Darks arts for dark days: Poetry on All Hallows' Eve [Katy Evans-Bush]

The old church in Heptonstall, Yorkshire

Rather than leave on such a public footing, I see I'm still live - so I'll consider the day a bit before signing off. I've always felt October 31st to be a highly charged day, not like other days - even nowadays: there is a feeling of things being afoot. In the UK this year this is even the day the clocks have gone back: suddenly the trees are seriously yellow, and more bald than yesterday; the light has flattened out overnight to something hard-edged and intent on - well, on what? The ground, maybe. Or something not quite visible.

Tomorrow is All Saints' Day, when the dead - our dead - roam the earth. So somehow this point is a pivot, on which the year seems to turn. We're dead opposite Easter, with its cheery daffodils and new hats. In Mexico they'll be celebrating the Day of the Dead; and then we all start getting ready for Christmas and the other festivals of light. For now, though, we're in the thick of it, the thickened atmosphere that goes with the annual thinning of the membrane.

It's a day for poetry: verbal gateway to the other side of consciousness. In his famously contentious "Dark Arts" lecture a few years ago, Don Paterson wrote of poetry as incantatory, invocatory, magical, even dangerousl: "poetry, from the earliest so deeply connected to the world and our own survival in it, was quickly invested with magical properties, and soon took the form of the spell, the riddle, the curse, the blessing, the prayer."

Real arcana is interesting only in prospect. These formulae must be very dull, if we are to do our job of alienating the amateur. Arcana are things as small, specific, useful and horrible as the Horseman's Word. Actually the horseman's word - which gives the apprentice ploughman power over horses and women when it's whispered in their ears - is also the secret formula for all poems. It was unwisely published in F. Marian MacNeill's The Silver Bough, so now it's in the public domain you might as well know it. In Scots it's twa-in-yin; two in one.

The object of a poem is to place a new unity in the language...

John Keats was born on this day. A Halloween baby, a born poet, and very much a mystical poet. I linked yesterday to his poem - one of his last, written on his deathbed in Rome for Fanny Brawne (unless I'm mistakenly remembering some other story) - This Living Hand. It never fails to send chills down my spine - it invokes his hand, his living self.

But another poem of his that arrives, I think, at the misty, half-unconscious dwelling-place evoked - or invoked - by Don's lecture is this one:

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
    Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
    And no birds sing.

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
    So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
    And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
    With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
    Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
    Full beautiful - a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
    And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
    And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
    And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,
    And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
    A faery's song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
    And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said -
    'I love thee true'.

She took me to her elfin grot,
    And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
    With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep
    And there I dreamed - Ah! woe betide! -
The latest dream I ever dreamt
    On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
    Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried - 'La Belle Dame sans Merci
    Hath thee in thrall!'

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
    With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
    On the cold hill's side.

And this is why I sojourn here
    Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
    And no birds sing.

Thankyouthankyouthankyou, Best American poetry! It has been wonderful. The invitation to follow me back to my own blog still stands, but I'm no Faery Queen to enchant you and make you follow...

Comments

[DL]

What a wonderful writer you are, and how lucky for us to have had you this whole week.

[DL]

Like you, I think, I associate those two Keats poems, "This Living Hand" and "La Belle Dame sans Merci" with fall -- not autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, but the more desolate fall. The knight at arms, alone and palely loitering, isn't he Keats himself, victim of a Halloween joke gone wrong?