Later, Landor recalls it in fragments as Hitchcock presents it as relevant to the death. The same words therefore move from a personal warning to a possible clue, without the threat alone establishing what happened to Ballinger.

Its central tension lies in the gap between saying and doing. Poe states an intention plainly; Hitchcock treats the statement and the short interval before Ballinger’s death as grounds for suspicion; Landor resists that inference. The phrase keeps the investigation focused on the difference between a threat that may be rhetorical and one that may anticipate action.