So like do they seem to my lov’d one;
So shapely and fair like my lov’d one;
Yet foul from their eyes shines their evil;
Their cruel and pitiless evil,
More evil than Thaphron and Latgoz,
Twice ill for its gorgeous concealment.
And only in slumbers of midnight
Appears the lost maid Nathicana,
The pallid, the pure Nathicana,
Who fades at the glance of the dreamer.
Again and again do I seek her;
I woo with deep draughts of Plathotis,
Deep draughts brew’d in wine of Astarte
And strengthen’d with tears of long weeping.
I yearn for the gardens of Zaïs;
The lovely lost garden of Zaïs
Where blossoms the white nephalotë,
The redolent herald of midnight.
The last potent draught I am brewing;
A draught that the daemons delight in;
A draught that will banish the redness;
The horrible coma call’d living.
Soon, soon, if I fail not in brewing,
The redness and madness will vanish,
And deep in the worm-peopled darkness
Will rot the base chains that hav bound me.
Once more shall the gardens of Zaïs
Dawn white on my long-tortur’d vision,
And there midst the vapours of Yabon
Will stand the divine Nathicana;
The deathless, restor’d Nathicana
Whose like is not met with in living.
Christmas Greetings to Eugene B. Kuntz et al
May good St. Nick, like as a bird of night,
Bring thee rich blessings in his annual flight;
Long by thy chimney rest his pond’rous pack,
And leave with lessen’d weight upon his back!
Christmas Greetings to Laurie A. Sawyer
As Christmas snows (as yet a poet’s trope)
Call back one’s bygone days of youth and hope,
Four metrick lines I send — they’re quite enough —
Tho’ once I fancy’d I could write the stuff!
Christmas Greetings to Sonia H. Greene
Once more the ancient feast returns,
And the bright hearth domestic burns
With Yuletide’s added blaze;
So, too, may all your joys increase
Midst floods of mem’ry, love, and peace,
And dreams of Halcyon days.
Christmas Greetings to Rheinhart Kleiner
St. John, whose art sublimely shines
In liquid odes and melting lines,
Let Theobald his regard express
In verse of lesser loveliness.
As now in regal state appear
The festive hours of Yuletide cheer,
My strongest wish is that you may
Feel ev’ry blessing of the day!
Christmas Greetings to Felis (Frank Belknap Long’s cat)
Little Tiger, burning bright
With a subtle Blakeish light,
Tell what visions have their home
In those eyes of flame and chrome!
Children vex thee — thoughtless, gay —
Holding when thou wouldst away:
What dark lore is that which thou,
Spitting, mixest with thy meow?
Christmas Greetings to Annie E. P. Gamwell
As when a pigeon, loos’d in realms remote,
Takes instant wing, and seeks his native cote,
So speed my blessings from a barb’rous clime
To thee and Providence at Christmas time!
Christmas Greetings to Felis (Frank Belknap Long’s cat)
Haughty Sphinx, whose amber eyes
Hold the secrets of the skies,
As thou ripplest in thy grace,
Round the chairs and chimney-place,
Scorn on thy patrician face:
Hiss not harsh, nor use thy claws
On the hand that gives applause —
Good-will only doth abide
In these lines at Christmastide!
LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
The Poem of Ulysses
Ode to Selene or Diana
To the Old Pagan Religion
On the Ruin of Rome
To Pan
On the Vanity of Human Ambition
On Receiving a Picture of Swans
Unda; or, The Bride of the Sea
An American to Mother England
Lines on Gen. Robert Edward Lee
The Rose of England
The Poe-et’s Nightmare
Aletheia Phrikodes
Fact and Fancy
Pacifist War Song — 1917
A Garden
The Peace Advocate
Ode for July Fourth, 1917
Nemesis
Astrophobos
Sunset
Laeta; a Lament
Psychopompos: A Tale in Rhyme
The Conscript
Despair
Revelation
The House
The City
To Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany
The Nightmare Lake
On Reading Lord Dunsany’s ‘Book of Wonder’
Christmas
Waste Paper
Providence
The Cats
Festival
Hallowe’en in a Suburb
The Wood
The Outpost
The Ancient Track
The Messenger
Fungi from Yuggoth
Dead Passion’s Flame
Arcadia
In a Sequester’d Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk’d
To Clark Ashton Smith, Esq., upon His Phantastick Tales, Verses, Pictures, and Sculptures
Life’s Mystery
Nathicana
Christmas Greetings to Eugene B. Kuntz et al
Christmas Greetings to Laurie A. Sawyer
Christmas Greetings to Sonia H. Greene
Christmas Greetings to Rheinhart Kleiner
Christmas Greetings to Felis (Frank Belknap Long’s cat)
Christmas Greetings to Annie E. P. Gamwell
Christmas Greetings to Felis (Frank Belknap Long’s cat)
LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
A Garden
Aletheia Phrikodes
An American to Mother England
Arcadia
Astrophobos
Christmas
Christmas Greetings to Annie E. P. Gamwell
Christmas Greetings to Eugene B. Kuntz et al
Christmas Greetings to Felis (Frank Belknap Long’s cat)
Christmas Greetings to Felis (Frank Belknap Long’s cat)
Christmas Greetings to Laurie A. Sawyer
Christmas Greetings to Rheinhart Kleiner
Christmas Greetings to Sonia H. Greene
Dead Passion’s Flame
Despair
Fact and Fancy
Festival
Fungi from Yuggoth
Hallowe’en in a Suburb
In a Sequester’d Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk’d
Laeta; a Lament
Life’s Mystery
Lines on Gen. Robert Edward Lee
Nathicana
Nemesis
Ode for July Fourth, 1917
Ode to Selene or Diana
On Reading Lord Dunsany’s ‘Book of Wonder’
On Receiving a Picture of Swans
On the Ruin of Rome
On the Vanity of Human Ambition
Pacifist War Song — 1917
Providence
Psychopompos: A Tale in Rhyme
Revelation
Sunset
The Ancient Track
The Cats
The City
The Conscript
The House
The Messenger
The Nightmare Lake
The Outpost
The Peace Advocate
The Poe-et’s Nightmare
The Poem of Ulysses
The Rose of England
The Wood
To Clark Ashton Smith, Esq., upon His Phantastick Tales, Verses, Pictures, and Sculptures
To Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany
To Pan
To the Old Pagan Religion
Unda; or, The Bride of the Sea
Waste Paper
Selected Essays
In 1921 Lovecraft attended an amateur journalist convention in Boston, where he met Sonia Greene. Born in 1883, she was of Ukrainian-Jewish ancestry and seven years older than Lovecraft. They married in 1924, and the couple relocated to Brooklyn, moving into Sonia’s apartment.
LIST OF ESSAYS
METRICAL REGULARITY
THE ALLOWABLE RHYME
THE DESPISED PASTORAL
AT THE ROOT
LITERARY COMPOSITION
SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE
CATS AND DOGS
A HISTORY OF THE NECRONOMICON
NOTES ON WRITING WEIRD FICTION
Sonia Lovecraft (1883-1972) was also a pulp fiction writer, as well as amateur publisher, single mother, business woman and successful milliner who bankrolled several fanzines in the early twentieth century.
METRICAL REGULARITY
Written in July 1915 and first published in The Conservative, Vol. 1 No. 2, July 1915
“Deteriores omnus sumus licentia” — Terence
Of the various forms of decadence manifest in the poetical art of the present age, none strikes more harshly on our sensibilities than the alarming decline in that harmonious regularity of metre which adorned the poetry of our immediate ancestors.
That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish. As old a critic as Dionysius of Halicarnassus and as modern an philosopher as Hegel have each affirmed that versification in poetry is not alone a necessary attribute, but the very foundation as well; Hegel, indeed, placing metre above metaphorical imagination as the essence of all poetic creation.
Science can likewise trace the metrical instinct from the very infancy of mankind, or even beyond, to the pre-human age of the apes. Nature is in itself an unending succession of regular impulses. The steady recurrence of the seasons and of the moonlight, the coming and going of the day, the ebb and flow of the tides, the beating of the heart and pulses, the tread of the feet in walking, the countless other phenomena of like regularity, have all combined to inculcate in the human brain a rhythmic sense which is as manifest in the most uncultivated, as in the most polished of peoples. Metre, therefore, is no such false artifice as most exponents of radicalism would have us believe, but is instead a natural and inevitable embellishment to poesy, which succeeding ages should develop and refine, rather than maim or destroy.
Like other instincts, the metric sense has taken on different aspects among different races. Savages show it in its simplest form while dancing to the sound of primitive drums; barbarians display it in their religious and other chantings; civilized peoples utilize it for their formal poetry, either as measured quantity, like that of Greek and Roman verse, or as measured accentual stress, like that of our own English verse. Precision of metre is thus no mere display of meretricious ornament, but a logical evolution from eminently natural sources.
It is the contention of the ultra-modern poet, as enunciated by Mrs. J. W. Renshaw in her recent article on “The Autocracy of Art,” (The Looking Glass for May) that the truly inspired bard must chant forth his feelings independently of form or language, permitting each changing impulse to alter the rhythm of his lay, and blindly resigning his reason to the “fine frenzy” of his mood. This contention is of course founded upon the assumption that poetry is super-intellectual; the expression of a “soul” which outranks the mind and its precepts. Now while avoiding the impeachment of this dubious theory, we must needs remark that the laws of Nature cannot so easily be outdistanced. However much true poesy may overtop the produce of the brain, it must still be affected by natural laws, which are universal and inevitable. Wherefore it is the various clearly defined natural forms through which the emotions seek expression. Indeed, we feel even unconsciously the fitness of certain types of metre for certain types of thought, and in perusing a crude or irregular poem are often abruptly repelled by the unwarranted variations made by the bard, either through his ignorance or his perverted taste. We are naturally shocked at the clothing of a grave subject in anapestic metre, or the treatment of a long and lofty theme in short, choppy lines. This latter defect is what repels us so much from Conington’s really scholarly translation of the Aeneid.
What the radicals so wantonly disregard in their eccentric performances is unity of thought. Amidst their wildly repeated leaps from one rough metre to another, they ignore the underlying uniformity of each of their poems. Scene may change; atmosphere may vary; yet one poem cannot carry but one definite message, and to suit this ultimate and fundamental message but one metre must be selected and sustained. To accommodate the minor inequalities of tone in a poem, one regular metre will amply lend itself to diversity. Our chief but now annoyingly neglected measure, the heroic couplet, is capable of taking on the infinite shades of expression by the right selection of sequence of words, and by the proper placing of the caesura or pause in each line. Dr. Blair, in his 38th lecture, explains and illustrates with admirable perspicuity the importance of the caesura’s location in varying the flow of heroic verse. It is also possible to lend variety to a poem by using very judiciously occasional feet of a metre different from that of the body of the work. This is generally done without disturbing the syllabification, and it in no way impairs or obscures the dominant measure.
Most amusing of all the claims of the radical is the assertion that true poetic fervor can never be confined to regular metre; that the wild-eyed, long-haired rider of Pegasus must inflict upon a suffering public in unaltered form the vague conceptions which flit in noble chaos through his exalted soul. While it is perfectly obvious that the hour of rare inspiration must be improved without the hindrance of grammars or rhyming dictionaries, it is no less obvious that the succeeding hour of calmer contemplation may very profitably be devoted to amendment and polishing. The “language of the heart” must be clarified and made intelligible to other hearts, else its purport will forever be confined to its creator. If natural laws of metrical construction be willfully set aside, the reader’s attention will be distracted from the soul of the poem to its uncouth and ill-fitting dress. The more nearly perfect the metre, the less conspicuous its presence; hence if the poet desires supreme consideration for his matter, he should make his verses so smooth that the sense may never be interrupted.
The ill effect of metrical laxity on the younger generation of poets is enormous. These latest suitors of the Muse, not yet sufficiently trained to distinguish between their own artless crudities and the cultivated monstrosities of the educated but radical bard, come to regard with distrust the orthodox critics, and to believe that no grammatical, rhetorical, or metrical skill is necessary to their own development. The result cannot but be a race of churlish, cacophonous hybrids, whose amorphous outcries will waver uncertainly betwixt prose and verse, absorbing the vices of both and the virtues of neither.
When proper consideration shall be taken of the perfect naturalness of polished metre, a wholesome reaction against the present chaos must inevitably occur; so that the few remaining disciples of conservatism and good taste may justly entertain one last, lingering hope of hearing from modern lyres the stately heroics of Pope, the majestic blank verse of Thomson, the terse octosyllabics of Swift, the sonorous quatrains of Gray, and the lively anapests of Sheridan and Moore.
THE ALLOWABLE RHYME
Written in October 1915 and first
published in The Conservative, Vol. 1, No. 3, October 1915
“Verum ubi plura nitent in carmine, non ego paucis offendar maculis” — Horace
The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the properties of versification and reason in its mad scramble after sensational novelty; whilst the other and quieter school constituting a more logical evolution from the poesy of the Georgian period, demands an accuracy of rhyme and metre unknown even to the polished artists of the age of Pope.
The rational contemporary disciple of the Nine, justly ignoring the dissonant shrieks of the radicals, is therefore confronted with a grave choice of technique. May he retain the liberties of imperfect or “allowable” rhyming which were enjoyed by his ancestors, or must he conform to the new ideals of perfection evolved during the past century? The writer of this article is frankly an archaist in verse. He has not scrupled to rhyme “toss’d” with “coast”, “come” with “Rome”, or “home” with “gloom” in his very latest published efforts, thereby proclaiming his maintenance of the old-fashioned pets as models; but sound modern criticism, proceeding from Mr. Rheinhart Kleiner and from other sources which must needs command respect, has impelled him there to rehearse the question for public benefit, and particularly to present his own side, attempting to justify his adherence to the style of two centuries ago.
The earliest English attempts at rhyming probably included words whose agreement is so slight that it deserves the name of mere “assonance” rather than that of actual rhyme. Thus in the original ballad of “Chevy-Chase,” we encounter “King” and “within” supposedly rhymed, whilst in the similar “Battle of Otterbourne” we behold “long” rhymed with “down,” “ground” with “Agurstonne,” and “name” with “again”. In the ballad of “Sir Patrick Spense,” “morn” and “storm,” and “deep” and “feet” are rhymed. But the infelicities were obviously the result not of artistic negligence, but of plebeian ignorance, since the old ballads were undoubtedly the careless products of a peasant minstrelsy. In Chaucer, a poet of the Court, the allowable rhyme is but infrequently discovered, hence we may assume that the original ideal in English verse was the perfect rhyming sound.
Delphi Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft (Illustrated) Page 218
