Gothic Poems: a Project
Rhys Hughes
The first poet I read with genuine enthusiasm was Edgar Allan Poe. I had read a little poetry before, enjoying most of what I had found, but Poe had the music I really wanted to hear in my head, sombre and yet energetic, and the imagery I truly wanted to see with my mind’s eye.
I was enthralled by his hypnotic rhythms and the way they drove along his mostly morbid flights of fancy. I found his lyricism remarkable, sublime, even addictive. But at first I supposed this wouldn’t be the case. I assumed he would be not much different from the other poets I had already chanced on: Tennyson, Southey, Longfellow. How wrong I was!
When I was fifteen years old, I was lucky enough to obtain a hefty volume of Poe’s short stories, and at the rear of this book many of his poems had been added as a bonus (I initially assumed that all his poems were included, but later I had to seek out ‘Tamerlane’ and ‘Israfel’ in other editions). This volume was soon destined to become the greatest treasure among all my books. It was more than a book: it was some sort of dark icon.
I had already read ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ in an anthology and knew it was likely I would become a devotee of Poe’s fiction, but I didn’t yet appreciate how remarkable his range was. He can be grotesque, yes, with a forceful emotional impact, but a significant percentage of his work has a purely cerebral basis (his detective tales, for instance) and our emotional response to this kind of fiction is cooler: it becomes the satisfaction of witnessing a puzzle neatly solved. Rather surprisingly, Poe also wrote weird comedies.
My mission therefore was to dive into the green tome. I read the stories first, for they were what I was especially interested in, and then I read his one novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and at last I broached the poems, not with a great deal of eagerness (it must be admitted) but because I already regarded myself as a Poe completist.
And so I felt compelled to read them. My doubts were soon quashed. The poems were heady and melodic, atmospheric, delirious and insistent, romantic in the old sense of the word, yet somehow also classical. They created their own darkness and glowed within it. My attitude to poetry abruptly changed. It had shown itself to be musical and magical.
My favourite Poe poem is probably ‘The Bells’ because of its frantic and irrepressible momentum. Once you begin reading it, the poem drags you away from yourself on a mad flight. It almost reads you. There are other poems that can be regarded as Poe’s masterpiece, and often are, but for me it will always be the extraordinary tumble and crash of this set of stanzas, a poem that accelerates until the reader feels it must surely be spiralling out of control. And yet control is maintained until the very last word.
Of course, there were many other highly melodic and rhythmic poets who rival Poe in both form and subject matter. Coleridge at his most imaginative is supreme. Shelley, Byron, Baudelaire, Dowson, Verlaine, Swinburne, Housman are profound, frequently diabolic, masterful. There are too many to mention. I have a strong affection for the unsettling jollity of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’. Oscar Wilde’s wonderful and deliberately arcane ‘The Sphinx’ seems at times to be almost a tribute to Poe.
Then there are the curious half-comic, half-grim ballads of The Ingoldsby Legends, possibly inspired by certain German writers of half a century earlier, Goethe, Tieck, Chamisso, Hoffmann, Novalis. The overtones and undercurrents in at least some of the work of all these writers can be regarded as gothic, if we consider how they push at the boundaries of the familiar and take the reader into a crepuscular world of elusive imagery.
The upshot of all this is that I have long wanted to write morbid, musical, frantic poems myself. I have finally embarked on a project to write a batch of proper old-fashioned creepy poems about ghosts, vampires, ghouls, banshees, demons, ruined castles, blasted crags, fathomless oceans, malignant moonlight, wanderers in the mountains, hobgoblins, apparitions, pagan gods, werewolves, indeed the gamut of the darkly fantastical. Here are the first four poems I have written along these lines. With luck, there will be others.
Rhys Hughes, March 2024
On the Crag
The ruined castle
on the blasted crag
resembles the shadow
of a whole handful
of broken fingers cast
on the wall of a torture chamber
by a guttering flame.
The full moon burns
with a languorous eye
a hole in those clouds
that swirl over the ridges
of the nameless high mountains
that undulate away
into death-destined days.
And now the heavy cold beams
that illuminate dreams
slant obliquely,
silent but not weakly,
through the narrow arrow slits
of the highest turrets.
But the wanderer stands,
adjacent and patient,
on another cold summit
lower than the eroded castle crag,
and madly he laughs
as finally he understands
the meaning of the ancient
wild promise
that has twisted
his mind since he was a child.
He raises his hand
in an unnatural salute,
each finger as hollow as a flute,
and holds it steady
in front of the crag,
hiding the castle like a monstrous
rag made from flesh.
The result is heady:
the root of his wonder is watered
by congruence,
a gift of perspective,
confirmation of the prophecy:
his hideous hand,
tormented, defective,
exactly matches the castle’s outline.
Now he knows
why he was driven here:
the malign edifice on the shelf
of atrocious rock
belongs to him,
a gift independent of bloodline,
given by fate itself.
The Hag
Her stumble along these cobbled streets
after the rumble
of the death-carts has receded
is pitiful, horrible,
yet our sympathies are muted,
for she is reputed
to be a most eager eater of boiled heads.
In rags she flutters like a serrated blade
that somehow
has cut itself into strips
that are light enough to be borne on air:
but fears are born
when she stares in our direction, minds
contract in self defence.
She is the hag of hags, unapproachable,
bellicose, infernal,
insane, nocturnal,
immortal but never youthful: demonic,
suppurating, eternal,
feverishly repellent, hellbent on eating
sweet savoury brains.
In the Forest
Lost in the forest
is Boris:
his ship, tempest-tossed,
was dashed
against the rocks of this
mysterious shore.
His poor crew perished
and he alone
survived, dragging himself
up the beach
beyond the grip of the tide.
And now he wishes to hide
from the ocean
among these trees, the leaves
that whisper
dryly, crisper than his unease.
He heaves himself over roots
thicker than masts
and everything he once knew
exists in the past:
he is lost, forever on his knees.
The raging seas were a maze
without any walls:
the forest is another maze and
one that can appal
even the stoutest mariner heart.
In a clearing he pauses to rest,
shadow-blessed,
while the dark magic of the isle
liquefies the man
in diabolic, alchemical style.
He feels his old body changing
in the undergrowth:
his bones, the timbers of a ship:
his ragged clothes,
fluttering sails, savagely ripped.
Lost in the forest
is Boris:
he has a hull and rudder now,
a deck that groans:
alone, he waits patiently
for other sailors to salvage him
where he lies.
He is a wreck
with porthole eyes,
a despised demise,
his unwise sighs full of dread,
alive but dead:
his own screaming figurehead.
The King
The throne of the king
is coloured with blood
instead of paint.
The king said: it is cheaper
to smear raw men’s gore
over the gold and iron chair
that lifts me above the floor
where the tears accumulate.
So the masses succumb
to the rule of a cruel fool,
one by dying one.
The king says: faint the paint
on my inherited seat’s frame,
I ought to accelerate the game
and turn more men into bones
pulled out of their flesh homes.
No one is left in the land
to stand before his gaze:
at last he is afraid.
The king says: it is bleaker
to pretend to rule emptiness
than it is to lose one’s head,
I must use a knife as a brush
to repaint my cold throne red.
Finally no throat remains
intact in a realm of groans,
not even his own.
