Poem of the Day: ‘When the Night Wind Howls’

From the standpoint of liturgical time — for those who observe it — talking about ghosts in the middle of November makes a kind of sense. For Catholics and other Christians, the spookiness of Halloween ushers in an entire month of remembering the dead. Even in the clash of the church’s calendar with the secular one, things make a kind of sense: Remembrance Day, for example, which we observed all last week with a run of World War I poems. The general gloominess of November weather works, too, shaken up with all the other elegiac items in the month’s grab bag. A little crazily, maybe, it all fits.This brings us to today’s comic poem by W.S. Gilbert (1836–1911), poet and librettist. Gilbert’s lyrics, as set to Arthur Sullivan’s scores, are themselves a crazy, shaken-up grab-bag of sounds that — miraculously — make crystalline sense together. Songs such as “I Am the Very Model of a Major-General” are so crammed full of language as to generate the impression that in the headlong race between words and music, the music is losing by an eyelash.Meanwhile, today’s poem, “When the Night Wind Howls,” begins decorously enough, in a mode which Walter de la Mare, later, would turn to delectably creepy effect. There are the trimeter lines which bring the rhymes around in that obsessive way Sun readers will recall from such de la Mare poems as “Dream Song” or “The Empty House.” But where de la Mare will content himself with creating a miasma of eeriness, here Gilbert lets all hell break giddily loose — “Ha! Ha!” — at “the dead of the night’s high noon.” When the Night Wind HowlsBy W.S. GilbertWhen the night wind howlsIn the chimney cowls,And the bat in the moonlight flies,And the inky clouds,Like funeral shrouds,Sail over the midnight skies —When the footpads quailAt the night-bird’s wail,And black dogs bay at the moon,Then is the spectre’s holiday —Then is the ghost’s high noon!Ha! Ha!Then is the ghost’s high noon!As the sob of the breezeSweeps over the treesAnd the mists lie low on the fen,From grey tomb-stonesAre gathered the bonesThat once were women and men,And away they go,With a mop and a mow,To the revel that ends too soon,For cock crow limits our holiday —The dead of the night’s high noon!Ha! Ha!The dead of the night’s high noon!And then each ghostWith his ladye-toastTo their church yard beds take flight,With a kiss, perhaps,On her lantern chaps,And a grisly grim, “good night!”Till the welcome knellOf the midnight bellRings forth its jolliest tune,And ushers in our next high holiday —The dead of the night’s high noon!Ha! Ha!The dead of the night’s high noon!___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘When the Night Wind Howls’

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