#1:“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.

This is one of the most lyrical poems ever written; it ticks and chimes like an old grandfather clock.

Poe believed that poetry should be primarily aesthetic and, accordingly, the sound and imagery of “The Raven” is magnificently sinister.

The theme of oncoming madness is nothing new for Poe, but the incessant rhythm and the raven’s constant refrain of “Nevermore” deliver the speaker’s insanity in a visceral way, which Poe couldn’t stylistically do in his prose.

Like the spirit of Halloween, Poe’s great narrative poem is both creepy and fun.

#2:“All Souls’ Night” by William Butler Yeats

Because I have a marvelous thing to say,
A certain marvelous thing
None but the living mock
Though not for sober ear;
It may be all that hear
Should laugh and weep and hour upon the clock.

Written in his allegedly haunted house overlooking Oxford and near the Christ Church cathedral, Yeats actually composed this poem on All Souls’ Night.

The idea of the poem is that the speaker, who in this case seems to be Yeats himself, holds a séance in order to call forth a number of his deceased friends who were involved in occult learning and practices.

The poem works on a number of levels and, if you spend enough time with it, it’s both creepy and powerful.

The tolling bell of Christ Church echoes through the poem in the form of sonic devices, and Yeats’s invocation of the Catholic Eucharist, near the end of the poem, draws attention to the connections between Samhain, séance and the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Yeats is imaginatively lifting the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead.

#3:“Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than shade

It’s hard to tell what this poem is about but it’s all the more unnerving for it.

Many of the images in “Byzantium” are shared with “Sailing to Byzantium” and “All Souls’ Night,” as if to suggest Yeats was obsessing over them, continually working out their meanings and effects.

The tolling of the cathedral is back and the images of winding “gyres” and “mummy cloth” return but, more than that, the mysterious quality of the other poems is here intensified.

Either Yeats was afraid to voice some esoteric knowledge or even he didn’t know exactly what he was talking about.

#4:“Darkness” by Lord Byron

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space

Byron’s “Darkness” horrifies and exhilarates throughout.

If you are at all interested in all this end of the world hoopla, which has once again taken hold of the collective imagination, read this epic poem by Byron.

Mass graves, scarcity of food and human tenderness, dogs turning on their masters — “Darkness” has all the components of the post-apocalyptic genre or, as Byron calls it, “the pall of a past world.”

#5:“Macbeth” by William Shakespeare

Liver of Blasheming Jew;
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Silver’d in the moon’s eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips;

Of course this comes from a play and not a poem, but the Witches’ spell has permeated all levels of Halloween culture and is written in rhyming couplets.

Their whole “double, double toil and trouble” bit is on the tips of everyone’s tongues at this time of year.

The ingredients for the Witches’ potion are a mix of childish fun and out-and-out horror; the “eye of newt” and “baboon’s blood” are both sort of gross but the “liver of blaspheming Jew” and “finger of birth-strangled babe” are a good deal more disturbing. It’s a frightful incongruity.

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image: Tannara Yelland