Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Some Spooky Poems for Halloween

Since it is Halloween, here is some eerie poetry for your perusal.
This one is by Robert Frost titled "The Witch of Coos":
http://www.bartleby.com/300/2462.html
One detects a touch of tongue-in-cheek here; the mother and son maybe having a little fun at the guest's expense.  I read a footnote somewhere that there was a French Canadian connection,  "Toffil Lajway" probably actually being "Theofil La Joie".
This next one is by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Mother's Ghost", in which a deceased wife puts the richly deserved fear of God into her husband for neglect of the children:
http://www.hwlongfellow.org/poems_poem.php?pid=2091
This one was in an American Literature anthology when I was in high school, entitled "Old Christmas Morning", referring to the date Christmas was celebrated on the Julian calendar.  My adolescent self found it intriguingly creepy:
https://allpoetry.com/Old-Christmas-Morning
A cautionary tale about blood feuds.

8 comments:

  1. Well! That "Old Christmas Morning" is great! Didn't see that coming at all!

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    1. I don't know much about the poet, Roy Helton. The only thing I could find was a short wiki article that listed some out of print works and said he used to write for The Atlantic. One of those tantalizingly obscure writers.

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  2. Nice ones. I don't know if there's such a thing as holloween art, but this painting by Jamie Wyeth has always seemed creepy ... Pumpkinhead - self portrait

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  3. Kinda looks like me after I've had a few.

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  4. Did you guys see that Jim Mc is ok?

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