read write prompt #50: the gothic (’tis the season)

by Tom Adam

Ah, the word gothic. It has so many meanings. More than I had realized as a matter of fact, but the one at issue is: “Noting or pertaining to a style of literature characterized by a gloomy setting, grotesque, mysterious, or violent events, and an atmosphere of degeneration and decay.”

Not really suitable for spring (which is about renewal), or summer (which is all about beach volleyball) or winter (er … snowboarding? OK, winter is the pause, the looking back at the past and the looking forward to the future). Autumn, however, is the season for Gothic. We have the ready-made holiday of Halloween as well as the decline of vibrant life in the world around us.

In honor of this season, and my favorite holiday, Halloween, this week we explore the world of Gothic poetry. (Oh, and to anyone reading us from down under, just play along). Gothicism as an artistic movement is largely part of the Romantic era. The Romantics turned away from the science and realism of the Enlightenment and focused on more subjective areas of experience. Gothic art was toward the fantastic end of what they explored, but spooky. On the non-spooky but still fantastic end was Surrealism.

The realm of Gothic writing is probably most familiar to us in novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the later writings of Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but it had considerable influence in poetry as well. Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” both fit within this genre. The gloomy and the grotesque, with an atmosphere of degeneration. But how did they do that?

Part of it is the environment. Often these tales are at night. Castles figure prominently. If the surroundings are important, they are mentioned early. Coleridge’s “Christabel” begins, ” ‘Tis the middle of the night by Castle-clock.” That lets us know right away it’s midnight and there’s a castle. When the details are not important, they are skipped, but when they become important they get mentioned. Gottfried Burger’s “Lenora” goes 90 lines during the day in some unspecified place, then we get night and most of the story happens. (And by line 235 end up in a graveyard with a skeleton.)

In Gothic literature, fantastic elements (the scary ones) are treated as if they were as real as anything else. “Fair Elenor” by William Blake immediately jumps into the Gothic mode: “The bell struck one and shook the silent tower; / The graves gave up their dead … ” Lord Byron’s “Darkness” has a similar immediacy: “I had a dream, which was not all a dream … ” Sometimes the strangeness takes longer to get to, but even then the author isn’t asking you to believe, he is just telling you what is. Or she: Mary Robinson’s “The Haunted Beach” begins at a spooky beach and soon (lines 25-27): “The fisherman beheld a band / Of spectres gliding hand in hand –- / Where the green billows played.”

Part of this genre’s effect is the spooky stuff in the poem: ghosts, witches, jilted lovers returned from the dead, skeletons, Death, the Devil, fairies and blood (lots of blood), not to mention murders.

And a large part of what makes the Gothic is what masters of terror have known for a long time: isolation. Many of these stories, novels, poems and stories in verse feature a mortal character being swept up the experience of horror. It keeps the reader in one person’s head for the duration. Sometimes the stories are in first person to give even greater immediacy.

Your prompt this week is to write your own Gothic poem. They tended to be on the lengthy side, but I think we can overlook if you lose a line or 200. If you need a little inspiration, here are a few to take a bit of a look at:

• “Fair Elenor,” William Blake
• “Lenora,” Göttfried August Bürger
• “Christabel,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” John Keats

For the collaboratively minded, I suggest something the Romantic were fond of: with someone else, pick a spooky story and each write your own version of it.