Due to debts from playing cards and a growing interest in wine, Poe begins to have difficulties.

Poe meets Virginia and they spend a day together, riding a horse and sitting "beside the glassy pool of romance."

He tells her a fairy tale, a raven perching on Poe's shoulder as he finishes the story, before they go on a walk together.

Poe, desperate for money, unsuccessfully attempts to sell some of his work to George Rex Graham.

Virginia, bothered by the cold winter weather, is kept warm by Poe's old coat from his time at West Point and from their pet black cat.

Hallucinating he begins climbing up a hill, and then resting on a rock that says wine, trying to move up past it he ends up perched on top of it before coming back to reality in his room.

Henry B. Walthall was granted the lead role as Edgar Allan Poe after previously playing the same author in D. W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience in 1914.