Are there poems that make you afraid? (Poem post: fear and poetry)

[radiantfracture]

The New Yorker: Poetry: Dorothea Lasky Reads Louise Bogan

This was going to be a podcast-Friday post, but then it was more poem- than podcast-centric, and then it wasn't Friday any more. I liked the podcast episode, but mostly I liked Dorothea Lasky's discussion of Louise Bogan's poem "Little Lobelia's Song."

Imaginary Photograph: Dorothea Lasky laughing apologetically as she changes my brain about poetry and fear.

Lasky has a new collection coming out, The Shining, about her obsession with that film, and so she's been thinking about the poetry of fear.

You know, I hadn't really thought of poems as a source of fear -- even that which evokes fear, or terror, or horror, is transmuted into awe by the aesthetic context. Every angel is terrifying, but also sort of hot.

Emily Dickinson can freak me out -- "I felt a funeral in my brain." There's "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché. That has horror. Maybe "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" freaks me out a little?

Are there poems that evoke fear for you? Not just describe it, but make your body awaken to danger?

Anyway, Lasky convinced me about Louise Bogan. The deepest knowledge I had of Bogan's work until now was from the nine-minute Essential American Poets episode about her. So I was sleeping on Louise Bogan, and now I'll never sleep again.

Lasky chose the triptych "Three Songs," published in The New Yorker in 1967 and in her collection The Blue Estuaries in 1968.

Here's the first of the three, a weird little singsong right out of a horror film:

Little Lobelia's Song

I was once a part
of your blood and bone.
Now no longer --
I'm alone, I'm alone.

Each day, at dawn
I come out of your sleep;
I can't get back.
I weep, I weep.

Not lost but abandoned,
left behind,
this is my hand
upon your mind.

I know nothing.
I can barely speak.
But this is my hand
upon your cheek.

You look at your face
in the looking glass.
This is the face
My likeness has.

Give me back your sleep,
until you die,
Else I weep, weep.
Else I cry, cry.

* * * * * *

Creepy.

I don't know whether it was just my mood, but as Lasky read out the poems she'd chosen, I exclaimed aloud in my kitchen (mixing the chocolate and butterscotch and peanut butter chips into the batter) -- "what the fuck." The fear felt so present in the lines as she spoke them -- that uncanny fear of the child and of the unconscious, that which comes from you but is alien to you.

Lasky provides some autobiographical context for the poem; it's just as unsettling. Bogan used to wake up crying uncontrollably, and "Little Lobelia" is the name Bogan's daughter gave "the thing that made her cry." Lasky says that "Bogan thought of it as this child ghost inhabiting her ... and making her cry."

"I've always seen rhyme as having a haunting quality, and not necessarily being innocuous," Lasky said, which is a wonderful thought to turn over and try out.

What's the most frightening couplet one could write, I wonder. Maybe post your chilling rhymes below?

{rf}

P.S.I've remembered a poem -- song really -- that terrified me. "The Worms Crawl In" -- it was in a children's book of creepy things and it ruined me.

Comments

[larryhammer]

Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is a chiller, for me. So are, in different directions, Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and Teasdale's "There Will Come Soft Rains".

ETA: Oh, and Robinson's "Eros Turannos."

[sovay]

and Teasdale's "There Will Come Soft Rains".

I just realized I forgot the big name nightmare fuel of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est," which my high school Latin teacher read to us senior year when we had just been reading Horace. It was my introduction to Owen. It was terrible to hear. But someone still was yelling out and stumbling / And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.— Nothing of the aftermath is as bad as that image of unrescuable terror, because it describes someone dying and knowing it, even if the brutally physical last verse leaves them still alive. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. It's like radiation, the demon of the next war: struggling to get out of something that has already killed you.

[larryhammer]

My senior year of high school, I took World History at a local university through a cooperative extension program. When we got to WWI, the professor started the class by playing Eric Bogle's "No Man's Land," then talked about the horrors of the war, played it again, briefly alluded to his own experiences in Vietnam, then ended the lecture with playing it a third time.

It gutted me. "It all happened again, / And again, and again, and again, and again"

[radiantfracture]

I think I like your professor.

[larryhammer]

I certainly did.

[radiantfracture]

the big name nightmare fuel of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est,"

Ha -- I recited this at a school assembly in -- 10th? -- grade. I still have fragments by heart.

that image of unrescuable terror, because it describes someone dying and knowing it

Yeah

Many things don't automatically frighten me, but that moment of contemplation, fff k k k.

It's why the only Fear from The Magnus Archives that really gets to me is the Buried.

Oh god, that reminds me -- it's a short story, not a poem -- about a construction project disaster.

It must have been written as some sort of warning, though it was just sitting there near the front of some anthology I read sometime, waiting to scar me for life. It's a series of POV experiences of horrible death via poor safety standards.

Some sort of OSHA-funded anthology? something about labour? I can't remember now.

[sovay]

Many things don't automatically frighten me, but that moment of contemplation, fff k k k.

And both of them know it, the person it's happening to and the person who's watching and can't stop it, and the reader too is trapped witnessing: so we can dream of it now. (Poetry as contagious haunting.)

It's why the only Fear from The Magnus Archives that really gets to me is the Buried.

I still don't know The Magnus Archives, but I can imagine how that one works.

It must have been written as some sort of warning, though it was just sitting there near the front of some anthology I read sometime, waiting to scar me for life. It's a series of POV experiences of horrible death via poor safety standards.

That sounds scarifying! Was it about some famous historical disaster, or just the written equivalent of a public information film?

P.S. *hugs*

[radiantfracture]

Robinson's "Eros Turannos."

Thank you! I had not known this poem, and do find it both chilling in its inexorable progression and haunting in its conclusion. And it seems to me the rhyme is part of the working of that spell -- a ballad?

[larryhammer]

I’ve seen it called ballad-like, though honestly I think it’s more lyric intensity than anything else.

ETA: I forgot to mention, in my anthology of 100 poems by 100 poets, I chose this one for Robinson.