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 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...)