Gothic Poems for October

Rhys Hughes

Here are four more poems from my work in progress, 77 Gothic Poems, a series of sombre, morbid and ghostly lyrics inspired mainly by the melodic visions of Edgar Allan Poe and to a lesser extent by the German Romantics of the late 18th Century. These poems contrive to be gloomy in spirit, even sometimes ghastly, but I hope they are musical too and will evoke nostalgia in the reader. Nostalgia for what? Not for haunted castles, blasted valleys and subterranean chambers, or for goblins, imps and vampires, but for that curious feeling that welled up inside us when we were younger (and rather more impressionable) after reading stories of phantoms and demons for the very first time.

The Skylight

On his back on the sagging bed

the poet in poverty

feels in his head the weight of the night

outside the skylight.

There are no frights worse

than the curse of his circumstances

and his situation

was created by his procrastination.

His epic is unfinished.

He is

like a line in that incomplete work,

burning with fever,

twisting continually out of the true,

pulsating, overdue,

a former believer grown cynical, a

fool with blue flesh

in an elongated pool of cold sweat.

The skylight watches him calmly,

as if he is

nothing more than a fading stain,

as if it really is

what it seems to be:

an eye with a universe for a brain.

Glass Maiden

She is made of glass,

a transparent truth, and yet

she was not born that way,

nor one unlucky day

was she transformed by her

own desire to shine

like cold fire in the setting sun.

Slowly her limbs paled

for no clear reason

and her thinning flesh

revealed her bones,

the femurs seeming

like stone clubs abandoned

behind a mystic window that

looks into a distant past:

our prehistory.

She moans constantly

but there is very little

anyone can do

for her: she should be framed

and silvered,

turned into a mirror

of her times, hung on the wall.

An appalling outcome

but the only practical one

when the parts

reflect less than the sum.

The Duel

Hermann buttons his frock coat

on a chill morning

before the sun has risen. Down

the twisting stairs

he goes, tiptoeing from his attic

room. It is snowing

outside.

But

he is bold.

As he slides on the icy cobbles

he manages a thin

smile: his duty is vile but utterly

necessary.

For the sake of honour

and decency: such things matter.

One might die

beneath a worse sky than clouds

full of snow. Who

is to say that he shall be the one

to lose everything?

Blood, life, every pinch of pain

and strife?

Hermann knows how to wield

a blade: he is not afraid

of anything now:

but how might he explain these

doubts that consume

his brain?

He suspects that the duel will be

a stain (not on his name

but on his soul). And courage is

perilously close to vanity.

The gravity

of the situation burns

his nerves like a complex

fuse with many knots.

His soul, mangled:

ruined whether he wins or loses.

But how?

He passes beyond the city’s

crumbling walls

that once held enthralled

a superstitious

population: his elation is

tempered by his

temper:

Which is cold, a controlled mood,

sanguine, fatalistic

within reasonable limits.

But what limits are reasonable? A

sharp grin appears

on his lips, as thin as his blade. He

shall wade through

the blood of his opponent,

no doubt.

In a woodland the glade waits,

moon drenched,

the snow aglow,

icicles shining on the branches

of dead trees:

blunt blades like clubs of silent

hate, and Hermann’s

fate flying in haste to meet him

at long last.

His opponent, already there:

they stare at each other,

twin brothers.

Hermann confronts himself,

a mirror image,

and to break a mirror rouses

a curse. He sighs

but first he bows low. Token

courtesies, then

the impossible

battle begins.

Inevitable,

astounding, eternal:

an infernal nocturnal struggle,

and whoever wins

must also lose: Hermann rues

the day, all days,

that he came away unscathed

but broken.

The Goblet

The goblet

in the hands of the

twisted hobgoblin, gripped

tight, will be drained

in three notorious gulps

high above

the gulfs of black eternity.

The wine that is spilled

will slick his chin

and allow the sinful curses

to slide with

blasphemous ease from his

unglamorous mouth.

Drunken demon, he laughs

on the bridge

that arches the fathomless

depths of the abyss

in its tortured span: he can

afford to be blasé:

his death means nothing

to anyone anyway.

Expendable ghoul, subhuman

and subterranean fool.

But the goblet will endure for

many appalling years.

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