"sprung out of the tomb's black maw"

[eldritchhobbit]

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

And happy birthday to greenhoodloxley, as well!

Thank you for joining me for my month-long holiday celebration. I hope you've enjoyed it. If you want to catch up on anything you missed, you can find all of this year's Halloween posts here.

Would you like to find some appropriate Halloween reading online? Here are my recommendations for archives to visit:
* The Literary Gothic (organized by title and author)
* Horror Masters (organized by subgenre, such as Classic Horror, Horror History, and Ghost Stories)
* The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (poetry, fiction, and non-fiction)
* The Works of H.P. Lovecraft (works written by Lovecraft)
* H.P. Lovecraft's Library (works read by Lovecraft)


I have other reading recommendations, as well:
* Speaking of Lovecraft, here's a new article from the New York Review of Books on HPL: "The Heroic Nerd." (Thanks to fenice_fu for the link.)

* And speaking of Lovecraft some more, Revolution Science Fiction is all about the spookiness today, as well. Be sure to check out sneezythesquid's contributions in the article "The 13 Scariest."

* Last but not least, don't miss Neil Gaiman's "must read" op-ed in The New York Times today, "Ghosts in the Machines."


And now, for our holiday verse...

"Hallowe'en in a Suburb" by H. P. Lovecraft

The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,
And the trees have a silver glare;
Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,
And the harpies of upper air,
That flutter and laugh and stare.

For the village dead to the moon outspread
Never shone in the sunset's gleam,
But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep
Where the rivers of madness stream
Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.

A chill wind blows through the rows of sheaves
In the meadows that shimmer pale,
And comes to twine where the headstones shine
And the ghouls of the churchyard wail
For harvests that fly and fail.

Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change
That tore from the past its own
Can quicken this hour, when a spectral power
Spreads sleep o'er the cosmic throne,
And looses the vast unknown.


So here again stretch the vale and plain
That moons long-forgotten saw,
And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,
Sprung out of the tomb's black maw
To shake all the world with awe.

And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,
The ugliness and the pest
Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,
Shall some day be with the rest,
And brood with the shades unblest.

Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,
And the leprous spires ascend;
For new and old alike in the fold
Of horror and death are penned,
For the hounds of Time to rend.