#WingedWordsWindsday: 2022/10/26 -- Happy Halloween!

 WINGED WORDS WINDSDAY

Compiled by Rob Chappell (@RHCLambengolmo)

Vol. 1, No. 52: October 26, 2022

 

 

Happy Halloween & Happy 1^st Birthday to Winged Words Windsday!

 

“Dusk in Autumn”

By Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

 

The Moon is like a scimitar,

A little silver scimitar,

A-drifting down the sky.

And near beside it is a star,

A timid twinkling golden star,

That watches like an eye.

 

And through the nursery window-pane

The witches have a fire again,

Just like the ones we make, —

And now I know they’re having tea,

I wish they’d give a cup to me,

With witches’ currant cake.

 

“A Forest Child”

By Madison Julius Cawein (1865-1914)

 

There is a place I search for still,

Sequestered as the world of dreams,

A bushy hollow, and a hill

That whispers with descending streams,

Cool, careless waters, wandering down,

Like Innocence who runs to town,

Leaving the wildwood and its dreams,

And prattling like the forest streams.

 

But still in dreams I meet again

The child who bound me, heart and hand,

And led me with a wildflower chain

Far from our world, to Faeryland:

Who made me see and made me know

The lovely Land of Long-Ago,

Leading me with her little hand

Into the world of Wonderland.

 

The years have passed: how far away

The day when there I met the child,

The little maid, who was a fay,

Whose eyes were dark and undefiled

And crystal as a woodland well,

That holds within its depths a spell,

Enchantments, featured like a child,

A dream, a poetry undefiled.

 

Around my heart she wrapped her hair,

And bound my soul with lips and eyes,

And led me to a cavern, where

Grey Legend dwelt in kingly guise,

Her kinsman, dreamier than the moon,

Who called her Fancy, read her rune,

And bade her with paternal eyes

Divest herself of her disguise.

 

And still I walk with her in dreams,

Though many years have passed since then,

And that high hill and its wild streams

Are lost as is that faery glen.

And as the years go swiftly by

I find it harder, when I try,

To meet with her, who led me then

Into the wildness of that glen.

 

“Halloween”

By John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922)

 

The ghosts of all things past parade,

Emerging from the mist and shade

That hid them from our gaze,

And, full of song and ringing mirth,

In one glad moment of rebirth,

And again they walk the ways of earth

As in the ancient days.

 

The beacon light shines on the hill,

The will-o'-wisps the forests fill

With flashes filched from noon;

And witches on their broomsticks spry

Speed here and yonder in the sky,

And lift their strident voices high

Unto the Hunter's Moon.

 

The air resounds with tuneful notes

From myriads of straining throats,

All hailing Folly Queen;

So join the swelling choral throng,

Forget your sorrow and your wrong,

In one glad hour of joyous song

To honor Halloween!

 

“The Shadow on the Stone”

By Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

 

I went by the Druid stone

That broods in the garden white and lone,  

And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows  

That at some moments fall thereon

From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,  

And they shaped in my imagining

To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders  

Threw there when she was gardening.

 

I thought her behind my back,

Yea, her I long had learned to lack,

And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,  

Though how do you get into this old track?’  

And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf  

As a sad response; and to keep down grief

I would not turn my head to discover

That there was nothing in my belief.

 

Yet I wanted to look and see

That nobody stood at the back of me;

But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision  

A shape which, somehow, there may be.’  

So I went on softly from the glade,

And left her behind me throwing her shade,  

As she were indeed an apparition—

My head unturned lest my dream should fade.

 

“The Kraken”

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

 

Below the thunders of the upper deep,

Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,

His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee

About his shadowy sides; above him swell

Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;

And far away into the sickly light,

From many a wondrous grot and secret cell

Unnumbered and enormous polypi

Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.

 

There hath he lain for ages, and will lie

Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,

Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

Then once by man and angels to be seen,

In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

 

The constellation Cetus (the Sea-Dragon or Kraken) is visible from the American Midwest in the southern sky on autumn evenings. (Image Credit: Samuel Leigh [1824] – Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)