Hallows Coming – Frost

Posted on October 19, 2019 by Professor Taboo

Frost’s poem diverges a bit from my previous Halloween poems. Loss and loneliness is experienced in many various ways by different people in unique settings, none exactly identical. Memories of missed loved ones can inspire or haunt us, or both.

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Dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls,
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.

O’er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
The orchard tree has grown one copse
Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
On that disused and forgotten road
That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;

The whippoorwill is coming to shout
And hush and cluck and flutter about:
I hear him begin far enough away
Full many a time to say his say
Before he arrives to say it out.

It is under the small, dim, summer star.
I know not who these mute folk are
Who share the unlit place with me–
Those stones out under the low-limbed tree
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.

They are tireless folk, but slow and sad,
Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad,–
With none among them that ever sings,
And yet, in view of how many things,
As sweet companions as might be had.

— Robert Frost, Ghost House

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Hallows Coming – Coleridge

Posted on October 15, 2019 by Professor Taboo

Another Hallows tale of prudish jealousy, a kind man’s gesture declared heresy, a tiny town filled with giants and colossal piety.

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I have walked a great while over the snow,
And I am not tall nor strong.
My clothes are wet, and my teeth are set,
And the way was hard and long.
I have wandered over the fruitful earth,
But I never came here before.
Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!

The cutting wind is a cruel foe.
I dare not stand in the blast.
My hands are stone, and my voice a groan,
And the worst of death is past.
I am but a little maiden still,
My little white feet are sore.
Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!

Her voice was the voice that women have,
Who plead for their heart’s desire.
She came—she came—and the quivering flame
Sunk and died in the fire.
It never was lit again on my hearth
Since I hurried across the floor,
To lift her over the threshold, and let her in at the door.

— Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, The Witch

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Care to share your own favorites of fall and the season’s Hallows? Share your most spooky stories, special beloved celebrations, how you and/or your family decorate your home—pics will be required! What about meals or snacks prepared and enjoyed, or better still what astonishing events of paranormal activity have you experienced personally or heard from a close, good (dignified) friend! You have until November 1st to remember them and comment throughout this Hallows theme.

There’s No Way!

Posted on October 14, 2019 by Professor Taboo

A new Follower just reblogged this post, my post from March 2016. The new Follower’s timing was remarkably uncanny for this past week I’ve had, an exhausting pummeling upon me and my sometimes ridiculous loyalty and endurance with an increasingly CONSUMED world enslaved to communicating by unreliable electronic devices, their imperfect software/apps, via multiple distribution substations or towers, and IP-spooling for heavy traffic—something few people understand out of naivety—then have knee-jerk reactions when transmissions-receptions are not immediate or timely for their individual clocks. Sometimes I really, excruciatingly miss live talking over phones, but especially miss organic, human interaction face-to-face in this often hectic society. It seems it is a slow dying custom between humans these days, at least in a hyper-developed country such as ours. Twitter, Instagram, Android-iPhone texting, or Facebook messaging have replaced the multi-faceted intriguing(?) ways humans fully express themselves live to each other.

Why must we communicate with each other ~~only~~ through such inanimate, artificial, coldly inorganic electronic platforms/apps that are quite unreliable sometimes, limiting, or operate in ways SO MANY do not fully understand? Seriously, is everyone an electronic or software engineer? No, of course not. So try to step back for several minutes, an hour(?), to rethink what you may not be aware of during your emotional, rash but temporarily valid reaction and consider all variables outside of yourself. We modern humans trapped inside this monthly-changing technological Ghosts in the Machines just might not know every single significant factors in other’s lives. Show more humble patience. It’s what everyone deserves, and maybe some day, what you deserve one day. 🙂

The Professor's Convatorium

Anyone who has had to deal with manifested psychiatric-psychological disorders like manic bipolar disorder as well as/or clinical addiction, which often go hand-in-hand, then like me you can probably relate to and empathize about why this particular song* speaks volumes to me. It captures the intensity. It covers ALL of the mental and emotional ups and downs, successes and failures, that seem to be a never-ending saga of love, hope, destruction, beauty, anger, disappointment, joy, and most of all perseverance. I sometimes wonder if staying isn’t abnormal.

I live a chemical life
I’m on a mission to try
You went insane for a day
I’ll have to shove it away
My only option is gone
Smile as they break and they fall
You want a simpler life
You can’t erase what was mine

Even though it is human nature to often seek perfection and expect perfection, we eventually find that…

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Hallows Coming – Field

Posted on October 11, 2019 by Professor Taboo

Swaying trees above shaking grass seek here, there rude boy with ample crass. Whom will this brooding wind ensnare those boys of mother’s tears?

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Have you ever heard the wind go “Yooooo”?
’Tis a pitiful sound to hear!
It seems to chill you through and through
With a strange and speechless fear.
’Tis the voice of the night that broods outside
When folks should be asleep,
And many and many’s the time I’ve cried
To the darkness brooding far and wide
Over the land and the deep:
“Whom do you want, O lonely night,
That you wail the long hours through?”
And the night would say in its ghostly way,
“Yoooooooo!
Yoooooooo!
Yoooooooo!”
My mother told me long ago
(When I was a little lad)
That when the night went wailing so,
Somebody had been bad;
And then, when I was snug in bed,
Whither I had been sent,
With the blankets pulled up round my head,
I’d think of what my mother’d said,
And wonder what boy she meant!
And, “Who’s been bad today?” I’d ask
Of the wind that hoarsely blew,
And the voice would say in its meaningful way,
“Yoooooooo!
Yoooooooo!
Yoooooooo!”

That this was true I must allow —
You’ll not believe it, though!
Yes, though I’m quite a model now,
I was not always so.
And if you doubt what things I say,
Suppose you make the test;
Suppose, when you’ve been bad some day
And up to bed are sent away
From mother and the rest —
Suppose you ask, “Who has been bad?”
And then you’ll hear what’s true,
For the wind will moan in its ruefulest tone:
“Yoooooooo!
Yoooooooo!
Yoooooooo!”

— Eugene Field, The Night Wind

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Hallows Coming – Aiken

Posted on October 8, 2019 by Professor Taboo

Following we must to Hallows night, eyes see clouds dark, birds, Moon red, not right.

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he rose among us where we lay.
She wept, we put our work away.
She chilled our laughter, stilled our play;
And spread a silence there.
And darkness shot across the sky,
And once, and twice, we heard her cry;
And saw her lift white hands on high
And toss her troubled hair.

What shape was this who came to us,
With basilisk eyes so ominous,
With mouth so sweet, so poisonous,
And tortured hands so pale?
We saw her wavering to and fro,
Through dark and wind we saw her go;
Yet what her name was did not know;
And felt our spirits fail.

We tried to turn away; but still
Above we heard her sorrow thrill;
And those that slept, they dreamed of ill
And dreadful things:
Of skies grown red with rending flames
And shuddering hills that cracked their frames;
Of twilights foul with wings;

And skeletons dancing to a tune;
And cries of children stifled soon;
And over all a blood-red moon
A dull and nightmare size.
They woke, and sought to go their ways,
Yet everywhere they met her gaze,
Her fixed and burning eyes.

Who are you now, —we cried to her—
Spirit so strange, so sinister?
We felt dead winds above us stir;
And in the darkness heard
A voice fall, singing, cloying sweet,
Heavily dropping, though that heat,
Heavy as honeyed pulses beat,
Slow word by anguished word.

And through the night strange music went
With voice and cry so darkly blent
We could not fathom what they meant;
Save only that they seemed
To thin the blood along our veins,
Foretelling vile, delirious pains,
And clouds divulging blood-red rains
Upon a hill undreamed.

And this we heard: “Who dies for me,
He shall possess me secretly,
My terrible beauty he shall see,
And slake my body’s flame.
But who denies me cursed shall be,
And slain, and buried loathsomely,
And slimed upon with shame.”

And darkness fell. And like a sea
Of stumbling deaths we followed, we
Who dared not stay behind.
There all night long beneath a cloud
We rose and fell, we struck and bowed,
We were the ploughman and the ploughed,
Our eyes were red and blind.

And some, they said, had touched her side,
Before she fled us there;
And some had taken her to bride;
And some lain down for her and died;
Who had not touched her hair,
Ran to and fro and cursed and cried
And sought her everywhere.

“Her eyes have feasted on the dead,
And small and shapely is her head,
And dark and small her mouth,” they said,
“And beautiful to kiss;
Her mouth is sinister and red
As blood in moonlight is.”

Then poets forgot their jeweled words
And cut the sky with glittering swords;
And innocent souls turned carrion birds
To perch upon the dead.
Sweet daisy fields were drenched with death,
The air became a charnel breath,
Pale stones were splashed with red.

Green leaves were dappled bright with blood
And fruit trees murdered in the bud;
And when at length the dawn
Came green as twilight from the east,
And all that heaving horror ceased,
Silent was every bird and beast,
And that dark voice was gone.

No word was there, no song, no bell,
No furious tongue that dream to tell;
Only the dead, who rose and fell
Above the wounded men;
And whisperings and wails of pain
Blown slowly from the wounded grain,
Blown slowly from the smoking plain;
And silence fallen again.

Until at dusk, from God knows where,
Beneath dark birds that filled the air,
Like one who did not hear or care,
Under a blood-red cloud,
An aged ploughman came alone
And drove his share through flesh and bone,
And turned them under to mould and stone;
All night long he ploughed.

— Conrad Aiken, The Vampire

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