Hallowe’en
- Author
- Madison Julius Cawein
- Date
- 1907
- Language
- English
- Country
- Form
- Five quatrains, rhymed ABAB, with a regular lyrical rhythm
- First published
- Weeds by the Wall, 1907
The source
It was down in the woodland on last Hallowe’en,
Where silence and darkness had built them a lair,
That I felt the dim presence of her, the unseen,
And heard her still step on the ghost-haunted air.
It was last Hallowe’en in the glimmer and swoon
Of mist and of moonlight that thickened and thinned,
That I saw the gray gleam of her eyes in the moon,
And hair, like a raven, blown wild in the wind.
It was last Hallowe’en where starlight and dew
Made mystical marriage on flower and leaf,
That she led me with looks of a love that I knew,
And lured with the voice of a heart-buried grief.
It was last Hallowe’en in the forest of dreams,
Where trees are eidolons and shadows have eyes,
That I saw her pale face like the foam of far streams,
And heard, like the leaf-lisp, her tears and her sighs.
It was last Hallowe’en, the haunted, the dread,
In the wind-tattered wood by the storm-twisted pine,
That I, who am living, kept tryst with the dead,
And clasped her a moment and dreamed she was mine.
Commentary
Dr. Ruxandra RouxHead of Literary Research & Development
Madison Cawein, Weeds by the Wall, 1907. A man alone in a wood on Halloween night feels a woman before he sees her: grey eyes, raven-black hair, a pale face, tears and sighs. She is dead. He is alive. For a moment they meet again. The poem never says who she was. Cawein later rewrote it, and the rewrite is more explicit: “where once we had sinned”, a love that “was dead”, someone “who once had been mine”. This page uses the 1907 text, the mysterious one.
Everything haunts: mist, moonlight, dew, leaves. “Trees are eidolons and shadows have eyes”: the woods become the outward form of memory. “It was last Hallowe'en” keeps coming back, like someone who cannot stop returning to one night. Is she a ghost, a lost love, or a dream made of longing? Cawein leaves all three open, which is the right call. It is Gothic without the castle: American woodland, no violence, only the idea that love and memory can briefly beat the boundary between the living and the dead. I will not argue.
Songs
The song made from Hallowe’en.
