This week’s choice is “The Haunted Oak” by Paul Laurence Dunbar, and I have chosen it to mark Halloween, although its message is a deeper, darker and more important one than the pumpkins and dressing-up normally associated with this festival.
They’d charged him with the old, old crime
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872—1906)
And set him fast in jail:
Oh, why does the dog howl all night long
And why does the night wind wail?
Poem 344. The Haunted Oak
Pray why are you so bare, so bare
Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw
Runs a shudder over me?
My leaves were green as the best, I trow
And sap ran free in my veins
But I saw in the moonlight dim and weird
A guiltless victim’s pains.
I bent me down to hear his sigh;
I shook with his gurgling moan
And I trembled sore when they rode away
And left him here alone.
They’d charged him with the old, old crime
And set him fast in jail:
Oh, why does the dog howl all night long
And why does the night wind wail?
He prayed his prayer and he swore his oath
And he raised his hand to the sky;
But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear
And the steady tread drew nigh.
Who is it rides by night, by night
Over the moonlit road?
And what is the spur that keeps the pace
What is the galling goad?
And now they beat at the prison door
“Ho, keeper, do not stay!
We are friends of him whom you hold within
And we fain would take him away
From those who ride fast on our heels
With mind to do him wrong;
They have no care for his innocence
And the rope they bear is long.”
They have fooled the jailer with lying words
They have fooled the man with lies;
The bolts unbar, the locks are drawn
And the great door open flies.
Now they have taken him from the jail
And hard and fast they ride
And the leader laughs low down in his throat
As they halt my trunk beside.
Oh, the judge, he wore a mask of black
And the doctor one of white
And the minister, with his oldest son
Was curiously bedight.
Oh, foolish man, why weep you now?
‘Tis but a little space
And the time will come when these shall dread
The mem’ry of your face.
I feel the rope against my bark
And the weight of him in my grain
I feel in the throe of his final woe
The touch of my own last pain.
And never more shall leaves come forth
On the bough that bears the ban;
I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead
From the curse of a guiltless man.
And ever the judge rides by, rides by
And goes to hunt the deer
And ever another rides his soul
In the guise of a mortal fear.
And ever the man he rides me hard
And never a night stays he;
For I feel his curse as a haunted bough
On the trunk of a haunted tree.
This poem tells the story of an old tragedy and the aftermath. The narrator queries why he shudders when he passes beneath a particular bough of an old oak, and why that bough remains strangely devoid of growth though the rest of the tree is green.
The bough responds to this query, saying that it was once as green and vigorous as the rest of the tree but that it once played a part in the murder of an innocent man, lynched and left hanging from the bough.
The man had been wrongfully detained for some unspecified but serious crime and was awaiting trial in prison despite his prayers and oaths. As he listened to the mournful howling of a dog and the whining of the wind, he hears the sound of horses trotting towards the jail as riders approach, though he does not understand their identities nor their intentions.
These men purport to be friends of the accused and deceive the jailor into surrendering his charge to them by suggesting the imminent arrival of a group of shadowy vigilantes determined to summarily execute the man for this imagined wrong. Their lies bear fruit and the man, deceived just as his jailor, is given over into the hands of these villains who are themselves the vigilantes.
They speedily escort their victim to the tree and the leader utters a low laugh as they make ready to enact their revenge. We see a doctor, a judge, a minister (of the church) and the minister’s son, prepared to put the man to death without a trial or a jury. Their faces may be masked but there is no mistaking their intent and the man realises his fate and sobs, though the tree foretells that in a little time, these men will blench at the memory of his face.
The deed is done and the bough suffers for its complicity in the deed: “I am dried and dead/From the curse of a guiltless man.” It is not alone in this, for the judge hunts frequently nearby but has a mortal dread of the tree and its withered bough. The tree is haunted night after night by this spectre and its unremitting curse—“And never a night stays he” means that he never ceases, rather than he never stops by.
I like it because it is an atmospheric poem, it tells its story well and we get a real sense of the horror of the victim’s death and the consequences for the tree and for at least one of the murderers. It reminds me a little of “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes and also “The Listeners” by Walter de la Mare.
Dunbar uses the familiar clichés of dogs howling and the wind wailing to evoke a supernatural feeling. The supposed offence is unspecified but it becomes clearer when we remember that Paul Dunbar was an African-American poet whose parents were enslaved in Kentucky. The victim is a black man and the “old, old crime” is the crime that many black men were accused of—rape. Like Tom Robinson in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the unnamed victim is the subject of an attempt to extract him from jail and exact summary justice. Unlike Tom Robinson, this poor man has no Atticus Finch to defend him, and the lying pillars of society have their way.
The idea of a haunting expresses not just the guilt of those involved in the lynching but also the general guilt of those who perpetrated and perpetuated the vicious trade of slavery. The Western world is still haunted by the spectres of those whose lives were brutally sacrificed for the benefit of rapacious and racist men.
I found this poem on the Haunted Britain and Ireland website which has a good collection of spooky poems, and if you don’t like this one, perhaps you will find a more suitable poem there.
Links
- Read some background on the poem by James A. Emanuel at Modern American Poetry Site.
- Watch Herbert Woodward Martin’s performance of the poem on YouTube.
- Visit the Haunted Britain and Ireland website and read their collection of poems.