Poems that Go Bump in the Night
by and published in Edition Six of Pomegranate
This time about two weeks ago, I went to sleep with all the lights in the house on and most of the curtains open. My parents were away at a Christmas party Up North and couple of friends and I foolishly decided to watch “1408,” the film of a Stephen King short story. We are the kind of people everyone silently hates at the cinema – we scream most of way through, constantly try to second guess the plot, and habitually exclaim, “Oh stop the music! It’s the music that gets me! I really wouldn’t be scared at all without that jumpy music, and the jerky close-ups, and the blue tint on the film.”
As I lay awake that night debating whether it was worth risking going downstairs for a glass of water (it wasn’t), I started wondering – when was the last time a book scared me like that, and have I ever felt that way about a poem? The first part of my question was easy to answer. As children my sister and I were horror junkies and we weren’t allowed to stay up watching “the Exorcist” unless Mum was out. We cut our teeth on R L Stein’s Goosebumps, devoured the PointHorror section of the library and grew up with “Frankenstein,” “Dracula” and “The Turn of the Screw.”
The second part of my question, however, was tricky. Our idea of horror as a genre is, for a start, pretty recent. A lot of the first novels were gothic romances, like Ann Radcliffe’s “The Mysteries of Udolpho” and many later novels – “Jane Eyre,” for instance – contain passages or sections that could be classed as horror writing within a much larger portrayal of the human condition. According to Stephen King, author of “1408” (and many of my nightmares since that fateful evening two weeks ago), “Horror” has been created by booksellers as a way to organise shelf-space in the course his own writing career.
If “Horror” is a new thing, then we are certainly not in the habit of thinking about poetry under this tag. This is not because, as poetry-lovers, our critical faculties are developed beyond generic pigeonholing. Anthologies of love poems, war poems, poems about beasts, poems for weddings and even “Space Poems” all make the Amazon.co.uk poetry bestsellers lists and I am in strongly favour of this. Like George MacBeth, “I am on the side of those who tend to like poems about dogs because they like dogs rather than because they like poems.” But what if I like Horror? Where does that leave me?
The anthologies listed above all fit into popular ways of thinking about poetry and poetry readers that have developed over the years, regardless of any resemblance they actually bear to real life. As a result, Love Poetry links up with any number of stereotypes from forlorn shepherd to suicidal teenager; War Poetry fits with the tragic hero type, and is Poetry It’s Okay for Men to Like, whilst Animal Poems are suitable for sentimental cat lovers. We even recognise Space Poems as belonging to the categories “For Children” or “Whimsy.” Yet when I start looking for a Horror poem I feel uneasy, as though that’s not what you’re supposed to read a poem for. My argument is not that there is not a place for the thematic grouping that these anthologies offer us, but that the narrow range of themes impoverishes our thinking about what poetry is and what it is capable of. In short, I want more themes, and more genres.
Starting out on my quest for a truly terrifying poem, I quickly realise that Horror, however loosely defined, has had an important part to play in invigorating poetic writing and in establishing the value and prestige of poetry for a long time. In 1595 when Sidney writes his “Defence of Poesy,” he and his contemporaries – Samuel Daniel, Thomas Lodge, even Spenser – are on the back foot when it comes to the issue of writing poetry in the English language at all. An important part of Sidney’s defence is that, when it’s done properly, poetic writing “openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue.” This is fairly grisly stuff. Of course, he is recommending poetry for its ability to show the truth at the same time as evoking strong feeling, but it is the horrific idiom of the surgeon, of the anatomist that he chooses to describe this. It is the power of fear that this combination can bring about, like the mystery and terror of the tortured and mutilated human body, that characterises unsettling and memorable eloquence.
I would add that the “white knuckle” factor of the Horror genre enriches reading so that thought is not just our leisure but becomes a vital instinct, an urge which involves our senses and faculties in as many weird and wonderful ways as the oft-written-about sensations of love or grief. This experience has been described by none other than Stephen King again as not just reading with a book in your lap, but needing to hold on to the book so tight that your knuckles turn white. He is, however, a fiction writer with the luxury of hundreds of pages at his disposal and the much-honed novelistic traditions of suspense, prolonged psychological characterization and the weaving of motifs into a significant fabric, all of which poets, in general, will not use. The poet will generally have to deliver his or her sensation in a few short sharp bursts not spanning more than a few pages, usually less than that.
I soon become convinced that because of this I will be lucky to find any poem that comes close to the “1408” experience. Most poems that flirt with Horror generally fall foul of whimsy, are overly self-conscious and ironic, or seem slightly ridiculous. Examples of the first type abound on the Internet where a quick search for “horror poems” leads me to “The Twelve Days of Halloween,” to be sung to the tune of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Working on the grounds that Horror thrives in film, I look for a poem approximating at the horror movie in one of my favourite books, “the Faber Book of Movie Verse,” and stumble across the second type of un-Horror poem. I am sorely disappointed, not by the quality of verse, but by the quantity of Horror. Both Margaret Atwood in ÔWerewolf Movie’ and Howard Moss in ÔHorror Movie’ keep Horror distinctly at bay by their constant awareness of the artificiality of the genre on screen. In her poem, Atwood points out the disparities between the fantasies of “Men who imagine themselves covered with fur and sprouting/ fangs” and the way that animals actually behave, which she describes in scientific and realistic terms: they “couple and kill,” and eat for “protein.” Unlike the true Horror fan in me, she is not interested in the fantasy for the Horror of it, but wants to explain it, to rationalise it – the no-no of Horror. Meanwhile, Moss’s poem is very much about stereotypes of the Horror Movie; it even features characters named “Dr ClichŽ” and “Nurse Platitude.”
So are contemporary poets frightened of being scary? Given some of the more serious failed-attempts that have been made in the past, it wouldn’t be surprising if the answer were “yes.” Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” for instance, may once have been scary, but now seems weather-worn with its atmospheric yet somewhat predictable opening: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,/ Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore…” Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” does not quite terrify either, but is a poem that has captivated me since I first read it a long time ago. A great deal of this poem still haunts me, not least the unforgettable opening as the Mariner chooses the Wedding-guest at random and begins his tale in tandem with the wedding scenes. Furthermore, many of its most haunting aspects are specifically poetic. There is something enchanting and foreboding about the Sun that “was flecked with bars” by the skeleton ship’s ribs and the “restless gossameres” of the ship’s sails, that is inseparable from language, just as in the same “Water, water, every where,/ And all the boards did shrink;/ Water, water, every where,/ Nor any drop to drink” haunts, frustrates and chills specifically in the sinister incantatory form that it is given by the poem.
This last virtue is something that has interested me for a long time. A Romantic emphasis on themes of Love and Nature and the expectation that poetry should describe emotional outpourings, perpetuated especially by confessional poetry, can mean that, along with a useful proliferation of thematic groupings, many modes of writing that are not simply descriptive or indicative are overlooked in the sphere of the poem. Curses, incantations and spells are just the sort of language use that we do not often see partly because of this bias, and also perhaps because we tend to think of them as a type of writing that belongs to a land of make-believe. This I acknowledge – although I believe that the out-of-the-ordinary nature of this way of using language can work either as a huge advantage or a disadvantage. In observing the following two examples of Curse Poetry, I think it is worth bearing in mind the standard for invigorated, experimental writing that T S Eliot set in his essay “On the Metaphysical Poets.” That is, in order to play on a “refined sensibility” in a “complex and various” Modern Age, the poet must “force, dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”
My first example is the spell-casting scene of the three witches in “MacBeth.” This will be familiar to most people, who will no doubt fondly remember the witches adding “Eye of newt, and toe of frog” etcetera to the cauldron, as well as the refrain, “Double, double toil and trouble;/ Fire burn, and caldron bubble.” Although in perfomance, this scene has the potential to be scary, as it is in Roman Polanski’s 1971 film version of “MacBeth,” to me, this is not horrifying poetry. As writing it is theatrical and fun. It sits well and the list of ingredients fit easily; in no way does it play to a specifically refined sensibility, nor does it force language to work in new ways as swathes of Shakespeare’s other writing does. In this way, like much poetry that was originally intended to be scary, the white-knuckle factor has been susceptible to ageing. If the writing is good, as it is here, it remains credible as the writing of make-believe; if the writing is bad, as it is in many cases, the attempt to scare becomes laughable.
On the other hand, Edna St Vincent Millay, writing in the early twentieth century, pulls off a curse quite seriously in her poem named “The Curse”:
Oh, lay my ashes on the wind
That blows across the sea.
And I shall meet a fisherman
Out of Capri,
And he will say, seeing me,
“What a Strange Thing!
Like a fish’s scale or a
Butterfly’s wing.”
Oh, lay my ashes on the wind
That blows away the fog.
And I shall meet a farmer boy
Leaping through the bog,
And he will say, seeing me,
“What a Strange Thing!
Like a peat-ash or a
Butterfly’s wing.”
And I shall blow to YOUR house
And, sucked against the pane,
See you take your sewing up
And lay it down again.
And you will say, seeing me,
“What a strange thing!
Like a plum petal or a
Butterfly’s wing.”
And none at all will know me
That knew me well before.
But I will settle at the root
That climbs about your door,
And fishermen and farmers
May see me and forget,
But I’ll be a bitter berry
In your brewing yet.
There is an astonishing mix of conventional curse structures and feasible actions (the laying of her ashes on the wind, the absorption of her ashes into the matter of a berry), and the way that Millay equates the butterfly’s wing with the horrifying voyeuristic face of the dead at the window is leagues ahead of film special effects. Recently in his collection of aphorisms, “The Blind Eye,” Don Paterson asked, “What have the poets lost now they no longer have their mnemonics?” This poem by Millay, I believe, comes striking close to enacting the principle that Paterson sets out in his whimsical answer: “The respect they used to aggregate to themselves through the specific threat: Would you like me to put something in your head that you can’t get out again?”
Like the Jaws theme, or Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells from “The Exorcist,” is part of the secret of being scary sound effects, in a poem as well as in a film? I think back to one of the only other poems that has actually terrified me: Goethe’s ‘Erlkšnig.’ I can genuinely say I have had nightmares because of this poem, even when I read it in translation. When I later learned German I found it all the more terrifying in the original. The rhythm of the poem, like the horses’ hoofs; the frustration of the boy’s unheeded cries, contrasted with the lyrical stanzas full of flowers on the shore and golden cloth; the final breath of the boy on the race home and the jolt to a standstill at the end of the poem when the Erl King has finally snatched the child’s life: all of these are haunting, incantatory, and aggravate the sorest ulcers of human fear for life. All of this and not just sound effects contributes to the poem that goes bump in the night. In all fairness, it is much easier to achieve terror on screen than in verse – but in a poem, you can’t turn the sound off.
Laura Marsh
Laura Marsh is articles submissions editor. She was a Foyle Young Poet in 2005 and 2006, and was a runner-up in the Christopher Tower and a winner of the Rialto Young Poets competition both in 2007. She is currently in her third year at Oxford University, where she is reading English. She enjoys near-infallible lack of hand-eye coordination, Patrick Hamilton novels and very long walks in the countryside.