Happy Halloween to you all! I’ve a pretty little treat for you all on this All Hallow’s Eve on the Classic English Literature Subcast – a little bone-us episode marking that night when the world of the dead bleeds into the world of the living, when sweet summer ends and the darkness of cold-hearted winter is exalted.
Of course, you probably all know that the modern celebration of Halloween traces its roots back to the Celtic festival of Samhain in ancient Britain and Ireland, a festival celebrating the harvest in which people lit great bonfires and wore costumes to ward off the coming cold and returning ghosts. When the Romans arrived in the British Isles in the first century of the common era, their festival of the dead, which revered the fruit goddess Pomona, blended with Samhain and may be, in fact, where the custom of bobbing for apples came from, the apple being Pomona’s favorite snack. By the middle ages, Christianity has assimilated the old pagan festival as All Hallow’s Tide, a three day remembrance of the dead, especially saints – hence the “hallow,” which means “to make holy.” Such sanctioned communion with the dead fit nicely with the Celtic and Roman observances and served a very deep, primal need of humans to confront mortality and mystery.
So to mark the day in my own small way, I’ve come up with an appropriate little poem for you. It’s by the 17th century poet Robert Herrick, whose 1648 collection Hesperides (containing some 1400 poems) is considered his magnificent octopus. One of those wee little verses concerns the night ride of a witch and the devil, and it’s called “The Hag.” Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin:
The Hag is astride,
This night for to ride;
The Devill and shee together:
Through thick, and through thin,
Now out, and then in,
Though ne'r so foule be the weather.
A Thorn or a Burr
She takes for a Spurre:
With a lash of a Bramble she rides now,
Through Brakes and through Bryars,
O're Ditches, and Mires,
She followes the Spirit that guides now.
No Beast, for his food,
Dares now range the wood;
But husht in his laire he lies lurking:
While mischiefs, by these,
On Land and on Seas,
At noone of Night are working,
The storme will arise,
And trouble the skies;
This night, and more for the wonder,
The ghost from the Tomb
Affrighted shall come,
Cal'd out by the clap of the Thunder.
Now, is that Halloweeny or what? Nice one. Herrick is a member of a group called the Cavalier Poets, presumably because they were Royalist gentlemen, but one wag asserted that they are so called because you could write their poetry while falling off the back of a horse. And, truth be told, there is a simplicity to Herrick’s style that seems to belie the notion of capital G capital P Great Poetry. But simple doesn’t have to mean bad, and I think this poem quite charming in its own spooky way.
It takes a ballad-style form with four stanzas, though Herrick uses a six-line stanza rather than the more typical quatrain. He rhymes a couplet, then the third line introduces a new sound. Then another couplet with its own rhymes, then the sixth line which chimes with the third: so aabccb. Sort of a giddy-up rhyme scheme.
The rhythm of the lines is rather interesting, too. Lines 1, 2, 4, and 5 are five syllables long, made up of an iamb (da-DUMP) and an anapest, which is a three-syllable foot consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable (da-da-DUMP). This metrical detail mirrors the three line rhyme scheme – a a B. It’s a nice touch. So, in the first line, for instance – The Hag is astride – the beats fall on the syllables hag and stride, which, of course, are the meaning-bearing sounds of the line.
Now, lines 3 and 6 are somewhat different: they are 8 syllables long, largely iambic, but they end in a trochee, which is the opposite of an iamb (DA-dump), so the stress drives down, it falls and offers a kind of melancholy counterpoint to the galloping rhythm of the shorter lines.
The poem’s subject matter is simple enough. The Hag, a powerful witch, rides out with the Devil himself. Herrick emphasizes the connection by making “together” the terminal word of the line: the hag and the devil are bound to each other, and their ride conjures up the foulest weather.
We usually reckon that witches ride broomsticks, but our Hag seems to be on horseback. She uses thorns and burrs for spurs and a bramble for a whip as she charges across the wild landscape driven by some great malevolent spirit. She rides bareback, seeking to harness her raw energy and power.
She so overawes that all the beasts hide. While the Hag ranges free, Nature withdraws, lurks in its lair, to wait out the unnatural rider. The night so foul, Nature so cowed, that even the dead shall arise, affrighted, called by the thunder!
That word affrighted is an interesting one. It’s one of those words that, back in the day, could indicate the subject of the sentence as both the doer or the receiver of the action. So Herrick’s lines – “The ghost from the tomb affrighted shall come” – do double duty. One, a resurrected corpse or spirit of the dead would certainly be frightening – I’m sure I would be likely to soil myself – but we can also read them as the ghosts themselves are frightened by the harrowing hag. Now that’d definitely result in a puddly-type incident.
“The Hag” is an unusual poem for Mr. Herrick. We’ll probably bump into him again in a future talk and you’ll see that he’s more likely to write lighter, more sexy verse. And it’s hard to know whether he intended this poem seriously or not. Certainly, most 17th-century folks believed in witches. Famously, King James VI of Scotland (soon to be James I of England) wrote a compendious dissertation called Of Demonology in 1597, in which he traces the history of necromancy, divination, and black magic. He discusses the methods witches use and endorses the necessity of witch-hunts. And surely we know that European religious struggles of the 16th and 17th centuries heightened the anxieties about dark forces exploiting the weakness of Christendom. Climate change, too, it seems, may have had some influence of the rise of witch hysteria at the time, which was part of what climatologists have nick-named “The Little Ice Age,” a centuries-long period of cooler weather which resulted in crop failures, livestock deaths, and then the attendant famines and pestilences. The poor old woman with all the cats down the road who muttered to herself all the time took the blame for all this.
Ah, but tonight: SHE RIDES!
Happy Halloween again, everyone!