The Lamb and The Tyger by William Blake: Analysis and Commentary

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

 The Lamb

Little Lamb, who made thee?

         Dost thou know who made thee, 

Gave thee life & bid thee feed 

By the stream & o'er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight,

Softest clothing wooly bright;

Gave thee such a tender voice,

Making all the vales rejoice? 

         Little Lamb, who made thee?

         Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I'll tell thee;

         Little Lamb, I'll tell thee!

He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb: 

He is meek & he is mild, 

He became a little child: 

I a child & thou a lamb, 

We are called by his name.

         Little Lamb God bless thee. 

         Little Lamb God bless thee.

The Tyger

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies. 

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain, 

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp, 

Dare its deadly terrors clasp! 

When the stars threw down their spears 

And water'd heaven with their tears: 

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright, 

In the forests of the night: 

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

“The Tyger” is one of the poems from William Blake’s Songs of Experience. It contrasts with its antithetical companion piece, “The Lamb” in Songs of Innocence. To understand fully both “The Lamb” and “The Tyger,” they should be read side by side, because each is opposed in the images, symbolism, and theme that it conveys and, for this reason, deepens and enriches its opposite’s meanings, as suggested by the companion poem.

In “The Lamb,” the speaker of the poem is obviously a child. (The etching that the poet created as an illustration to accompany this poem also shows its speaker to be a child, a young boy). He speaks as a child, in a lilting, singsong fashion, repeating the same questions over and over. He sees the lamb as “little,” like himself, and identifies with the animal as a fellow creature rather than as a beast of a different species. He also personifies the lamb, addressing the animal as if it were a person:

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee. . . ?

The lamb’s Maker is the one, the child assumes, who has directed the lamb’s innocent, simple, pastoral life—an existence that involves mostly eating in a pleasant habitat, “by the stream & o'er the mead.”

The lamb’s Creator, the child says, made it a delightful creature, giving it both “softest clothing wooly bright” and “a tender voice” that causes “all the vales [to] rejoice.” The description of the lamb is that, almost, of a living, breathing plush animal. This is the lamb as seen through the eyes of the child, through the eyes of innocence.

On a deeper level, the lamb, for the child, symbolizes Jesus Christ, who became a “little child,” making it possible for the speaker of the poem to identify with the baby Jesus:

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,

Little Lamb I'll tell thee:

He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb:

He is meek & he is mild,

He became a little child:

I a child & thou a lamb,

We are called by his name.

The innocent lamb, “meek and mild,” like both the child and nature’s Creator, who both “calls himself a Lamb” and “became a little child,” allows the child to experience a oneness with both nature (the lamb) and God (Jesus Christ). The child is one with the universe. In blessing the lamb, therefore, he blesses himself, nature, and its Creator, all of whom, together in the lamb, are made one. Of course, Jesus is referred to not only as a lamb but also as a lion (“the lion of the tribe of Judah”), and the same person who said he came in peace also said that he would return in judgment. However, the child is unaware of these other aspects of the Creator, just as he seems unaware of the more predatory aspects of nature.

For this knowledge and understanding, the child must become an adult. The vision of innocence must expand to encompass the vision of experience.

In “The Tyger,” Blake provides a snapshot, as it were, of one of God’s fiercest predators. It is important to observe that Blake does not attribute the tiger to a natural origin apart from God, as if the animal appeared as a result of a mindless evolutionary process. 

Rather, the tiger, in all its ferocity, was “framed” by “hand” that “dared” to “seize the fire” in which the tiger’s fiery eye had burned among the “distant deep” of heaven’s stars. Likewise, a “shoulder” was employed in the “art” of twisting “the sinews” of the tiger’s heart.

The predator’s creator was present when the animal’s heart began to beat, and it was the tiger’s Creator who, as a smith, operated the “hammer” and the ‘chain” and the “anvil” that were used to “forge” the animal’s very brain. The tiger is clearly very much, by conscious design, the creation of God, who has given the beast its fierce and predatory nature as much as he has shaped the correspondingly “fearful symmetry” of the great cat’s body, which is “burning bright/In the forests of the night.” That the dark forest was chosen as this creature’s habitat is further evidence within the poem that the animal’s fierce nature was intentional from the beginning, as it is a fitting—perhaps the only-truly fitting—environment for such a fearful beast.

What does the tiger’s “fearful symmetry” suggest about its creator? “Did he smile his work to see?” the speaker of the poem wonders, adding, “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” The Judeo-Christian concept of God is that he is almighty, yes, but also a loving and good God. The mighty tiger’s form and nature seem to cast doubt upon the notion that God is benevolent, kind, and loving. Alternatively, it at least challenges readers to remember that divine ways and human ways are not the same and that there is a complexity to God that is beyond human reckoning, for God did also create the lamb. As nature itself demonstrates, God is obviously the author of polarities, of opposites, and, perhaps, at least as viewed from the human perspective, of contraries which, as Blake insists elsewhere, are necessary to progress.

“The Tyger” ends as it began, with the same questions as those with which it began, as if the existence of the fierce, predatory tiger suggest truths about its Creator that are too terrible for the speaker of the poem to accept. Doubts rise, but they seem to be repressed. Insight does not become knowledge; it is merely the catalyst for more and more doubt and fear. Perhaps it is best to ask the same questions again and again than to accept the answers that seem to arise.

Which is the true representation of God, the “meek and mild” Creator who made the lamb or the conscious artisan who crafted the fierce and predatory tiger? Neither is complete or, by itself, an accurate depiction of God, for God is not what he appears to human beings, either as they envision him through childhood’s innocence or adulthood’s experience. He is, instead, both/and and neither/nor. However, the recognition of such complexity, which arises from the mental, emotional, and spiritual shock, of an awareness of the conflicting polarities, or contraries, within one’s own view of nature and God, may be the beginning of a wisdom that knows, at least, what God is not.

By accepting these antitheses, the opposites themselves are not reconciled, but the whole idea that they must be reconciled is transcended in the acceptance of a transcendent God who is beyond innocence and experience and beyond all other polarities that mark the boundaries of human understanding. Thus, contraries make progress in understanding oneself, one’s world, and one’s place in one’s world possible.

All's Well That Ends Well

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Horror writers with longstanding records as bestselling authors are not exempt from writing novels with unsatisfying endings. When the novelist is Stephen King, whose novels typically run as many as eight hundred pages (sometimes more), an unsatisfying ending is more than annoying; it's horrible.

Many of King's novels do end poorly, as It, Under the Dome, Revival, and many others attest. After reading hundreds of pages in which reality seems fairly real (other than the presence of the centuries-old, shape-shifting “It”), only to discover that the universe isn't a product of the Big Bang, as astronomers apparently mistakenly believe, but that it resulted from a gigantic turtle's need to vomit—well, readers are apt to think the effect is anything but agreeable. In fact, readers might think they'll be sick enough themselves to vomit a universe of their own. Likewise, the ending of Under the Dome is beyond frustrating. After plodding through hundreds of pages (many of which are devoted to King's Democratic progressivism and his obsessive hatred of Republicans and of President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in particular), readers discover that the invisible and impenetrable dome that cuts off Chester's Mill, Maine, is the result of a gigantic, mischievous female adolescent alien who placed an inverted dome over the town, much as a mischievous Earthling might invert a bowl over an anthill. Consequently, readers are likely to work out until they've acquired sufficient strength to rip this ridiculous novel page from page. While writing Desperation, King seemed to find nothing amiss with the views of Christian fundamentalists. He even sought out one of them, a pastor, as his adviser. But, as The Regulators, the companion novel to Desperation, indicates, King likes to turn the tables on himself. He does just this in Revival. He'd had no problem with the beliefs and teachings of Christian fundamentalists when he wrote Desperation, but, while writing Revival, he said he couldn't stomach the Christian fundamentalists' idea of hell, as it's described in the Bible. He doesn't cite chapter and verse, but here are a few passages, from the King James Version of the Bible, concerning hell, that most Christian fundamentalists would probably accept:

For a fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell, and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains (Deuteronomy 32:22).

The sorrows of hell compassed me about . . . (Samuel 22:6).

Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit (Isaiah 14:15).

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell (Mathew 5:29).

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell (Matthew 10:28).

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18).

Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? (Matthew 23:33).

And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched (Mark 9:23).

And in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torments . . . (Luke 16:23).

For . . . God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment . . . (2 Peter 2:4).

According to these verses, hell, an expression of divine wrath, is a locked pit below the earth. Made of several layers, it's a place of eternal darkness and everlasting fire, in which the damned, who are cast therein bodily, are beset by sorrows and live in constant torment (although both body and soul can be destroyed in hell). It's occupied by both fallen angels and by human sinners, and it's set against the kingdom of heaven, which shall overcome it.

This is the conception of hell that King finds ridiculous. In its place, he offers something so extremely absurd that it's laughable, and it is with this, his own conception of hell, which he believes is superior to the Biblical depiction of hell, that he concludes Revival, describing hell as a gigantic anthill full of gigantic, ravenous ants. Huh?

Somehow, King sees a huge anthill in which huge ants crush sinners with their huge jaws as superior to the depiction of hell provided in the Bible, the King James Version of which is, without argument, one of the greatest literary masterpieces of the English language. With judgment this poor, it is truly a wonder that King ever managed to write his much better, earlier work.

The endings of the stories by Bentley Little, another prolific horror novelist, are as bad as those of King's worst books. They're tacked-on, rather than being integral to the plot, and, typically, they explain nothing concerning what has transpired in the hundreds of pages preceding them. They seem to hint at an explanation, but, as there is no actual explanation at which to hint, the intimation itself is nothing more than a half-hearted, meaningless gesture. Read virtually any of Little's novels, including the one for which he won the dubious Bram Stoker Award, and you'll see what I mean—but be prepared for a major disappointment. For example, The Resort suggests the bizarre incidents which occur at the present resort are somehow linked to those which occurred at an earlier, nearby resort, which now lies in ruins. How and why the two resorts might have shared some common causal link is unclear because unexplained. Therefore, readers are within reason to assume that there never was such a link. Likely, they will feel cheated of the time, effort, and money they spent in reading the novel.

Horror master Edgar Allan Poe offered a solution to the dilemma of the sloppy ending 172 years ago. In “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), he explains how he wrote his narrative poem “The Raven.” First, he decided how the story would end. Then, he selected everything—every word, every image, every figure of speech, every point of the plot, every character, every line of dialogue, every nuance of the setting—so that the final result, the story's effect, would be inevitable, given what came before and led up to it. It seems clear that neither King nor Little (nor many other writers, of the horror genre and of other genres, have any idea where their stories are going or why, but write only in the moment, making up the plot as they go.

Poe applied his technique not only to “The Raven,” but to most of his stories and other narrative poems. One story for which the ending isn't as clear and fitting as the conclusions of his other tales is “Ligeia.” As Kevin J. Hayes points out, in The Annotated Poe:

The ending leaves many questions unanswered. The reappearance of Ligeia can be interpreted as a phantasmagoric illusion [an image projected by the so-called magic lantern, a type of early projector], an opium-induced hallucination [the narrator uses laudanum], a psychological fantasy, a modern recurrence of a traditional transformation legend, or an actual event. . . .

Comments Poe made concerning the story's problematic ending indicate that he'd intended the story to have a supernatural ending. A friend of his, Pendleton Cooke, asked about the story's resolution. In response, Poe “suggested how he might have improved it”:

One point I have not fully carried out—I should have intimated that the will did not perfect its intention—there should have been a relapse—a final one—and Ligeia (who had only succeeded in so much as to convey an idea of the truth to the narrator) should be at length entombed as Rowena—the bodily alterations having gradually faded away.

It seems that Poe, unlike King, Little, and a host of other writers, learned his lesson about writing sloppy endings. He was careful, from then on, to plan more carefully the outcomes of his stories, the vast majority of which have the unified structure and the single effect for which he has become famous. For example, “The Pit and the Pendulum” is based an article, “Anecdote towards the History of the Spanish Inquisition.” According to this article, “when General Lasalle entered Toledo, he immediately visited the Palace of the Inquisition,” where he tested a torture device, which he found to be in good order.

As Hayes observes, the way in which the article recounted the story was ineffective from “a dramatic point of view,” so Poe reversed its chronology:

Though fascinated by the story, Poe nevertheless recognized what was wrong with it, at least from a dramatic point of view: it was backwards. By having Lasalle arrive in the first sentence, the article destroys all possibilities for tension and terror. Poe turned the story around, describing what happens to one particular prisoner while saving Lasalle's timely intervention for the final paragraph.”

Poe had learned the lesson that he would teach in “The Philosophy of Composition” and exemplify in the majority of his own short stories, essays, and narrative poems: in the words of the bard, “All's well that ends well.”

Edgar Allan Poe: An Obituary and a Eulogy

Copyright 2010 by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7, 1849, and an obituary by his mortal enemy and biographer Rufus Griswold appeared three weeks later, on October 20, on page four of the New-York Weekly Tribune. It was another chance for Poe’s foe to lambaste the author, and he did so, claiming that Poe “had few or no friends” and suggesting that he was deserving of none. “Few,” Griswold felt sure, would “be grieved by” Poe’s demise.

Even the author’s reputation as a man of letters was questionable, Griswold implied: “Literary art has lost one of its most brilliant but erratic stars.” Griswold, assuming the name of “Ludwig,” characterizes Poe as a dissolute alcoholic who lived a penurious and friendless existence at the expense, as often as not, of his benefactors. He was, “Ludwig” all but insists, little more than a freeloader:

His wants were supplied by the liberality of a few individuals. We remember that Col. Webb collected in a few moments fifty or sixty dollars for him at the Union Club; Mr. Lewis, of Brooklyn, sent a similar sum from one of the Courts, in which he was engaged when he saw the statement of the poet’s poverty; and others illustrated in the same manner the effect of such an appeal to the popular heart.

Poe came to the attention of the literati as a result of an accident, Griswold claims. He had entered a literary contest, and his story won not because it had any merit, but because it was the first among the many entries that showed any legibility, and the judges, in selecting it as the winner, might be done as quickly as possible with their responsibility:

Such matters are usually disposed of in a very off hand way: Committees to award literary prizes drink to the payer’s health, in good wines, over the unexamined MSS, which they submit to the discretion of publishers, with permission to use their names in such a way as to promote the publisher’s advantage[[.]] So it would have been in this case, but that one of the Committee, taking up a little book in such exquisite calligraphy as to seem like one of the finest issues of the press of Putnam, was tempted to read several pages, and being interested, he summoned the attention of the company to the half-dozen compositions in the volume. It was unanimously decided that the prizes should be paid to the first of geniuses who had written legibly. Not another MS. was unfolded. Immediately the ‘confidential envelop’ was opened, and the successful competitor was found to bear the scarcely known name of Poe.

Had it not been for the intervention of another benefactor, “the accomplished author” John P. Kennedy, who’d written Horseshoe Robinson, it seems unlikely, Griswold would have his readers believe, that Poe would ever have been likely to have earned himself the position of editor of The Southern Literary Messenger at even the “small salary” that Poe was paid:

The next day the publisher called to see Mr. Kennedy, and gave him an account of the author that excited his curiosity and sympathy, and caused him to request that he should be brought to his office. Accordingly he was introduced: the prize money had not yet been paid, and he was in the costume in which he had answered the advertisement of his good fortune. Thin, and pale even to ghastliness, his whole appearance indicated sickness and the utmost destitution. A tattered frock-coat concealed the absence of a shirt, and the ruins of boots disclosed more than the want of stockings[[.]] But the eyes of the young man were luminous with intelligence and feeling, and his voice, and conversation, and manners, all won upon the lawyer’s regard. Poe told his history, and his ambition, and it was determined that he should not want means for a suitable appearance in society, nor opportunity for a just display of his abilities in literature. Mr. Kennedy accompanied him to a clothing store, and purchased for him a respectable suit, with changes of linen, and sent him to a bath, from which he returned with the suddenly regained bearing of a gentleman.

The late Mr. Thomas W. White had then recently established The Southern Literary Messenger, at Richmond, and upon the warm recommendation of Mr. Kennedy, Poe was engaged, at a small salary — we believe of $500 a year — to be its editor.

In keeping with his image of Poe as a ne’er-do-well who lived off others, Griswold also characterizes Poe as something of a vagabond, mentioning his moves from Richmond to Philadelphia; from Philadelphia to New York; from New York back again to Richmond; and, finally, as it seemed, judging by his death in Baltimore, back again to New York.

In the years following the death of his “poor” wife, whom Poe had married “hurriedly” and “with characteristic recklessness of consequences,” at a time when he was as penniless as she, the author was able to make a meager living on the basis of “an income from his literary labors sufficient for his support.” However, Griswold suggests, Poe continued to keep an eye out for the chance to freeload, for, as “Ludwig,” or Griswold, points out, Poe “was understood by some of his correspondents” to be planning “to be married, most advantageously, to a lady of that city: a widow, to whom he had been previously engaged while a student in the University.”

As a man, Poe didn’t amount to much, either, Griswold’s death notice suggests: “He was at all times a dreamer,” who walked about not with his head so much in the clouds as “in heaven or hell,” communing with imaginary beings, the “creatures and the accidents of his brain”:

He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers, (never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned), but for their happiness who at the moment were objects of his idolatry — or, with his glances introverted to a heart gnawed with anguish, and with a face shrouded in gloom, he would brave the wildest storms; and all night, with drenched garments and arms wildly beating the winds and rains, he would speak as if to spirits that at such times only could be evoked by him from the Aidenn close by whose portals his disturbed soul sought to forget the ills to which his constitution subjugated him — close by that Aidenn where were those he loved — the Aidenn which he might never see, but in fitful glimpses, as its gates opened to receive the less fiery and more happy natures whose destiny to sin did not involve the doom of death.

He seemed, except when some fitful pursuit subjected his will and engrossed his faculties, always to bear the memory of some controlling sorrow. The remarkable poem of The Raven was probably much more nearly than has been supposed, even by those who were very intimate with him, a reflexion and an echo of his own history.

The true man is mirrored by his works, Griswold says, and Poe’s works are dark and dreary, indeed:

Every genuine author in a greater or less degree leaves in his works, whatever their design, traces of his personal character: elements of his immortal being, in which the individual survives the person. While we read the pages of the Fall of the House of Usher, or of Mesmeric Revelations, we see in the solemn and stately gloom which invests one, and in the subtle metaphysical analysis of both, indications of the idiosyncrasies, — of what was most remarkable and peculiar — in the author’s intellectual nature. But we see here only the better phases of this nature, only the symbols of his juster action, for his harsh experience had deprived him of all faith in man or woman. He had made up his mind upon the numberless complexities of the social world, and the whole system with him was an imposture. This conviction gave a direction to his shrewd and naturally unamiable character. Still, though he regarded society as composed altogether of villains, the sharpness of his intellect was not of that kind which enabled him to cope with villainy, while it continually caused him by overshots to fail of the success of honesty.

A friend of Poe’s, George R. Graham, answers Griswold’s character assassination-disguised-as-an-obituary with a eulogy in which he praises Poe (“The Late Edgar Allan Poe,” Graham’s Magazine, March 1850, 36: 224-226). Adopting the device of writing his eulogy to Willis, a mutual friend of Poe and himself, Graham begins by taking unto himself the task of writing a “defence [sic] of his character” as it was “set down by Dr. Rufus W. Griswold.”

“I knew Mr. Poe well — far better than Mr. Griswold,” Graham writes, and he immediately describes Griswold’s portrait of Poe an “exceedingly ill-timed and unappreciative estimate of the character of our lost friend,” which is both “unfair and untrue.” Graham believes that Griswold demonizes Poe out of spite, or “spleen.” Griswold’s obituary is, in fact, Graham argues, an attempt to avenge himself and his friends upon Poe for Poe’s honest criticisms of their literary works:

Mr. Griswold does not feel the worth of the man he has undervalued; — he had no sympathies in common with him, and has allowed old prejudices and old enmities to steal, insensibly perhaps, into the coloring of his picture. They were for years totally uncongenial, if not enemies, and during that period Mr. Poe, in a scathing lecture upon [[“]]The Poets of America,[[”]] gave Mr. Griswold some raps over the knuckles of force sufficient to be remembered. He had, too, in the exercise of his functions as critic, put to death, summarily, the literary reputation of some of Mr. Griswold’s best friends; and their ghosts cried in vain for him to avenge them during Poe’s life-time.

What Griswold and his friends were incapable of achieving during Poe’s life, Griswold sought to gain after his death, by cowardly accusing Poe of charges against which Poe could not now defend himself. However, Graham suggests, even if Griswold had not had an axe to grind, Griswold would have not been “competent. . . to act as his judge — to dissect that subtle and singularly fine intellect — to probe the motives and weigh the actions of that proud heart” because not only did Griswold not “feel the worth of the man he has undervalued” but he also could not measure Poe’s worth, since Poe’s “whole nature — that distinctive presence of the departed which now stands impalpable, yet in strong outline before me, as I knew him and felt him to be — eludes the rude grasp of a mind so warped and uncongenial as Mr. Griswold’s.”

As a man, Griswold found Poe to have had close friends and to have been “always the same polished gentleman — the quiet, unobtrusive, thoughtful scholar — the devoted husband — frugal in his personal expenses — punctual and unwearied in his industry — and the soul of honor, in all his transactions. This, of course, was in his better days, and by them we judge the man. But even after his habits had changed, there was no literary man to whom I would more readily advance money for labor to be done.” As for his being a ne’er-do-well or a freeloader, Graham says, Poe was of such a rarified genius that his writings found only a small audience, (and literature is an enterprise that seldom pays well, in any case). He drank because he made little at doing what he loved so well:

The very natural question — “Why did he not work and thrive?” is easily answered. It will not be asked by the many who knew the precarious tenure by which literary men hold a mere living in this country. The avenues through which they can profitably reach the country are few, and crowded with aspirants for bread as well as fame. The unfortunate tendency to cheapen every literary work to the lowest point of beggarly flimsiness in price and profit, prevents even the well-disposed from extending any thing like an adequate support to even a part of the great throng which genius, talent, education, and even misfortune, force into the struggle. The character of Poe’s mind was of such an order, as not to be very widely in demand. The class of educated mind which he could readily and profitably address, was small — the channels through which he could do so at all, were few — and publishers all, or nearly all, contented with such pens as were already engaged, hesitated to incur the expense of his to an extent which would sufficiently remunerate him; hence, when he was fairly at sea, connected permanently with no publication, he suffered all the horrors of prospective destitution, with scarcely the ability of providing for immediate necessities; and at such moments, alas! the tempter often came, and, as you have truly said, “one glass” of wine made him a madman. Let the moralist who stands upon tufted carpet, and surveys his smoking board, the fruits of his individual toil or mercantile adventure, pause before he lets the anathema, trembling upon his lips, fall upon a man like Poe! who, wandering from publisher to publisher, with his fine, print-like manuscript, scrupulously clean and neatly rolled, finds no market for his brain — with despair at heart, misery ahead for himself and his loved ones, and gaunt famine dogging at his heels, thus sinks by the wayside, before the demon that watches his steps and whispers OBLIVION.

The solution might have been to sell out and write the hack work that a general audience more interested in entertainment than art seemed to crave, but Poe was too much a man of honor to do so, Graham declares: “Could he have stepped down and chronicled small beer, made himself the shifting toady of the hour, and with bow and cringe, hung upon the steps of greatness, sounding the glory of third-rate ability with a penny trumpet, he would have been feted alive, and perhaps, been praised when dead. But no! his views of the duty of the critic were stern, and he felt that in praising an unworthy writer, he committed dishonor.”

Rather than the idle, half-mad dreamer that Griswold had made Poe out to be, Poe was a man of genius, Graham states, whose thoughts occupied higher regions than those of men of more mundane interests:

He was a worshipper of INTELLECT — longing to grasp the power of mind that moves the stars — to bathe his soul in the dreams of seraphs. He was himself all ethereal, of a fine essence, that moved in an atmosphere of spirits — of spiritual beauty, overflowing and radiant — twin brother with the angels, feeling their flashing wings upon his heart, and almost clasping them in his embrace. Of them, and as an expectant archangel of that high order of intellect, stepping out of himself, as it were, and interpreting the time, he reveled in delicious luxury in a world beyond, with an audacity which we fear in madmen, but in genius worship as the inspiration of heaven.

It should be observed that contemporary critics hold a view of Poe that is much closer to Graham’s estimation of the author than to Griswold’s caricature of him.



Note: Both Griswold’s obituary and Graham’s eulogy may be read in their entireties at “A Poe Bookshelf: Books, Articles and Lectures on Edgar Allan Poe,” courtesy of The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.



Horror Masters

Free of charge, at Horror Masters , such authors as Mary Shelley’s (Frankenstein), Bram Stoker’s (Dracula), Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, William Beckford, Horace Walpole, Hans Christian Andersen, Louisa May Alcott, Honoré De Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Charlotte Brontë, Lord Byron, George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wilkie Collins, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nikolai Gogol, Bret Harte, Leigh Hunt, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Washington Irving, Charles Lamb, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Matthew Gregory Monk, George Macdonald, Niccolò Machiavelli, Herman Melville, Charles Perrault, Thomas De Quincy, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Harriet Stowe, Jonathan Swift, William Makepeace Thackeray, Mark Twain, and many others.

On this same site, you will also find, absolutely free, works by L. Frank Baum, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Willa Cather, G. K. Chesterton, Sir Winston Churchill, Christabel Coleridge, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Lord Dunsany, Eugene Field, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ellen Glasgow, Oliver Goldsmith, Maxim Gorky, H. Rider Haggard, Edward Everett Halle, Thomas Hardy, O. Henry, William Hope Hodgson, William Dean Howells, W. W. Jacobs, Henry James, M. R. James, Franz Kafka, Jerome K. Jerome, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, Arthur Machen, Katherine Mansfield, Guy De Maupassant, Brander Matthews, A. Merritt, John Metcalf, Edith Nesbit, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Damon Runyon, Saki, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frank R. Stockton, Leo Tolstoy, H. G. Wells, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and W. B. Yeats.

There are non-fiction stories, novels, novellas, short stories, poems, early and late Gothics, and such categories from which to choose as “Classic Horror,” “Dark Stuff,” “Ghost Stories,” “Horror History,” “Monsters,” “Occult,” “Psychos,” and “The X-treme,” which includes “Decadent Traditions in Horror,” including works by the Marquis de Sade, Giovanni Boccaccio, and others.
Stories are listed both by writer and by title. You’ll find names as familiar as your own and altogether unknown, but the creator Horror Masters has compiled a huge list of winners, and they’re absolutely free!

Summer Morning, Summer Night: A Review

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Ray Bradbury has made quite a career out of nostalgia, and his affectionate respect for the past continues to serve him well in Summer Morning, Summer Night (2008), a collection of short stories unified by the common setting of Green Town, Illinois. Not altogether unlike Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which Bradbury admits influenced the structure, if not the contents, of The Martian Chronicles, this anthology is gentler and more sensitive than Anderson’s gallery of the grotesque tended to be. The characters, however, are often eccentric in their own ways, and most are, like their author, sensitive and understated, even in their eccentricity.

The first story in the collection, “End of Summer,” concerns a sexually repressed schoolteacher, thirty-five-year-old Hattie, who lives with her grandmother, aunt, and cousin, who are equally straight-laced and no-nonsense. Although Hattie fears being found out by one of them, she also defies their narrow, emotionless, sexless lives. She has repressed her own sexuality, but, in this story, she throws caution to the winds. In fact, she has apparently taken some risks even before the story proper commences. She is a voyeur; in this tale, she becomes, also, a seductress. She seems to delight in outraging her family’s stern sense of propriety, even if she does so in secret. It is enough for her, it appears, that she knows that she has violated their taboos.

As the story opens, she lies awake in her room, counting “the long, slow strokes of the high town clock” (9). Judging by her count, it is two o’clock in the morning, and the streets are deserted. She rises from her bed, applies makeup, polishes her fingernails, dabs perfume behind her ears, casts off her “cotton nightgown” in favor of a negligee, and lets down her hair (9). Gazing into her mirror, she is satisfied with the image of herself that meets her gaze:

She saw the long, dark rush of her hair in the mirror as she unknotted the tight schoolteacher’s bun and let it fall loose to her shoulders. Wouldn’t her pupils be surprised. She thought; so long, so black, so glossy. Not bad for a woman of thirty-five (9).

Having donned the uniform of a literal lady of the evening, Hattie sneaks past the closed doors of her grandmother, aunt, and cousin, anxious that one or more of them might choose this moment to exit their bedroom, but, despite her nervousness, nevertheless pauses to stick “her tongue out at one door, then at the other two” (10).

Outside, she pauses to enjoy the sensations of the “wet grass,” which is “cool and prickly,” and, after dodging the “patrolman, Mr. Waltzer,” surveys the town from the vantage point of the courthouse rooftop before sneaking from house to house to eavesdrop and spy upon their residents (10).

One of the men upon whom she spies follows her, and she seduces him--or perhaps it is he who seduces her. In the night, when darkness and shadows rule, passions are abroad in the darkness, and it is difficult to say, sometimes, who is the predator and who the prey. It may be that both are seducers, just as both are seduced.

After the assignation, Hattie returns to the house she shares with Grandma, Aunt Maude, and Cousin Jacob, no longer wearing cosmetics, dressed primly, and behaving properly, except for the smile she seems unable to shed, even in the austere presence of her repressive kinsmen, who chastise her for being late to rise and tardy to work. She leaves their company, still smiling as she runs out of the house, the door slamming behind her.

In this story, the monster is not the typical bogeyman, but the strict propriety of the prim and proper family of which Hattie both is and is not a member. A synecdoche of society itself, the rigid demand for conformity and the repression of personal passion of which has a debilitating effect upon the individual human spirit because it represses the fleshly aspects of human existence, Hattie’s family and its unyielding demands for steadfast respectability, at the very cost of one’s soul, suggests that it is inhuman to deny one’s physical appetites.

In demanding that these vital elements of their personalities be repressed, her relatives become more like machines that saintly souls, whereas, because of her covert rebelliousness, which allows her to remain true to herself, including the passions and appetites of her fleshly existence, Hattie shows the monstrosity that hides behind the familial and social demands for sexual repression and emotional rigidity. Ironically, her behavior, which would, no doubt, scandalize her family, as it would her community, is the salvation, rather than the ruination, of her soul. Her actions stand as a silent, even secret, rebuke to the harshness of an overly restrictive and conventional lifestyle. Hattie dares not disturb the universe--or even her own household--but, in private, she finds the sexual release that is denied to her in the public arena of her life, and these nocturnal assignations, brief as they may be, are enough to bring a smile to her lips that does not fade. The private life is all we have, Bradbury suggests, but it is enough when one finds another with a similar attitude and similar needs with whom to share it. Sometimes, heroism is as quiet and as passive-aggressive as the rebellious, but discreet, protagonist of this gentle tale of gallantry and pluck.

This story is itself a synecdoche, as it were, for the entire anthology of which it is the first flower. The other stories are just as delicate, just as beautiful, just as perfumed with the scents of joy and sorrow, reminiscence and lament, magic and wisdom. Most of all, they are instances of poetry, prose poems which assert, each one, in its own way, the enchantments and mysteries of life, as they manifest themselves in things both small enough to go unnoticed by all but the most sensitive and discerning and large enough to shake children and adult alike with laughter or with tears. A slender volume, Summer Morning, Summer Night is as deep and broad as the gray-haired man who, in writing it, packed every page and paragraph with as much Green Haven, Illinois, as would fit. The book shows why Ray Bradbury remains a treasure as much today as he was when he first broached the enchanted wonderland of modern middle America, well over half a century ago.

"Christabel": The Prototypical Lesbian Vampire

She’s sweet and chaste and pure and innocent and sexy and girl-next-door and religious and probably blonde, and she’s named Christabel. She’s the victim.

Her dark half and lover is mysterious and sexually experienced and seductive and exotic and blasphemous and probably brunette, and she’s named Geraldine. She’s the prototypical lesbian vampire.

Reveler upon opium when he was not writing poetry or literary criticism (or dodging bill collectors), poor, but brilliant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, among other eerie poems, such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “Kubla Khan,” a narrative ditty about a lesbian vampire named Christabel. It has gotten relatively short shrift among publishers and is not as well known among the general public as other of the poet’s works. If one has encountered the poem at all, it was most likely during a class concerning poetry or English literature. It is a disturbing poem, and, since it involves a good deal of horror, terror, revulsion, and abnormality, it is a good subject for study by horror writers, professional and aspiring.

While praying beside an oak tree in the wee hours of the morning, Christabel encounters a strange stranger named Geraldine, who says men have abducted her from her home. Enchanted by Geraldine’s seductive beauty, Christabel, perhaps knowing a good thing when she sees it (she may even regard Geraldine as a response to her prayer), takes the stranger home with her, whereupon Christabel’s father, Sir Leoline, a baron, becoming infatuated with Geraldine, orders a celebratory parade to declare her rescue. Here, the poem (another of Cole ridge’s “fragments”) ends, although the poet is alleged to have intended to finish it according to this storyline, identified by Coleridge’s biographer, James Gilman:

Over the mountains, the Bard, as directed by Sir Leoline, hastes with his disciple; but in consequence of one of those inundations supposed to be common to this country, the spot only where the castle once stood is discovered--the edifice itself being washed away. He determines to return. Geraldine, being acquainted with all that is passing, like the weird sisters in Macbeth, vanishes. Reappearing, however, she awaits the return of the Bard, exciting in the meantime, by her wily arts, all the anger she could rouse in the Baron's breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is described to have been susceptible. The old Bard and the youth at length arrive, and therefore she can no longer personate the character of Geraldine, the daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, but changes her appearance to that of the accepted, though absent, lover of Christabel. Now ensues a courtship most distressing to Christabel, who feels--she knows not why--great disgust for her once favored knight.

This coldness is very painful to the Baron, who has no more conception than herself of the supernatural transformation. She at last yields to her father's entreaties, and consents to approach the altar with the hated suitor. The real lover, returning, enters at this moment, and produces the ring which she had once given him in sign of her. . . [betrothal]. Thus defeated, the supernatural being Geraldine disappears. As predicted, the castle bell tolls, the mother's voice is heard, and, to the exceeding great joy of the parties, the rightful marriage takes place, after which follows a reconciliation and explanation between father and daughter.

The verse is almost adolescent, or, as critics prefer to say, when addressing the work of a member of the literary canon, childlike:

‘Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock;
Tu--whit!-- Tu--whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.

Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennel beneath the rock
She maketh answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour;
Ever and aye, by shine and shower,
Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
Some say, she sees my lady's shroud.
Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.
The thin gray cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky.

Coleridge not-so-subtly plants some clues that Geraldine may be as monstrous as she is beautiful, for she refuses to thank the Virgin Mary for her rescue:

So free from danger, free from fear,
They crossed the court : right glad they were.
And Christabel devoutly cried
To the Lady by her side,
Praise we the Virgin all divine
Who hath rescued thee from thy distress!
Alas, alas! said Geraldine, I cannot speak for weariness.

Uh oh!

The fire likes her, too; it leaps in her presence, to show the reader, again, that there’s something odd about Geraldine:

They passed the hall, that echoes still,
Pass as lightly as you will!
The brands were flat, the brands were dying,
Amid their own white ashes lying;
But when the lady passed, there came
A tongue of light, a fit of flame;
And Christabel saw the lady's eye,
And nothing else saw she thereby. . . .

Smitten by her seductress, mesmerizing houseguest, Christabel assures Geraldine that Christabel’s father sleeps: “O softly tread, said Christabel,/ My father seldom sleepeth well.” Is Christabel’s caution a concern for her father’s rest or an invitation of sexual dalliance with Geraldine? Their destination, and they stealthy way in which they approach it, suggests that Christabel may not be as innocent and virtuous as she appears to be, for she leads her houseguest, with the utmost caution, to her bedroom, where she offers her a glass of wine that Christabel’s now-deceased mother (and, presently, her “guardian spirit”) made from wildflowers:

Sweet Christabel her feet doth bare,
And jealous of the listening air
They steal their way from stair to stair,
Now in glimmer, and now in gloom,
And now they pass the Baron's room,
As still as death, with stifled breath!
And now have reached her chamber door;
And now doth Geraldine press down
The rushes of the chamber floor. . . .

. . . O weary lady, Geraldine,
I pray you, drink this cordial wine!
It is a wine of virtuous powers;
My mother made it of wildflowers.

The next moment, her name having been mentioned, the spirit of Christabel’s mother appears, but only Geraldine can see the phantom, and she orders the ghost to leave.

O mother dear! that thou wert here!
I would, said Geraldine, she were!

But soon with altered voice, said she--
`Off, wandering mother! Peak and pine!
I have power to bid thee flee.'
Alas! what ails poor Geraldine?
Why stares she with unsettled eye?
Can she the bodiless dead espy?
And why with hollow voice cries she,
`Off, woman, off! this hour is mine--
Though thou her guardian spirit be,
Off, woman. off! 'tis given to me.'

Invoking her authority to be alone with Christabel, Geraldine enforces her right, not wanting to be bothered by her enchanted hostess’ mother’s spirit hanging about like a spectral chaperone. Once the ghost has departed, Geraldine wastes no time in further seducing Christabel. She instructs Christabel to “unrobe” herself and to get into bed. Christabel does as she’s directed, obviously still under Geraldine’s spell. Unable to sleep, she studies Geraldine’s beautiful face and form, and the young hostess’ voyeurism is rewarded by a glimpse of Geraldine’s breast, which elicits a cry from the poem’s narrator for divine protection for Christabel:

But now unrobe yourself; for I
Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie.'

Quoth Christabel, So let it be!
And as the lady bade, did she.
Her gentle limbs did she undress
And lay down in her loveliness.

But through her brain of weal and woe
So many thoughts moved to and fro,
That vain it were her lids to close;
So half-way from the bed she rose,
And on her elbow did recline
To look at the lady Geraldine.

Beneath the lamp the lady bowed,
And slowly rolled her eyes around;
Then drawing in her breath aloud,
Like one that shuddered, she unbound
The cincture from beneath her breast:
Her silken robe, and inner vest,
Dropt to her feet, and full in view,
Behold! her bosom, and half her side--
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!

Her charms having worked their magic, Geraldine, after a moment’s confused hesitation (probably included to make the meter work), gets into bed with Christabel, wherein they stretch out alongside one another, lay in one another’s arms, and, presumably, experience greater intimacies than those that a mere embrace may provide:

Yet Geraldine nor speaks nor stirs;
Ah! what a stricken look was hers!
Deep from within she seems half-way
To lift some weight with sick assay,
And eyes the maid and seeks delay;
Then suddenly as one defied
Collects herself in scorn and pride,
And lay down by the Maiden's side!--
And in her arms the maid she took. . . .!

At last, the mesmerizing Geraldine explains the magic of her enchanted “bosom” to her victim:

And with low voice and doleful look
These words did say :
`In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell,
Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel!

So ends the first part of the poem, in which the princess Christabel, having befriended a strange, abducted woman, Geraldine, whom she’d met while she’d been praying in the woods near her father’s castle, shelters her for the night, only to be seduced by her houseguest’s beauty and to be spellbound by her magic breasts.

Despite the adolescent versification and the clumsy plot, the poem does have a certain seductive and mesmerizing effect upon the reader, drawing him or her into the magic of Geraldine’s enchanted “bosom” and suggesting that the poor, chaste Christabel, despite the narrator’s continued pleas for her protection, is, both sexually and otherwise, her houseguest’s victim:

It was a lovely sight to see
The lady Christabel, when she
Was praying at the old oak tree.
Amid the jaggéd shadows
Of mossy leafless boughs,
Kneeling in the moonlight,
To make her gentle vows.

Her slender palms together prest,
Heaving sometimes on her breast;
Her face resigned to bliss or bale--
Her face, oh call it fair not pale,
And both blue eyes more bright than clear.
Each about to have a tear.:

With open eyes (ah, woe is me!)
Asleep, and dreaming fearfully,
Fearfully dreaming, yet, I wis,
Dreaming that alone, which is--
O sorrow and shame! Can this be she,
The lady, who knelt at the old oak tree?
And lo! the worker of these harms,
That holds the maiden in her arms,
Seems to slumber still and mild,
As a mother with her child.

A star hath set, a star hath risen,
O Geraldine! since arms of thine
Have been the lovely lady's prison.
O Geraldine! one hour was thine--
Thou'st had thy will! By tairn and rill,
The night-birds all that hour were still.
But now they are jubilant anew,
From cliff and tower, tu--whoo! tu--whoo!
Tu--whoo! tu--whoo! from wood and fell!

And see! the lady Christabel
Gathers herself from out her trance;
Her limbs relax, her countenance
Grows sad and soft; the smooth thin lids
Close o'er her eyes; and tears she sheds--
Large tears that leave the lashes bright!
And oft the while she seems to smile
As infants at a sudden light!

Yea, she doth smile, and she doth weep,
Like a youthful hermitess,
Beauteous in a wilderness,
Who, praying always, prays in sleep.
And, if she move unquietly,
Perchance, 'tis but the blood so free
Comes back and tingles in her feet.
No doubt, she hath a vision sweet.
What if her guardian spirit 'twere,
What if she knew her mother near?
But this she knows, in joys and woes,
That saints will aid if men will call :
For the blue sky bends over all!.

No wonder lesbian and feminist critics regard this fragmented poem as one of the great ones of world lit.

The lesbian vampire has since become a staple of erotic horror, appearing in many legitimate, if “R”-rated, films, including:

Eternal (2004): Detective Raymond Pope’s search for his missing wife leads him to the estate of a wealthy woman, Elizabeth Kane, who may be the latest incarnation of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the vampire who bathed in virgins’ blood.

Lost for a Vampire (1971): A writer researching a book visits an all-girls’ boarding school inhabited by lesbian vampire students.

Vampyros Lesbos (1971): In Turkey, American lawyer Linda Westinghouse’s dreams about being harassed and seduced by a dark-haired lesbian vampire beauty come true.

Les Frissons des Vampires (1970): Honeymooning couples are victimized by a castle of lesbian vampires.

Vampyres (1974): A lesbian couple lures innocent passersby to their deaths, one of the seductresses finally falling prey to a woman she seduces.

The Velvet Vampire (1971): A vampire woman comes out of the desert to seduce a hippie couple.

The Vampire Lovers (1970): The first of a trilogy of films about lesbian vampires, this one recreates, more or less faithfully, Sheridan LeFanu’s novel, Camilla. The lesbian is rival against a man for the affections of a woman whom both desire. He wins.

Blood and Roses (1960): A dead vampire’s spirit lives again by possessing Camilla, who narrates the tale.

Daughters of Darkness (1971): A honeymooning couple encounters Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who seduces the bride.

The Hunger (1983): Miriam Blaylock seduces scientist Sarah Roberts.

One into which it was harder for some critics to sink their teeth into is Lesbian Vampire Killers (to be released in 2009), a comedy in which men seek to rescue their women from a gang of lesbian vampires who have victimized a small Welsh town.

The Birth of Monsters and Other Poems

Copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In previous posts ("Horrific Poems: A Sampler" and "Charles Baudelaire's 'Carrion'"), I shared a few poems in the horror genre. In this post, I'm sharing a few of my own verses, which, hopefully, will be found diabolical enough to thrill, if not to chill.

I chose the sonnet because of its rhyme scheme. The sonnet form I've selected requires that, in the first twelve lines, the last word of each alternate line must rhyme. It also requires that the last two lines constitute a rhyming couplet. The overall rhyme scheme often forces an image, a trope, a thought, or a sentiment, thereby, helping, as it were, to write the poem itself, as if the rhyme scheme were something of a muse.

To The Wind

The wind blows free, but you and me,
We are captives, bound by a force
Mightier than stone, field, or tree:
Gravity determines our course.
Within the confines of the earth,
We may go wand'ring as we please;
Our minds may conceive and bring forth
Flights of fancy, winged fantasies,
Divorced of flesh and wed to naught,
With no authority to say
Nay, ye have transcended what ought
Be thought or tried by mortal clay.
Fettered by our humanity,
A faint breeze is cause for envy.

The Birth of Monsters

Beneath the canopies of trees, shadows,
Thick and dark, fall across stained, moss-covered
Headstones, and the rising winter’s wind blows;
Leafless branches, like clawed fingers, scratch; stirred,
By a sudden gust, wreaths and flowers leap
From vases overturned, blow and scatter,
And, were the cadavers not buried deep,
They might, clotted with gore and blood-splattered,
Rise from their coffins and their graves, to reel
And stagger across the dark churchyard’s grounds,
Insensible and unable to feel,
Among the tombs and the burial mounds.
Look! Listen! The imagination warns;
Of such wild nights are ghastly monsters born!

The Great Debate

In life, the skeptic and the man of faith
Each sought to refute the other one’s view,
The former claiming that to see a wraith
Meant one had lost his reason, for, ‘tis true,
That quick is quick and dead is dead; buried,
Bodies are removed from society,
Fit for naught but food on which worms may feed.
The latter argued that the soul, set free
By the body’s death, ascends unto God,
In whose image and likeness it was made,
Leaving but mortal flesh beneath the sod,
The transcendent spirit beyond decay.
Their passionate arguments have long since
Ended, unsure--by their own deaths silenced.

Fiendish Kinsmen

Winged, fanged things with claws, vague and indistinct,
Haunt the dark; furtive and stealthy, seldom
Are they seen, for which reason they are linked,
More often than not, with nightmare or some
Horrid fantasy, reason’s predators,
Slimed in mucus and enveloped in blood,
Stalking, or creeping, or slinking through gore,
Vile, evil things unseen since Noah’s flood,
The very spawn, perhaps, of murd’rous Cain,
Living embodiments of sin, exiled
From Eden, homeless, now, but for the brain
Of man, whose thoughts are both wicked and wild.
Not once were these mad fiends clearly described,
Yet we know them well, for we’re of their tribe.

The Book of Art, the Book of Life

The image, metaphor, and symbol each
Is plucked, as a leaf, from the tree of life
That it, pressed within an art book, may teach
The lesson of sorrow, anguish, or strife.
Authors may select a flower, a dove,
An ocean liner cruising the vast deep,
A rainbow shining in the sky above,
Or a road winding up a mountain steep;
Wordsworth wrote of a cloud of daffodils
Beneath a clear sky, both bright and azure,
Keats of a granary at autumn filled,
And Blake of a lamb, wooly-bright and pure;
Only in poems by Baudelaire and Poe
Does art blush to see blood and guts on show.

The Roulette Wheel

The roulette wheel, having been twirled, must whirl,
Its silver ball leaping from red to black,
Having, from the Croupier’s hand been hurled,
A fortune risked upon its fateful track.
Past the even and the odd, the small ball
Runs round the tilted track within the wheel;
Where it shall stop, no one yet knows, but all
Watch, transfixed, to see which fate it shall seal--
In Europe, thirty seven chances be,
One more in American destinies:
In the modern world, our technology
Has replaced the Norns, Moirae, and Parcae:
The wheel spins with pain, grief, and misery,
Red blood, black death, and silvery decay.

Charles Baudelaire’s “Carrion”

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In a previous post, we shared several relatively short poems that express horrific themes. In this post, we share Charles Baudelier’s “Carrion,” a strange rhyme, indeed, and appalling.


First, the poem; then, the commentary:

Remember, my soul, the thing we saw
that lovely summer day?
On a pile of stones where the path turned off
the hideous carrion--

legs in the air, like a whore--displayed
indifferent to the last,
a belly slick with lethal sweat
and swollen with foul gas.

the sun lit up that rottenness
as though to roast it through,
restoring to Nature a hundredfold
what she had here made one.

And heaven watched the splendid corpse
like a flower open wide--
you nearly fainted dead away
at the perfume it gave off.

Flies kept humming over the guts
from which a gleaming clot
of maggots poured to finish off
what scraps of flesh remained.

The tide of trembling vermin sank,
then bubbled up afresh
as if the carcass, drawing breath,
by their lives lived again

and made a curious music there--
like running water, or wind,
or the rattle of chaff the winnower
loosens in his fan.

Shapeless--nothing was left but a dream
the artist had sketched in,
forgotten, and only later on
finished from memory.

Behind the rocks an anxious bitch
eyed us reproachfully, waiting for
the chance to resume
her interrupted feast.

--Yet you will come to this offence,
this horrible decay, you, the
light of my life, the sun
and moon and stars of my love!

Yes, you will come to this, my queen,
after the sacraments,
when you rot underground among
the bones already there.

But as their kisses eat you up,
my Beauty, tell the worms
I've kept the sacred essence, saved
the form of my rotted loves!

Some time after the incident (“the thing we saw/ that lovely summer day”), still haunted, it appears, by the sight, the speaker of the poem recalls having seen, while walking with his lover, the dead and bloated carcass of a maggot-infested beast. In describing the animal’s “corpse” as he reminisces about the sight to his girlfriend, thus keeping alive in his memory the appalling sight, he mixes distasteful images and adjectives that bespeak unpleasant qualities and states with images and adjectives that express agreeable and pleasant characteristics and conditions:

“thing,” “carrion,” “whore,” “sweat,” “gas,” “rottenness,” “corpse,” “flower,” “perfume,” “flies,” “guts,” “maggots,” “scraps of flesh,” “vermin,” “carcass,” “music,” “water,” “wind,” “fan,” “bitch,” “feast,” “offence,” “decay,” “queen,” “sacraments,” “kisses,” “Beauty,” “worms.”

The negative images and descriptive words and phrases suggest his disgust, but, strangely, it is a disgust that merges with attraction. He is fascinated, it seems, with what he considers the beauty of death as it is represented in the concrete and vivid spectacle of an animal’s decomposing carcass. The rotting nature of the body seems to show life’s dirty little secret, as it were: the reality (death, or nothingness) that is hidden at the center of existence.

Nature does not discriminate in its destructiveness to accord with human perceptions and prejudices of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, and value and insignificance, but kills and dismantles all. In doing so, it feeds upon itself, life deriving sustenance from the effects of death, as the flies feed upon the carcass and lay eggs that, as “maggots,” can later “finish off/ what scraps of flesh” remain, the crumbs, as it were, of the flies and dogs’ “feast.”

The speaker next personalizes death by applying the lesson he has learned from having seen the dead animal to the eventual fate of his girlfriend, observing that she, too, “will come to this offence,/ this horrible decay,” despite her religious faith, as indicated by the “sacraments,” and “rot underground among/ the bodies already there.” Death will not spare her, any more than it has spared others of her faith or, for that matter, those of no faith. Again, death is indiscriminate in its destructiveness, and neither faith nor disbelief avails against one's demise.

He ends his reminiscence and commentary upon the experience of having come across the dead animal’s rotten and bloated body by foreseeing, as it were, an ironic future situation, asking his lover to imagine herself, conscious despite her death and being devoured by “worms” whose “kisses eat” her, that he, in having survived her (for a time, at least), has “kept the sacred essence” and “saved/ the form of” his “rotted loves.” Moreover, he makes her, his “queen,” an embodiment of “Beauty,” addressing her as such.

This appellation may refer to the last lines of John Keats' “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” Keats wrote. Regardless of what these closing lines of Keats’ poem may mean (critics continue to debate the issue), it is truly chilling to suppose, as Baudelaire’s speaker seems to imagine, that the truth, concerning “Beauty,” is that it must, like a lovely woman, end in death, in nothingness, and in absurdity, just as love itself must end.

In such a poem, there is no hope, nor is there any reason to suggest that the repulsive and the beautiful, in the final analysis, signify any difference. If death and destruction are the end of life, of beauty, and of love, death, ugliness, and apathy are no better or worse than one another, and good and evil themselves become but moot and meaningless points.