"A Descent into the Maelström" is an 1841 short story by Edgar Allan Poe. In the tale, a man recounts how he survived a shipwreck and a whirlpool. It has been grouped with Poe's tales of ratiocination and also labeled an early form of science fiction.

A Norwegian fisherman tells a tourist how he was caught during a storm in a maelström three years earlier and how he survived his ordeal. The tourist is the story's narrator, and he speaks as a reporter who has met an interesting character while traveling in Norway. The story opens

Inspired by the Moskstraumen, it is couched as a story within a story, a tale told at the summit of a mountain climb. The story is told by an old man who reveals that he only appears old - "You suppose me a very old man," he says, "but I

The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.

Presents a selection of Poe's tales and poems with in-depth marginal notes elucidating his sources, obscure words and passages, and literary, biographical, and historical allusions.