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The Racism of H.P. Lovecraft

Posted in Poetry with tags , , , on August 17, 2012 by telescoper

From time to time I’ve posted bits of poetry on this blog by H.P. Lovecraft, an author of fantasy, horror and science fiction stories that I discovered as a teenager and which made a big and lasting impression on me.

I never thought Lovecraft was a great writer, actually. At times his prose style is truly excruciating. But he was clearly a person with a remarkable imagination and he did write some genuinely frightening stories. He also had a big influence on many subsequent horror writers and film-makers.

It was only in later life that I started to read collections of his poetry, which is also uneven in quality but among which there are many gems. They’ve proved quite popular when I’ve posted them on here too, perhaps because quite a few of the followers of this blog also know Lovecraft’s stories.

But last night I came across this revolting poem, which reveals a side of H.P. Lovecraft’s character of which I was previously unaware.  Its charming title is On the Creation of Niggers:

When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove’s fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th’Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

I don’t think any further comment is necessary.

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The Cool Web

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on August 9, 2012 by telescoper

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by,

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the roses’s cruel scent,
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.

by Robert Graves (1895-1985)

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Against Entropy

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on July 30, 2012 by telescoper

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

by John M. Ford (1957-2006)

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There’s a shoulder where death comes to cry

Posted in Music, Poetry with tags , , , on July 26, 2012 by telescoper

I heard this song Take this Waltz by Leonard Cohen a long time ago, and found it very mysterious as I didn’t know what it was about. Lately I found this youtube clip with a preface by Mr Cohen himself that explains that it is a tribute to the Spanish Poet Federico Garcia Lorca. I can’t say I know much about Lorca’s poetry, even in English translation, but I wish I did.

Lorca was born in 1898, and was murdered in 1936 by fascists during the Spanish Civil War. His body was never found.

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A Walk after Dark

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on July 23, 2012 by telescoper

A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.

It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shameless a stare;
The things I did could not
Be so shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead.

Now, unready to die
But already at the stage
When one starts to resent the young,
I am glad those points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of Middle-age.

It’s cosier thinking of night
As more an Old People’s Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at seventeen.

Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote,
Only the young and the rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.

For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn’t have happened did.

Occurring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world:

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgement waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

Written in 1948 by by W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

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No worst, there is none

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on July 23, 2012 by telescoper

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing –
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
-ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

by Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844-89).

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The Rain

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on July 2, 2012 by telescoper

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

by Robert Creeley (1926-2005).

 

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Astrophobos

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on June 23, 2012 by telescoper

In the midnight heavens burning
Thro’ ethereal deeps afar,
Once I watch’d with restless yearning
An alluring, aureate star;
Ev’ry eye aloft returning,
Gleaming nigh the Arctic car.

Mystic waves of beauty blended
With the gorgeous golden rays;
Phantasies of bliss descended
In a myrrh’d Elysian haze;
And in lyre-born chords extended
Harmonies of Lydian lays.

There (thought I) lies scenes of pleasure,
Where the free and blessed dwell,
And each moment bears a treasure
Freighted with a lotus-spell,
And there floats a liquid measure
From the lute of Israfel.

There (I told myself) were shining
Worlds of happiness unknown,
Peace and Innocence entwining
By the Crowned Virtue’s throne;
Men of light, their thoughts refining
Purer, fairer, than our own.

Thus I mus’d, when o’er the vision
Crept a red delirious change;
Hope dissolving to derision,
Beauty to distortion strange;
Hymnic chords in weird collision,
Spectral sights in endless range.

Crimson burn’d the star of sadness
As behind the beams I peer’d;
All was woe that seem’d but gladness
Ere my gaze with truth was sear’d;
Cacodaemons, mir’d with madness,
Thro’ the fever’d flick’ring leer’d.

Now I know the fiendish fable
That the golden glitter bore;
Now I shun the spangled sable
That I watch’d and lov’d before;
But the horror, set and stable,
Haunts my soul for evermore.

by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)

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The Echoing Green

Posted in Poetry, Sport with tags , , , , on June 10, 2012 by telescoper

The sun does arise,
And make happy the skies.
The merry bells ring
To welcome the spring.
The skylark and thrush,
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around,
To the bells’ cheerful sound,
While our sports shall be seen
On the echoing green.

Old John with white hair
Does laugh away care,
Sitting under the oak,
Among the old folk.
They laugh at our play,
And soon they all say:
‘Such, such were the joys
When we all, girls and boys,
In our youth-time were seen
On the echoing green.’

Till the little ones weary
No more can be merry;
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end.
Round the laps of their mother
Many sisters and brothers,
Like birds in their nest,
Are ready for rest;
And sport no more seen
On the darkening green.

by William Blake (1757-1827)

Posted to mark the “Great British Summer of Sport“, although I doubt if William Blake would have approved of the modern Olympics, which is nothing more a publicly-subsidised celebration of  consumerism  run  for the benefit of sponsors and corporate guests of multinational junk-food merchants.

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The End of May

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on May 31, 2012 by telescoper

How the wind howls this morn
About the end of May,
And drives June on apace
To mock the world forlorn
And the world’s joy passed away
And my unlonged-for face!
The world’s joy passed away;
For no more may I deem
That any folk are glad
To see the dawn of day
Sunder the tangled dream
Wherein no grief they had.
Ah, through the tangled dream
Where others have no grief
Ever it fares with me
That fears and treasons stream
And dumb sleep slays belief
Whatso therein may be.
Sleep slayeth all belief
Until the hopeless light
Wakes at the birth of June
More lying tales to weave,
More love in woe’s despite,
More hope to perish soon.

by William Morris (1834-96).

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