Hallowe'en Song

[moon_custafer]

Dear bundle of straw,
Dear sugared jackdaw-lantern skull
O bald round face & seedpod eyes
as bright as raindrops on a spider's web
(there is something grey that dances in a corner):

Your face, a sere and yellow leaf,
and all the broken brightness of your cheek,
for all your body is scarecrow-soft,
my Feathertop--

There is bone & fibre in you yet.
There is stone & fire in you yet.

Comments

FeatherTop!

[(Anonymous)]

My favourite pumpkinhead story! It was my first exposure to the Immortal N. Hawthorne (well, apart from "The Scarlet Letter" but I read that in an English Appreciation class so I hated it). I am now reading a big book of all of his less-than-novel-length stuff and loving it.

/Don
spectrum at DIE.SPAMMERS DIE.DIE ca.inter.net

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Beatrice Rappacini should definitely be a member of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; that, or DC should do a Poison Ivy crossover of some sort with her. Also, I've told you about The Christmas Banquet (http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/haw5510.txt) - it's a little like a Hawthorne clip show: "and there was this guy, who'd sort of indirectly killed someone under circumstances where he himself couldn't be sure if his will had entered into it, so he suffered endless torments of conscience! and this otherwise totally gorgeous lady with a blemished eye who always wore a veil, not because of normal vanity but because being almost-but-not-quite perfect freaked her out!"

Hmm. Good thing Hawthorne didn't actually write in that tone. On a related note, how 'bout that Robert Browning? I've always thought Steve Barringer could do a really spooky one-man short film of My Last Duchess.

Feathertop and other vegetable friends/fiends

[(Anonymous)]

I still have 900 pages to go in my Hawthorne tome before I get to Miss Rappacini but I'm looking forward to both the destination and the journey.

Never heard of Browning though....

/Don

Re: Feathertop and other vegetable friends/fiends

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Oh, you know, Robert Browning? Married to Elizabeth Barret Browning (evil father-in-law played by Charles Laughton, I think). He was one of the first Victorian poets I found I actually liked - a lot of his things are these sort of first-person monologues in verse, but subtly done so you hardly notice the rhymes. "My Last Duchess" is a Renaissance nobleman showing off a portrait of his late wife, while hinting that he killed her; a rather unwise conversational direction, given that he seems to be speaking to a representative of his future wife's family (there's a line toward the end "nay, nay, we'll go down together, sir," which makes me suspect the diplomat is trying to edge away slowly to the door...)