In the Ghoul-Haunted Woodland

by Brett Rutherford

It is not difficult to write rhymed verse, once one has read a lot of it. I destroyed all my semi-suicidal juvenilia, but sometime around 1990, these lines came back into my memory -- almost all of a poem I had written while I was a sophomore in high school. It is "Ulalume," of course, with a little Lovecraft added. The last stanza would not come back to me in full, but the final lines are, I, think awfully good. There are are few good lines along the way, and I am sure that my adult consciousness made a few of the stanzas better than the lost original. It is offered her for the fun of it, and it probably would red well out loud. 
Curiously, I can remember standing alone in a classroom after school, because I did not want to go home, thinking, not of poetry, but of the main theme from the third movement of Beethoven's First Piano Concerto. The rhythm of the poem comes from that music, which has nothing whatever supernatural about it. One cannot account for how things fit together in the mind of a young man who has read Poe.

I can count on a little more than one hand the number of my rhymed poems (one in elegiac stanzas I like a lot), but I am firmly again rhyme 99% of the time.

Here goes:

Upon that plain of fancied dreams

     where I have nightly wandered,

beneath the willows of my tears, I chanced,

     and paused, and pondered.

The moon, a luminescent orb,

     rose high above the trees:

the willows wept, the silence crept,

     bestilled the very breeze.

The moon I saw was pale and white,

     but yet, a tinge of bronze,

an umber crown, an aura’d sphere,

     spun gold upon the lawns.

I came with dread into this wood,

     I came with dark defeat;

I walked with blasted hope amid

     the Eclipse of Love’s heat.

Dead! dead! the eyes that answered mine

     with velvet promise under

stars that laughed and spelled one name,

     then tore our love asunder.

Tonight there is no constancy of sun,

     no orbit free of shade —

each screaming world falls one by one

     into the dark it made!

Black stars in blacker clouds now rise

     above the cypress grove;

black thoughts within your sepulchre

     that summon and reprove

my days of solitude and gloomy verse,

     my nights of vigil at your side,

my pleas to nonexistent gods

     that Love would triumph and abide.

Some creature of the Nocturne, from some

     timeless, shadowed land,

climbed down from out the treetops

     in the heights before my hand,

came down before my startled view

     and thereupon took rest —

in awe I waited, watched, and put my

     saneness to the test…

Its face was cold and black, and frozen

     like the stars

and yet its eyes—if eyes they were—

     were streaked with flaming bars...

Its breath seeped out, enveloped me,

     a wave of rank decay,

my hurried blood ran rampant

     to the echoes of dismay...

I turned to flee this haunted wood …

A limb or claw, an arm or hand,

     whatever tool of hell,

reached out and pulled me firmly back —

     I stumbled and I fell!