The Halloween Special 2023
A Halloween Episode Featuring Horrific Poetry from Emily Dickinson, Linda Pastan and Lord Tennyson
Hello and Welcome to Words That Burn, the podcast taking a closer look at poetry. It’s that time of year again, when the days are just a bit shorter, the nights are that little bit too long and every shadow hides something sinister; It’s time for the Halloween Special.
Every year I bring you three spine tingling poems and indulge in a little bit of melodrama to explain them, this year is no different.
In this episode, you’ll hear 3 poems from 3 fantastic poets; Emily Dickinson, Linda Pastan and Lord Alfred Tennyson. In One need not be a chamber, you’ll learn that all that is sinister need not be supernatural. In The Deathwatch Beetle you’ll bear witness to a Poe-esque unravelling of a psyche. To round it all out we’ll be taking a look at the supposed inspiration behind the Cthulhu mythos in The Kraken.
So without further adieu, lets dive into One Need Not Be a Chamber by Emily Dickinson:
One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Far safer, of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than an interior confronting
That whiter host.
Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one's own self encounter
In lonesome place.
Ourself, behind ourself concealed,
Should startle most;
Assassin, hid in our apartment,
Be horror's least.
The prudent carries a revolver,
He bolts the door,
O'erlooking a superior spectre
More near.
Before I begin the analysis I would like to thank Carolyn Hembree, who brought this to my attention on Twitter. Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.
It's difficult to put into words the impact that Emily Dickinson has had, both on poetry and on English literature as a whole. She only reached literary acclaim after her death, with her first collection being published 4 years after her passing.(Habegger 2002) She became well known for her acute observations on both the natural world and the minutiae of everyday life. These skills were honed over the course of her education and later sharpened to an extreme point by her own struggles with religion and science. (Wills 2020) The poet emerged firmly in the camp of the latter in the later years of her life.
All this is brought to bear in One Need Not Be a Chamber. In the poem, Dickinson constructs an eerie parallel between the human mind and inner demons, Invoking that most gothic of tropes; the haunted house. Whilst the transformation of old Victorian houses into the default horror homestead would come later (Wills 2020; Blakemore 2018), the American gothic genre came into full swing during Dickinson’s lifetime(Weinstock 2017), with the poet herself becoming a key contributor.
Looking at this poem it’s not hard to see why.
From the very first line we understand that the subject of the poem is a haunting. Dickinson explains that the human mind can be far more labyrinthine than any mere building, with corridors surpassing Material place.
In the second stanza she exposes the true peril of inner turmoil expressing how much better it would be to receive an actual supernatural manifestation that to struggle with your own inner demons:
Far safer, of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than an interior confronting
That whiter host
This stanza is written in the style that would become synonymous with Dickinson. Firstly it is concise, as are all the other stanzas here. Dickinson was able to create a comprehensive set of images that would ensare the reader with an economy of words that is, even by contemporary standards, remarkable. That cohesion and fullness of image was aided by the musicality of her verse, which would carry the reader through with ease. She achieved this in two ways; unique but consistent structure and slant rhyme.
Throughout her body of work Dickinson employed a wide range of styles and structures, constantly finding new ways to express her inner world but each poem, whilst often utilising unique forms, would maintain its structure rigorously throughout. She was not a huge fan of Pentameter but rather favoured tetrameter, four metrical feet(Miller and Sánchez-Eppler 2022).
However it is her use of rhyme that often signs her work. Her favourite rhyme scheme was ABCB which is on display here. Meeting and Confronting have no direct rhyme, whilst ghost and host are a perfect match. She would bridge the lack of direct rhyme using slant rhyme(Miller and Sánchez-Eppler 2022), otherwise known as partial rhyme. The ing of the first and third line provides that.
Dickinson continues her encyclopaedia of gothic tropes in the next stanza, comparing more classic horror situations to the far riskier prospect of introspection:
Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one's own self encounter
In lonesome place.The gothic setting of an old church with some grim being in pursuit, is for Dickinson’s speaker far preferable to even a moment alone with their own thoughts. You might notice the unusual use of punctuation, pauses where they are not needed and capitalizations in unusual places. Here the intermittent grammar is used to create a sense of hesitation, a trepidation on the part of the speaker to continue.
But continue they must and in the next stanza the true spectre of the piece is revealed: Ourself, behind ourself concealed,
Should startle most;
Assassin, hid in our apartment,
Be horror's least.
So according to the speaker, the true enemy is yourself, a far more daunting foe than some meagre assassin who only means to end our lives. There is a beautiful sense of irony in all these stanzas as, more often than not, the things that Dickinson is contrasting her dark night of soul with represent a far greater threat. Her images have a wonderful sense of continuity and consistency once again as the 2nd and 4th lines start and complete the scale of fear from most to least.
The final stanza of the poem is a recognition that preparation does not always prevent disaster:
The prudent carries a revolver,
He bolts the door,
O'erlooking a superior spectre
More near.
No revolver or strong lock can keep you safe from your inner demons, and no amount of precaution can protect you from the way your inner demons will haunt you.
I absolutely love this poem. I find it’s tone to be almost post-modernist in the way that it plays with the tropes and conventions of the gothic genre. At every point Dickinson subverts her readers' expectation of the supernatural with the altogether more modern concern of mental health and conscience. In that way, I think it does an incredible job of showcasing just how unique Dickinson was as a poet of her time and just why her legacy has endured since her death.
Speaking of death, our next poem is one that also takes stock of the human soul and psyche. This time, what happens to it in the wake of tragedy. This is The Death Watch Beetle by Linda Pastan:
1.
A cardinal hurls itself
at my window all morning long,
trying so hard to penetrate
its own reflection
I almost let it in myself,
though once I saw
another red bird, crazed
by the walls of a room,
spatter its feathers
all over the house.
2.
My whole childhood is coming apart,
the last stitches
about to be ripped out
with your death,
and I will be left—ridiculous,
to write
condolence letters
to myself.
3.
The deathwatch beetle
earned its name
not from its ugliness
or our terror
of insects
but simply because of the sound
it makes, ticking.
4.
When your spirit
perfects itself,
will it escape
out of a nostril,
or through the spiral
passage of an ear?
Or is it even now battering
against your thin skull, wild
to get through, blood brother
to this crimson bird? I’m fascinated by the construction of this poem. Each stanza is a tiny vignette of terror with a single tragic theme tying it all together. Linda Pastan was a poet who wrote relentlessly about the ordinary, but with an oddly sinister focus. Here is a quote from the poet from her interview with The Paris Review:
‘’I am indeed interested, you might say obsessed, not with ordinary life per se but with the dangers lurking just beneath its seemingly placid surface, one of those dangers being loss itself. Death, of course, is the ultimate danger, the ultimate loss, and as I move closer to it, I write about it more frequently and perhaps more feelingly. Though I recently came upon some poems I wrote when I was twelve, and they, too, are about death.’’(Dueben 2016)
A more fitting quote for a Halloween special I simply cannot imagine. This poem is a testament to Pastan’s focus and attention to detail with death and grief. Each stanza, as I said, is a vignette of terror, but one that focuses on an aspect of death. The first stanza emphasises the senselessness of it:
A cardinal hurls itself
at my window all morning long,
trying so hard to penetrate
its own reflection
I almost let it in myself,
though once I saw
another red bird, crazed
by the walls of a room,
spatter its feathers
all over the house.
There is something instantly macabre in the image of this deathwish gripped cardinal. The animal itself is crimson that most ubiquitous of horror colours, sharing it with blood. The true horror of this bird though, lies in its repeated smashing against a window. For me, this is an instant reference to Edgar Allan Poe, who frequently wrote about sinister repetition of a single action, often driving his protagonists to insanity(Botting n.d.).
The speaker is driven to the point of crazed compassion, considering letting the creature in. We are then met with the horrific revelation that our speaker has seen such a thing before and it ended in feathers all over the house.
The use of the word spatter is very intentional here, meant to invoke the idea of blood yet again. The metaphor of the crimson bird as a harbinger of death is a masterful one, and no one had mastered the art of the contemporary dark metaphor quite like Linda Pastan (“Website,” n.d.).
Why do I say that it is a harbinger of death, this relentless little bird is a stand in for the inevitability of death. It is always there and will not be denied. However our speaker is also familiar with it and the chaos it left in its wake, as so many of us are.
From there the second stanza shifts its focus to a new scene:
My whole childhood is coming apart,
the last stitches
about to be ripped out
with your death,
and I will be left—ridiculous,
to write
condolence letters
to myself.
In this stanza we are given a hint as to who is dying in this particular poem. My whole childhood is coming apart is a hint that Pastan is about to lose a parent or parental figure. The image is once again macabre in the extreme with stitches being ripped an odd invocation of a wound reopening or simply an unravelling. The loneliness of grief is given heavy emphasis in the phrase:
and I will be left—ridiculous,
to write
condolence letters
to myself.
This then is a kind of pre-elegy poem, to someone who is yet to die. Leaving the speaker to deal with their looming passing and subsequent red bird waiting to spatter itself.
The third stanza sees the eponymous Death Watch Beetle make its appearance and the Poe imagery make a return:
The deathwatch beetle
earned its name
not from its ugliness
or our terror
of insects
but simply because of the sound
it makes, ticking.
Here Pastan provides us with a rather matter of fact poetic description of how the deathwatch beetle did in fact get its name. It’s not a sentry of the dying but rather a timepiece counting down to something. The horror here can better be understood in the context of the previous two stanzas. Pastan is waiting for someone to die and their dread of that moment makes each tick of the clock unbearable.
How did the beetles ticking become associated with death then? In my research for this episode I found a fascinating account from Naturalist Thomas Browne, who had undertaken writing a manual of common errors called Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Here is his entry on the Death Watch Beetle:
Few ears have escaped the noise of the dead-watch, that is, the little clicking [sic] sound heard often in many rooms, somewhat resembling that of a watch; and this is conceived to be of an evil omen or prediction of some persons death: wherein notwithstanding there is nothing of rational presage or just cause of terrour unto melancholy and meticulous heads. For this noise is made by a little sheath-winged gray insect found often in wainscot, benches, and wood-work in the Summer. We have taken many thereof, and kept them in thin boxes, wherein I have heard and seen them work and knack with a little proboscis or trunk against the side of the box, like a picus martius, or woodpecker against a tree....He that could extinguish the terrifying apprehensions hereof, might prevent the passions of the heart, and many cold sweats in grandmothers and nurses, who in the sickness of children, are so startled with these noises." (II.vii, 1650 edition)(Killeen n.d.)
It is also rumoured that his very same beetle influenced Edgar Allan Poe to write The Tell Tale Heart (“Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Poe Studies - Poe Newsletter - Thoreau and the Deathwatch in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart” n.d.).
So far we have seen the inevitability, chaos and anticipation of death, the fourth stanza reveals a final aspect: When your spirit
perfects itself,
will it escape
out of a nostril,
or through the spiral
passage of an ear?
Or is it even now battering
against your thin skull, wild
to get through, blood brother
to this crimson bird?
The crimson bird returns in a way, as Pastan contemplates the form their soul might take upon departure. A further clue that this person, whomever is dying, may be sick or unresponsive, only adding to the frustration our speaker feels.
They contemplate the various escape routes a soul might use, only to settle on the disturbing image established in the first stanza;
now battering
against your thin skull, wild
to get through, blood brother
to this crimson bird?
Our poet imagines that their relative wants nothing but release from the tyranny of sickness and is desperate for a release from death and so a strange kind of relief is the fourth aspect of death in the poem. It may grant a suffering person release from their pain if not the living they leave behind.
I stumbled upon this poem quite by accident and have been obsessed with it ever since. While I think its subject matter is very dark I think that Pastan’s gorgeous writing and beautiful imagery elevate it to something beyond a miserable contemplation of the grim reaper.
When she was alive, Pastan was often asked why she wrote on such dark and hopeless things. As a poet should, she penned a poem in response. Here is her reading of it at the Dodge Poetry Festival:
https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/pe11.rla.genre.poetry.pastdark/why-are-your-poems-so-dark-by-linda-pastan/ (Why Are Your Poems So Dark?, by Linda Pastan 1969)
Before we continue, I have a favour to ask; if you’ve been enjoying this particularly spooky edition of the podcast or if you’re a regular listener, please consider leaving it a review wherever you listen, just a start rating will do as it really does help the podcast get out to more people.
If you know someone who’d enjoy the horrors of this episode, please consider sending it to them directly. With that being said, on with the show.
Our final poem for this Halloween episode is The Kraken by Lord Alfred Tennyson, a poem whose horrific vision of a beast would go on to inspire an entire multiverse of terror and woe:Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
Reading this, it’s difficult not to see how it would have influenced H.P. Lovecraft’s now infamous Cthulhu mythos. But the poem is far more than just inspiration for another work.
Alfred Lord Tennyson is today widely regarded as one of the most popular Victorian poets(Academy of American Poets 2000). He was an incredibly structured poet, very keen to invoke the correct forms in his work. This poem is a actually variation on a petrarchan sonnet, a poem consisting of 14 lines divided into two parts: an octave and a sestet.(Boland and Strand 2001). I call this a variation because keen eyed observers will notice that the final section has 7 lines instead of the customary 6.
Despite his love of strict form his themes on the other hand could be wild and varied. This apocalyptic vision has stirred wild conjecture from critics as the imagery and central subject of the poem is so open. Some critics believe it to be a work of politics, the slumbering beast being the working classes, whose inevitable revolution would bring about the end of civilization (Boland and Strand 2001; Preyer n.d.). Tennyson was a conservative, can you tell?
Others wrote that the poem was meant to represent repressed fear and the depths of the psyche, the kraken being the unconscious surging forward to disrupt the passive life a person has been living.(Young-Zook n.d.)
Regardless of the core meaning, it is the image Tennyson paints that I find most intriguing. It is a poem that comes early in the esteemed poet's career, but as critic John D. Rosenberg wrote:
“the germ of all Tennyson’s poetry [the poet] stakes out his
essential subject—the twilight world of myth in which consciousness
and unconsciousness intersect,”(Rosenberg n.d.)
Tennyson is writing on a truly epic, mythological scale. Let’s take a look at the opening octave:
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
This is true language of doom and gloom. From thunders, to abysmal seas and places where the sunlight flees, Tennyson is taking us to the deepest point of the ocean where no person has managed to venture. The poet creates a haunted place where we as readers do not necessarily want to go.
The traditional rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet is ABBA ABBA(“Poetry 101: What Is a Petrarchan Sonnet? Learn About Petrarchan Sonnets With Examples,” n.d.). However, this poem instead chooses something a little different: ABAB ABBA. A is defined by the first line and deep, so sleep is corresponding, then A is redefined when the group of 4 begins again and swell is the rhyme with cell corresponding. Likewise The B of the structure is defined by the second line sea followed by Flee. There are many reasons Tennyson might have done this. His Victorian audience would be very familiar with the standard form of the sonnet and so in choosing to vary the structure immediately, I believe he aimed to lure them in with something different. Then return to the familiar, to almost lure them along. All this comes to shape the poem in an almost prophetic way, with some people claiming that the language is Delphic in nature.(Preyer n.d.). This is fitting given that Tennyson was preoccupied with , as Rosenberg put it earlier, the twilight world of myth.
It also shows the astuteness of the young Tennyson in understanding what got the Victorian public excited. During the Victorian era, there was an absolute craze for all things sea monster with The Times Newspaper stating: “It was long since discovered that nothing is so fascinating to an English crowd as a sea-monster.” (Bushnell n.d.)
This craze coincided with the rise of Darwin and his theory of Evolution, which in turn led to an increase in scientific exploration and classification of animal life.(Bushnell n.d.).
This stirred Tennyson's imagination and we can see hints of Darwin’s theories in phrases like millennial growth and height.
There is more evidence of scientific language in the final 5 lines of the poem: Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
These are the truly apocalyptic visions of this Kraken. Who is described as polypi, the Victorian terms for octopi and squid, cephalopods and other such creatures. (Bushnell n.d.) The scale of Tennyson’s Kraken is made clear in his description of its giant arms. The ancient nature of it is highlighted by the phrase lain for ages . Then comes it's inevitable awakening when In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die it will mean the end for it and possibly for us two.
These harrowing lines are surely the ones that would take root in the imagination of H.P. Lovecraft, the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, another ancient being with an octopus-like visage. Those giant arms terrifying tentacles would become a defining trait of all his fiction and indeed all the stories that would spring forth from his canon.(Price n.d.)
Indeed we know that Lovecraft was somewhat obsessed with Tennyson in his youth. As academic Richard Maxwell Writes:
‘’H. R Lovecraft also connected knowledge of the Kraken with knowledge
of the cosmos, but he made the link in quite a different manner. As a young
child (between three and seven years old), Lovecraft "would spout Tennyson
from the table-top."(Maxwell n.d.)
We may never know the true meaning of Tennyson’s poem. The Kraken was published in his collection Poems Chiefly Lyrical and then he dropped it from all future collections. It’s unclear whether he was ashamed of his poem or felt it no longer represented his writing. But , perhaps, just maybe, like the rest of us; he came to fear it too.
That is all for the 2023 Words That Burn Halloween Special, I hope you are now suitably shaking in your boots. I want to give a massive thank you to all the people who suggested poems, rest assured if you didn’t hear your pick, it may well be on the chopping block for next year.
Did you have a favourite poem? If so, I'd love to hear it. If you’d like to get in touch with me there are a few ways to do so.
Thank you once again for taking the time to listen to the podcast once again and I wish you a truly terrifying Halloween.
Words That Burn is written and produced by me, Benjamin Collopy.
Get In Touch:
Follow the Podcast On Instagram
Follow the Podcast on X/Twitter
Works Cited:
Academy of American Poets. 2000. “Alfred, Lord Tennyson.” Poets.org. Poets.org - Academy of American Poets. July 13, 2000. https://poets.org/poet/alfred-lord-tennyson.
Blakemore, Erin. 2018. “How Victorian Mansions Became the Default Haunted House.” JSTOR Daily. October 16, 2018. https://daily.jstor.org/how-victorian-mansions-became-the-default-haunted-house/.
Boland, Eavan, and Mark Strand. 2001. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms.
Botting, F. n.d. “Poe’s Phantasmagoreality.” Paperpile. Accessed October 25, 2023. https://paperpile.com/app/p/94066d98-c829-0f67-b32d-280e7002d7bf.
Bushnell, K. P. n.d. “TENNYSON’S KRAKEN UNDER THE MICROSCOPE AND IN THE AQUARIUM.” Paperpile. Accessed October 26, 2023. https://paperpile.com/app/p/72c0bc87-5028-071b-ae19-464877076711.
Dueben, Alex. 2016. “Linda Pastan Talks About Her New Collection, ‘Insomnia.’” The Paris Review. January 6, 2016. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/01/06/the-looming-dark-an-interview-with-linda-pastan/.
“Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Poe Studies - Poe Newsletter - Thoreau and the Deathwatch in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart.” n.d. Accessed October 25, 2023. https://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1971105.htm.
Habegger, Alfred. 2002. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson. Modern Library.
Killeen, K. n.d. “Thomas Browne: Selected Writings.” Paperpile. Accessed October 25, 2023. https://paperpile.com/app/p/5b4ceb87-a00e-0a04-ae97-8dc015362b56.
Maxwell, R. n.d. “Unnumbered Polypi.” Paperpile. Accessed October 26, 2023. https://paperpile.com/app/p/029b08e8-f2a6-0612-b2ad-51bb271e9563.
Miller, Cristanne, and Karen Sánchez-Eppler. 2022. The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson. Oxford University Press.
“Poetry 101: What Is a Petrarchan Sonnet? Learn About Petrarchan Sonnets With Examples.” n.d. Masterclass.com. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/poetry-101-what-is-a-petrarchan-sonnet-learn-about-petrarchan-sonnets-with-examples.
Preyer, R. n.d. “Alfred Tennyson: The Poetry and Politics of Conservative Vision.” Paperpile. Accessed October 25, 2023. https://paperpile.com/app/p/8f6dbaf7-b730-06b0-b319-657091d883bd.
Price, R. M. n.d. “The Cthulhu Cycle: Thirteen Tentacles of Terror.” Paperpile. Accessed October 26, 2023. https://paperpile.com/app/p/f65f5d51-a473-0ef4-a5c4-8396dd41b9b7.
Rosenberg, J. D. n.d. “Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature.” Paperpile. Accessed October 26, 2023. https://paperpile.com/app/p/b99b395b-1514-0af4-978b-b7eda3fea1e4.
“Website.” n.d. https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2023/02/01/linda-pastan-poet-dead/.
Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. 2017. The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic. Cambridge University Press.
Why Are Your Poems So Dark?, by Linda Pastan. 1969. GBH. https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/pe11.rla.genre.poetry.pastdark/why-are-your-poems-so-dark-by-linda-pastan/.
Wills, Matthew. 2020. “How Emily Dickinson Wrestled with Darwinism.” JSTOR Daily. March 16, 2020. https://daily.jstor.org/how-emily-dickinson-wrestled-with-darwinism/.
Young-Zook, M. M. n.d. “SONS AND LOVERS: TENNYSON’S FRATERNAL PATERNITY.” Paperpile. Accessed October 26, 2023. https://paperpile.com/app/p/e3fa078e-2070-0316-a48a-555971f5ed20.