HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!

All Souls' Night, 1917
by Hortense King Flexner

You heap the logs and try to fill
The little room with words and cheer,
But silent feet are on the hill,
Across the window veiled eyes peer.
The hosts of lovers, young in death,
Go seeking down the world to-night,
Remembering faces, warmth and breath—
And they shall seek till it is light.
Then let the white-flaked logs burn low,
Lest those who drift before the storm
See gladness on our hearth and know
There is no flame can make them warm.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!

Theme in Yellow
by Carl Sandburg
I spot the hills With yellow balls in autumn. I light the prairie cornfields Orange and tawny gold clusters And I am called pumpkins. On the last of October When dusk is fallen Children join hands And circle round me Singing ghost songs And love to the harvest moon; I am a jack-o'-lantern With terrible teeth And the children know I am fooling.

E. A. Poe Museum

                                               
I took a trip to see some family in Virginia not too long ago and just HAD to go to the nearby Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond. It was on my bucket list for a long time and now I can check it off!

 

There are so many amazing artifacts from his life on display and you truly get a sense of what his time spent in Richmond may have been like at the time. If you are ever in the Richmond area and are a Poe fan, you have to check it out. A great memorial to one of America's great horror legends. Here are just a couple of the pictures I took there.

 

books we love

A delightfully ghoulish array of specters and sorceresses, witches and ghosts, hags and apparitions haunt these pages–a literary parade of phantoms and shades to add to the revelry of All Hallow’s Eve.

From Homer to Horace, Pope to Poe, Randall Jarrell to James Merrill, Poems Bewitched and Haunted draws on three thousand years of poetic forays into the supernatural. Ovid conjures the witch Medea, Virgil channels Aeneas’s wife from the afterlife, Baudelaire lays bare the wiles of the incubus, and Emily Dickinson records two souls conversing in a crypt, in poems that call out to be read aloud, whether around the campfire or the Ouija board. From ballads and odes, to spells and chants, to dialogues and incantations, here is a veritable witches’ brew of poems from the spirit world.

books we love

Insolent and defiant, the Chants de Maldoror, by the self-styled Comte de Lautreamont (1846-70), depicts a sinister and sadistic world of unrestrained savagery and brutality. One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing, it follows the experiences of Maldoror, a master of disguises pursued by the police as the incarnation of evil, as he makes his way through a nightmarish realm of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and prostitutes, lunatics and strange children. Delirious, erotic, blasphemous and grandiose by turns, this hallucinatory novel captured the imagination of artists and writers as diverse as Modigliani, Verlaine, Andre Gide and Andre Breton; it was hailed by the twentieth-century Surrealist movement as a formative and revelatory masterpiece.

Although MALDOROR's most immediate pleasure is its naked nastiness - rape, murder, torture, blasphemy etc. - the truly unsettling nature of the book is its textual instability, the violence of its language, the horrible, concrete, surgical beauty of its images, the haunting effect of its descriptions, its foregrounding and destabilising of slowly compelling narrative, its clashing of tones, moods, viewpoints, narrators, targets, sympathies. French literature produces a lot of books like this, wherein a madman shouts the reader out of his complacency (e.g. Rimbaud, Corbiere, the Gide of FRUITS OF THE EARTH). This is better than most because its disgust is funny and a thrill.

The Hag

Robert Herrick (1648)

The Hag is astride,     This night for to ride; The Devill and shee together:     Through thick, and through thin,     Now out, and then in, Though ne’r so foule be the weather.     A Thorn or a Burr     She takes for a Spurre: With a lash of a Bramble she rides now,     Through Brakes and through Bryars,     O’re Ditches, and Mires, She followes the Spirit that guides now.     No Beast, for his food,     Dares now range the wood; But husht in his laire he lies lurking:     While mischiefs, by these,     On Land and on Seas, At noone of Night are working,     The storme will arise,     And trouble the skies; This night, and more for the wonder,     The ghost from the Tomb     Affrighted shall come, Cal’d out by the clap of the Thunder.