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]

Agreed -- it's a haint, not a source of awful awe.

[sovay]

Agreed -- it's a haint, not a source of awful awe.

I have it mixed up mentally with W. H. Auden's "O Where Are You Going?" which is like satire with horror shot through it. That gap is the grave where the tall return if you say so, Manly Wade Wellman. Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly who invited M. R. James.

[larryhammer]

I can see this confusion.