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.
