Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre, edited by August Derleth
418 pages
Published 1947
Read from December 9 to December 14
Rating: 3 out of 5
Spanning from the era of anonymous traditional ballads to the 1940s, this ambitious collection purported to be the first to anthologize fantasy and horror verse. It samples broadly across time, from William Blake in the 1780s to Dorothy Quick in the 1940s, and has at least one poem from each decade in between.
I decided to read it for three reasons: 1) to expand my poetry education; 2) to maybe find cool public domain lines to turn into titles; 3) to pad out each of the relevant decade tags here on my reading blog. (Hey, it’s particularly hard to find anything I want to read from the 1800s, 1810s, and 1820s. I’ll do what I must to bulk those tags up.) I was successful at 1 and 3.
There’s no way I could individually review over two hundred poems. I do want to single out a few noteworthy entries from each era, though:
Anonymous traditional ballads
Anyone familiar with Steeleye Span would know most of these selections. I’ve published a story inspired by “Twa Corbies” and a poem queering “The Wee Wee Man,” so of course I’m going to be fond of them. One new to me was “William and Marjorie,” a ghost visitation with a nicely folkloric three-sets-of-three climax, which ends with a rare triumph for the woman.
1780s-1790s
William Blake’s “Fair Eleanor” (1783) is so archetypal in its turgid gothic style that I could have sworn I read it before, but apparently not. It’s interesting to see an old poem structured more or less like a modern short story: in media res opening, followed by filling in the backstory, then climax.
Robert Burns’ “Address to the Deil” (1786) is a banger, recalling the greatest hits of Scottish Twitter as the narrator sarcastically flatters and taunts the Devil with the casual familiarity of one drinking at the same tavern.
Walter Scott’s “The Eve of St. John” (1799) is an extended variant on a common ballad trope — the fair lady wife trysts with the rival of the lord, only this time the rival is already dead — but the narrative (and its rhyme scheme) is solid.
1800s
The book’s lone selection from this decade is “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp” by Thomas Moore (1806). It’s fine. I like the imagery of the firefly lamp and the white canoe.
Why are there so many good Anglophone writings from the eighteenth century, but so few from the first couple decades of the nineteenth? Not just in this anthology, but in general.
1810s
There aren’t that many more offerings from this decade, so I’ll have to single out James Hogg’s “Kilmeny” (1813), a long narrative poem about a mortal woman who visits the land of the spirits before returning to the Scottish greenwood. Some quite lovely descriptions here.
And of course I should mention “Kubla Khan or a Vision of a Dream” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1813). Everyone quotes the opening stanzas, but the rest of the narrative is oddly unremarkable. Anticlimactic, even.
1820s
Of the two selections from this decade, I’ll have to go with John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (initially 1819, but revised in 1820, so I’m still counting it). I’ve wanted to read Keats ever since I obsessed over Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos as a fledgling adult, back in the early ’00s. I even bought a collection of Keats’ poems back then, which followed me through several moves, only to be donated unread. “Dame” turns out to be a solid enough tale of getting caught in a fae lady’s thrall. A promising introduction.
1830s
There are four poems included from this decade, the most memorable of which is Richard Harris Barham’s “The Hand of Glory” (1838). Truth be told, the narrative felt rather puerile.
1840s
Inevitably, we must single out Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” (1845). It’s one of those cultural fixtures so incessantly referenced and parodied that every kid knows about it. I read it, in fact, as a child, maybe 10 years old, expecting a tale of terror equal to its cultural ubiquity. It is, of course, nothing at all like what my childhood self expected. Rereading it for the first time as an adult, I’m impressed with the fluency of it, the seeming effortlessness of Poe’s meter and rhyme. A classic worthy of the title, just not what a preteen in the 1990s might consider “scary.”
Poe’s “Dream-Land” (1844), which I hadn’t heard of until now, reads like a draft sketch that would, via William Hope Hodgson, Weird Tales, and the 1970s adult fantasy boom, evolve into the familiar fantastic vibe of D&D. I enjoyed it!
Thomas Hood’s “The Haunted House” (1844) is excessively long to my taste, but I enjoyed the opening depiction of fauna and flower taking refuge on the grounds of the namesake haunted house.
Another one of Hood’s ghostly narratives, however, “Pompey’s Ghost” (1842), is remarkable for how racist it is. Most of the poem is spent trying to cram in puns on the word “black.” Imagine the Predator meme format, with “1840s” and “1940s” shaking hands, and the handshake is labeled “Racism.”
This was a weirdly hopping decade for poetry, at least in this book. I also want to mention “The Sands of Dee” by Charles Kingsley (1849), which makes excellent use of repetition to build atmosphere.
1850s
After the glut of poetry in the previous decade, there isn’t much to pick from in the 1850s.
“The Witch Bride” by William Allingham (1850) is a slight but well-written retread of a familiar theme.
Richard Garnett’s “The Highwayman’s Ghost” (1859) is another fun trifle with a self-explanatory title.
1860s
“The Legend of the Glaive” by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1863) is interesting as a prototype of the heightened language of classic Sword & Sorcery and its imitators. We get a reference to the hero’s “quivering sinew,” as well as catch an inkling of the far-off Conan within a ghostly Norseman’s “Gigantic sorrow.”
Another standout is one I’ve already reviewed on its own:
Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (1862). It’s the first poem in this entire collection known to be written by a woman.
1870s
James Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night” (1874) is an interminable meander through typical Romantic shades of mortality, but beginning in section IV it becomes unexpectedly compelling, repetition fashioning an uneasy map of lands between Heaven and Hell:
As I came through the desert thus it was,
As I came through the desert: Hell is mild
And piteous matched with that accursèd wild
In its own fatalistic immensity, “City” bludgeons the reader into respect, and even an occasional slip of atheistic awe. Plus it uses London as a metaphor for being alive in a godless universe, which is just about the most 1870s thing I can imagine.
1880s
James Whitcomb Riley’s “A Glimpse of Pan” (1883) is our earliest, uh, glimpse of Pan. It pre-dates Machen’s
The Great God Pan by eleven years. It isn’t much, but it does what it says on the tin, as the saying goes.
1890s
Slim pickings again for this decade. The best I can scrounge up is “Luke Havergal” by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1897), which is middling except for the astonishing couplet:
God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half of paradise
1900s
Lizette Woodworth Reese’s “A Windy Night” (1906) is unexpectedly modern, jumping from the small town mundane by the firelight to the fey hunt outside. Quite good.
1910s
“The Superstitious Ghost” by Arthur Guiterman (1918), while fine, isn’t really my cup of tea. But its humor feels like a preview of the earliest issues of F&SF thirty years in the future.
“Dave Lilly” by Joyce Kilmer (1914) jumped out at me for its Berkshires setting, name-dropping North Adams, a town my partner R and I almost moved to. The poem is otherwise unremarkable, a pleasant tale of a ghost fisherman fishing for ghost trout on the side of Greylock.
“The Sorceress of the Moon” by William Rose Benét (1914) has to take its place among the prototypes of 20th century fantasy. So much Sword & Sorcery-adjacent imagery!
1920s
Another brief bit of magic from Lizette Woodworth Reese, “Bitters” (1928) casts a botanical spell after my own heart.
Amy Lowell’s “A Dracula of the Hills” (1923) is both the first non-rhyming poem on the table of contents, and the earliest example I’ve ever read of taking a common fantasy or horror trope and setting it in the hollers of Appalachia.
Another rambling free verse poem from Lowell, “The Paper in the Gate-Legged Table” (1924), is notable for its Weird Fiction quality, presenting a tale of grass (that metaphor for mortality) coming to consume us all, and the man who strives with crazed desperation to avoid the common fate:
The terrible, blind grass, feeling its way
With little patting hands. Feeling its way
Slowly, horribly, over all mankind.
There is no safety anywhere at all
Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Hashish-Eater: or, The Apocalypse of Evil” (1922) is notable for how pompously it reads in the present day. Smith’s antique hyperbole equates being stoned to cosmic perception, and goes on longer than a doom metal track. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to enjoy here. Almost any line could inspire a painting on the side of a van:
…And I read,
Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx,
The annulling word a spiteful demon wrote
With gall of slain chimeras; and I know
What pentacles the lunar wizards use…
But Smith blathers in a similar vein with little variation for some seventeen pages. It’s a lot. It took me the better part of a day to work my way through it. (In Smith’s defense, it was a really bad day.)
Stephen Vincent Benét’s “Metropolitan Nightmare” (1927) is a marvelously evocative (and prescient) poem of climate change in New York City. Unfortunately, I detect a Jazz Age anxiety about the city becoming “African.”
Robert E. Howard’s “The Harp of Alfred” (1928) is straightforwardly effective at what it sets out to do.
1930s
It’s rare that I’ll encounter a folkloric or fantastic idea that’s entirely new to me. Roy Helton’s “Lonesome Water” (1930) dishes up one such concept: a man drinks the titular water and finds himself bound to the Appalachian hillside. Quite interesting.
H. P. Lovecraft’s “Psychopompos” (1937) is famous and widely considered a classic. I see the artistry in its lengthy recitation, but I felt it was a pretty basic Weird Tales medieval fantasy revenge plot gussied up with rhyming couplets.
Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth” sequence (published individually over the 1930s; collected and published in 1943) is treated here as a single poem rather than thirty-six separate sonnets. Reading them together, this makes sense, as the first ten form a consecutive narrative, and the rest are variations on the theme. I have to acknowledge the craft that went into writing a short story in sonnet form; goodness knows I’ve yet to write a rhyming sonnet to my own satisfaction. If I could write a cycle of connected sonnets, I’d consider it my greatest accomplishment as a poet.
Ashton Clark Smith’s “Outlanders” (1937) is a fun sonnet about barbarian adventurers.
“The Singer in the Mist” (1938) is another solid poem by Robert E. Howard. He certainly had his niche. Most of his offerings here committed to his hypermasculine fatalism / nihilism schtick, and didn’t land so well as this one.
1940s
There was a healthy selection of poems from this decade. I can’t tell if I felt most of them were a step down from the rest of the book (editor Derlith’s own poems left me unimpressed), or if I’m just too depressed from recent life events to appreciate them. I did like some of them, though:
Vincent Starrett’s “221B” (1945) is at once charming and tragic, a bit of Sherlock Holmes fan-fiction that yearns for pre-war innocence.
Dorothy Quick’s “Tree Woman” (1946) is a neat sonnet about a woman in a Druidic wood.
Leah Bodine Drake’s “Changeling” (1942) feels adjacent to a picture-book in its rhymes and repeated refrain, but I liked it. The exact same review applies to her “Wood Wife” (also 1942).
Lastly, “The Goats of Juan Fernandez: A Note on Survival” by Coleman Rosenberger (1947) could pass for 2020s ecopoetry, particularly its closing line.
—
This has been surprisingly enjoyable, all in all. You know me, I love a wide-ranging anthology that collects from all different decades. Too bad about the unrelated turns life has taken while I read it, though.
