My haunted brain

In the spirit of the halloween season spooky does it. Or the beauty of language does. I am positively terrified by images conjured and emotions evoked by grave poetry. Rhymes bury boredom. Meeting words not used in common conversation charms me. With a witch's gait in my head, I roamed cyberspace and filled my HP cauldron with passages from poems of 13 literary greats:

1. Halloween by Robert Burns (1785)
Upon that night, when fairies light On Cassilis Downans dance, Or owre the lays, in splendid blaze, On sprightly coursers prance; Or for Colean the rout is ta’en, Beneath the moon’s pale beams; There, up the Cove, to stray an’ rove, Amang the rocks and streams

2. Ulalume: A Ballad by Edgar Allan Poe (1847)
And now, as the night was senescent,
And star-dials pointed to morn —
As the star-dials hinted of morn —
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born

3. The Hag by Robert Herrick (1648)
A Thorn or a Burr, She takes for a Spurre: With a lash of a Bramble she rides now, Through Brakes and through Bryars, O’re Ditches, and Mires, She followes the Spirit that guides now.

4. Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (1862)
Morning and evening, Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries, Melons and raspberries

5. Sonnet 100 by Lord Brooke Fulke Greville (1633)
Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,
Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny,
Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offense,
Doth forge and raise impossibility:

6. Darkness by George Gordon, Lord Byron (1816)
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—

7. Act IV, Scene I of Macbeth by Shakespeare (1606)
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse; Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips
Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. Something wicked this way comes!

8. ... Jack the Journeyman by William Butler Yeats
I know, although when looks meet, I tremble to the bone,
The more I leave the door unlatched, the sooner love is gone, For love is but a skein unwound, Between the dark and dawn.

9. Ghost House by Robert Burns
I DWELL in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls,
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.

10. ... Chamber to be Haunted by Emily Dickenson
One need not be a chamber to be haunted, One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing Material place.

11. Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest by Sylvia Plath
In voice furred with frost, Ghost said to priest:
'Neither of those countries do I frequent: Earth is my haunt.'

12. The House With Nobody In It by Joyce Kilmer
Whenever I go to Suffern along the Erie track
I never go by the empty house without stopping and looking back, Yet it hurts me to look at the crumbling roof and the shutters fallen apart, For I can't help thinking the poor old house is a house with a broken heart

13. Socrates Ghost by Delmore Schwartz
The mechanical whims of appetite
Are all that I have of conscious choice,
The butterfly caged in eclectic light
Is my only day in the world's great night,

1 - 7 source: About.com: Poetry
8 - 13 source: Ghost Stories

~ header from Samulli / click here for more lists ~