In Honor of October and Hallow's Eve

There are a ton of sites around the interwebz that have to do with things deemed "dark" or "horrible", and since it's October, it seems appropriate to show you all some interesting site. 

This one is neat in that it helps you create a dark poem. If you're not too handy with the ole poetry theme, and you want to write something dark to put around at your Halloween party, this will really help you out! Here's something that I just went through and put together real fast, and I think that it's pretty neat. 

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Around, all around, the storm clouds gather.

My dread grows as the headsman's axe falls against my neck.
It wounds me, and darkly my
life's blood drips
to the thirsty earth.
In pain I fall limply
while the Reaper takes my hand.
Now alone, my cascade of tears falls upon uncaring eyes.

This is my doom

So, here's the site that this came from:  http://www.deadlounge.com/poetry/created.html

If you click on it, it should just take you right to the site. If not, just copy and paste into the browser/search engine of your choice, and it should take you there as well. 

And what would October be with a little famous Gothic poetry? And who is better at the dark and macabre than Edgar Allen Poe? He has some of the best dark poems around, in my personal opinion. Here is one of his poems: 

For Annie

Thank Heaven! the crisis,
The danger, is past,
And the lingering illness
Is over at last--
And the fever called "Living"
Is conquered at last.

Sadly, I know
I am shorn of my strength,
And no muscle I move
As I lie at full length--
But no matter!--I feel
I am better at length.

And I rest so composedly,
Now, in my bed,
That any beholder
Might fancy me dead--
Might start at beholding me,
Thinking me dead.

The moaning and groaning,
The sighing and sobbing,
Are quieted now,
With that horrible throbbing
At heart:--ah, that horrible,
Horrible throbbing!

The sickness--the nausea--
The pitiless pain--
Have ceased, with the fever
That maddened my brain--
With the fever called "Living"
That burned in my brain.

And oh! of all tortures
That torture the worst
Has abated--the terrible
Torture of thirst
For the naphthaline river
Of Passion accurst:--
I have drank of a water
That quenches all thirst:--

Of a water that flows,
With a lullaby sound,
From a spring but a very few
Feet under ground--
From a cavern not very far
Down under ground.

And ah! let it never
Be foolishly said
That my room it is gloomy
And narrow my bed;
For man never slept
In a different bed--
And, to sleep, you must slumber
In just such a bed.

My tantalized spirit
Here blandly reposes,
Forgetting, or never
Regretting, its roses--
Its old agitations
Of myrtles and roses:

For now, while so quietly
Lying, it fancies
A holier odor
About it, of pansies--
A rosemary odor,
Commingled with pansies--
With rue and the beautiful
Puritan pansies.

And so it lies happily,
Bathing in many
A dream of the truth
And the beauty of Annie--
Drowned in a bath
Of the tresses of Annie.

She tenderly kissed me,
She fondly caressed,
And then I fell gently
To sleep on her breast--
Deeply to sleep
From the heaven of her breast.

When the light was extinguished,
She covered me warm,
And she prayed to the angels
To keep me from harm--
To the queen of the angels
To shield me from harm.

And I lie so composedly,
Now, in my bed,
(Knowing her love)
That you fancy me dead--
And I rest so contentedly,
Now in my bed
(With her love at my breast).
That you fancy me dead--
That you shudder to look at me,
Thinking me dead:--

But my heart it is brighter
Than all of the many
Stars in the sky,
For it sparkles with Annie--
It glows with the light
Of the love of my Annie--
With the thought of the light
Of the eyes of my Annie.

by Edgar Allan Poe

Spirits of the Dead

Thy soul shall find itself alone
'Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone;
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.

Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness- for then
The spirits of the dead, who stood
In life before thee, are again
In death around thee, and their will
Shall overshadow thee; be still.

The night, though clear, shall frown,
And the stars shall not look down
From their high thrones in the Heaven
With light like hope to mortals given,
But their red orbs, without beam,
To thy weariness shall seem
As a burning and a fever
Which would cling to thee for ever.

Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish,
Now are visions ne'er to vanish;
From thy spirit shall they pass
No more, like dew-drop from the grass.

The breeze, the breath of God, is still,
And the mist upon the hill
Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token.
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!

by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Born: January 19, 1809 // Died: October 7, 1849

Edgar Poe was born on January 19,1809 to Eliza and David Poe, Jr. in Boston. Shortly after moving the family from Boston to New York, David abandoned them. 2 years later, Eliza died leaving behind three orphaned children. Poe, a southerner, shares with Melville a darkly metaphysical vision mixed with elements of realism, parody, and burlesque. He refined the short story genre and invented detective fiction. Many of his stories prefigure the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy so popular today. Poe's short and tragic life was plagued with insecurity. His strange marriage in 1835 to his first cousin Virginia Clemm, who was not yet 14, has been interpreted as an attempt to find the stable family life he lacked.

Poe believed that strangeness was an essential ingredient of beauty, and his writing is often exotic. His stories and poems are populated with doomed, introspective aristocrats (Poe, like many other southerners, cherished an aristocratic ideal). These gloomy characters never seem to work or socialize; instead they bury themselves in dark, moldering castles symbolically decorated with bizarre rugs and draperies that hide the real world of sun, windows, walls, and floors. The hidden rooms reveal ancient libraries, strange art works, and eclectic oriental objects. The aristocrats play musical instruments or read ancient books while they brood on tragedies, often the deaths of loved ones. Themes of death-in-life, especially being buried alive or returning like a vampire from the grave, appear in many of his works, including "The Premature Burial," "Ligeia," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Poe's twilight realm between life and death and his gaudy, Gothic settings are not merely decorative. They reflect the over-civilized yet deathly interior of his characters disturbed psyches. They are symbolic expressions of the unconscious, and thus are central to his art.

Poe's verse, like that of many Southerners, was very musical and strictly metrical. His best-known poem, in his own lifetime and today, is "The Raven" (1845). In this eerie poem, the haunted, sleepless narrator, who has been reading and mourning the death of his "lost Lenore" at midnight, is visited by a raven (a bird that eats dead flesh, hence a symbol of death) who perches above his door and ominously repeats the poem's famous refrain, "nevermore."

He died in Baltimore, a delirium of "acute congestion of the brain", and was buried near his grandfather in the Presbyterian cemetery. There are a few different theories as to the cause of Poe’s death. Dr. J Evans Snodgrass, who was the physician on when Edgar was brought in , believes he died from complications of alcoholism. Dr John Moran, Poe’s own physician, believes he was set upon by thugs and beaten. Dr R. Michael Benitez has yet another theory. He has reviewed the evidence and published his findings in the September issue of the Maryland Medical Journal. "No one can say conclusively that Poe died of rabies, since there was no autopsy after his death." (Gugliotta) "But the historical accounts of Poe’s condition in the hospital a few days before his death point to a strong possibility that he had rabies." (Gugliotta) As with many things about Poe perhaps we’ll never know the full truth.

And then, of course, there's music. Music has several genres that range from the Gothic period to just dark and Gothic in general -- sometimes called Death Metal, Dark Metal, Gore Metal, etc. The band Cradle of Filth is one of the more well known in today's music industry. Following are some of their lyrics: 

The Forest Whispers My Name

Black candles dance to an overture
But I am drawn past their flickering lure
To the breathing forest that surrounds the room
Where the vigilant trees push out of the womb

I sip the blood-red wine
My thoughts weigh heavy with the burden of time
From knowledge drunk from the fountain of life
From Chaos born out of love and the scythe
The forest beckons with her nocturnal call
To pull me close amid the baying of wolves
Where the bindings of Christ are down-trodden with scorn
In the dark, odiferous earth

We embrace like two lovers at death
A monument to the trapping of breath
As restriction is bled from the veins of my neck
To drop roses on my marbled breast
I lust for the wind and the flurry of leaves
And the perfume of flesh on the murderous breeze
To learn from the dark and the voices between

This is my will...

The forest whispers my name... again and again

When the moon is full
We shall assemble to adore
The potent spirit of your Queen,
My mother great Diana.
She who fain would learn all sorcery
Yet has not won its deepest secrets,
Then my mother will
Teach her, in truth
All things as yet unknown

I walk the path
To the land of the Dark Immortals
Where the hungry ones will carry my soul
As the wild hunt careers through the boughs

Come to me, my Pale Enchantress
In the moon of the woods we kiss

Artemis be near me
In the arms of the ancient oak
Where daylight hangs by a lunar noose
And the horned, hidden one is re-invoked

The principle of Evil
Evolution has been recalled
Beneath the spread of a Magickal Aeon
I stand enthralled
...In the whispering forest

"Pale, beyond porch and portal,
Crowned with leaves, she stands,
Who gathers all things mortal,
With cold immortal hands,
Her languid lips are sweeter,
Than love's who fears to greet her,
To men that mix and meet her,
From many times and lands."

A Dream Of Wolves In The Snow

"Oh, listen to them
The children of the night
What sweet music they make"
[From Bram Stoker's "Dracula" (1897)]

May dreams be brought that I might reach...
The gentle strains of midnight speech
And frozen stars that gild the forest floor

Through the swirling snow
Volkh's children come
To run with me, to hunt as one
To snatch the lambs of Christ
From where they fall...

Funeral In Carpathia

Candelabra snuffed prey - silhouette wedded
Nightfall take my hand
Seduce me with silky timbred limbs
Grant me thy dark command
Over the peaks framing tapestries
Of thick forest, dusk has filled
With Lucifugous kisses enwreathed in mist
Creeping like violations from the shadows
to kill

Lucretia
is my love in vein
When thy tears bleed sweeter
Thank the midsummer rain?
Bewinged, infested belfries
Toll o'er the sobbing throng
A writhe of lethargic, terrored nudes
Whipped and welted neath the barbed windsong....

(in saddean paradise
Ancestral legacies linger on....)

I am He
The crowned and conquering darkness
Satan robed in ecumenical filth
Livid Bacchus sustained by bridal echelons of sylph

This wintry eve when the snow glistens deep
And sharpened turrets wed the jewelless skies
I shrug off the shroud of preternatural sleep
Enbroided by these words Malaresia scribed....

"Beauty slept and angels wept
For Her immortal soul
In this repose, all evil chose
To claim her for their very own"

Carpathia
The pleasured dead speak of her
In necromantic tongue
When ambered daylights are done

Masterbating in their graves
On her zenith to come....

This catafalque night when awed stars report
Their absence from the heavenly brow
Crippled seraph shalt cower in illustrious courts
Whilsts the cloaked maelstrom resounds throughout

"How the storm it fulfills
My heart though unhealed
Celestial knifes ebonied
And wild woods thrill
Yet far fiercer still
Her lustre eviscerates me"

Carpathia
Priapic lovers twist in concert with Her
Covenants are struck, jagged lightning fellates
The path towards the castle weary innocence takes

I rule as Master here
Where feral hordes impart my temper
Love sank wounded when I, betrayed
saw death etch cruelly, upon my lineage

"Usher the spite seething Draconist
And commit this world to thy ancient
sovereignty"

Erunescent veil descend
Psalmed sunset thus portends
And laid to rest, I now am blessed
With this darkness.... Forever more

Supreme Vampiric Evil

Malice Through The Looking Glass

Take away the wine
For restlessness plagues me....
I am assailed by a spectre profounder
Than hatred and grief or the sum of their hideous crime

I shalt suffer this confessional mime

Awaiting the sun to set, crimsoning seas
Only once it is dark doth my misery cease

She died to a sky dressed in flame
Eyes full of curses for her killers by choice
Who fell to their god o'er her vision and voice

"I am as dusk come to ravish the light"
Steal me from their stares and mute christ into night
"I will answer thy prayers"
If thou Wouldst drink of my life....

Encroaching evening skies
Die with such tragedy
And those interred in cold graves
Dwell on pleasures to be
In deep hysteria
Where our legend still breathes
Through sweet death and thereafter
Sweeping nightmares.... shalt feed

So, this is just the first installment of the Gothic (according to today) literature out there. I'll be searching the interwebz for more juicy stuff as Hallow's Eve draws closer!

Until next time!