This week’s poem, chosen for Halloween, is “The Eldritch Dark” by Clark Ashton Smith.
Now as the twilight’s doubtful interval
Closes with night’s accomplished certainty,
A wizard wind goes crying eerily;
And in the glade unsteady shadows crawl,
- Clark Ashton Smith (1893—1961)
Poem 410. The Eldritch Dark
Now as the twilight’s doubtful interval
Closes with night’s accomplished certainty,
A wizard wind goes crying eerily;
And in the glade unsteady shadows crawl,
Timed to the trees, whose voices rear and fall
As with some dreadful witches’ ecstasy,
Flung upward to the dark, whence glitters free
The crooked moon, impendent over all.
Twin veils of covering cloud and silence thrown
Across the movement and the sound of things,
Make blank the night, till in the broken west
The moon’s ensanguined blade awhile is shown….
The night grows whole again…. The shadows rest,
Gathered beneath a greater shadow’s wings.
This is very different to the poem we usually think of when sonnets are mentioned: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day”) but poetry is versatile and a sonnet may be dark and brooding just as it may airily speak of love.
Clark Ashton Smith was a writer of weird tales who was a contemporary of, and corresponded with Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan the Barbarian) and H.P. Lovecraft (the progenitor of the Cthulhu Mythos). He influenced Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Fritz Leiber, and George R.R. Martin, amongst others.
This poem seems quite appropriate for Halloween, and especially this evening where the moon is voyaging amongst the clouds and my home-made lights have attracted some young visitors to enjoy the treats on offer.
Smith begins with the transition between day and night—that “doubtful interval” of dusk which is closed definitively by nightfall. He appeals to our senses—we hear the sorrowful wind and we see the shadows shifting as the moon’s light is filtered by the moving trees who modulate the wind with their own chorus so that we can imagine the witches of Macbeth cackling and cavorting madly, the creaking and groaning rising towards the crescent of the moon, looming ominously above.
The clouds gather, the wind drops, and silence falls so that blackness claims all until the sickle of the moon is seen again stained with a red haze in the western sky before the night gathers once more, enfolding the lesser shadows in its greater darkness.
I like this poem because it evokes so many creepy ideas in just a few lines. It seems almost like a speech from one of Shakespeare’s plays, the language is so archaic and abstruse and, as I said earlier it is reminiscent of the scenes with the witches in Macbeth.
There are a couple of performances online but the one I like is by The Wisconsin Idea Theatre.