Songs Of Darkness

Most of these are poems, and most have a theme of darkness; those that are not I just happen to like. They are grouped by their author's nationality and in rough chronological order, from the oldest to the newest; since Britain gave us the English language, the British authors come first, beginning with the ones from medieval and Renaissance times, followed by the authors from Britain's former colonies, starting with the U.S.; and then others, starting with countries where the dominant language is some other Indo-European language besides English.
The picture is a painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's called Persephone.
Britain
(He reportedly wrote this on the night before his country's monarch, Queen Elizabeth I, had his head chopped off for treason. He was only in his twenties.)
(The original Robinson Crusoe.)
By William Drummond:
By Thomas Gray:
By Percy Bysshe Shelley:
By William Blake:
From Poetical Sketches:
From Songs of Experience:
By William Wordsworth:
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
(This moderately long poem is on two pages; use the links and/or the back button.)
By Leigh Hunt:
By Robert Browning:
By Algernon Charles Swinburne:
From Atalanta In Calydon:
By Matthew Arnold:
By Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll:
(Kind of long, but it's been divided into eight separate pages. Again, just use the links at the bottom and/or the back and forward buttons to navigate through this mini-epic.)
From Alice In Wonderland:
By Charles Dickens:
Short story
By George Gissing:
Short story
By Edward Lear:
By Christina Rossetti:
By Dante Gabriel Rossetti:
From The House of Life:
By Amy Levy:
By William Ernest Henley:
By Gerard Manley Hopkins:
By George Meredith:
By Oscar Wilde:
By G.K. Chesterton:
Essay
By William Butler Yeats:
By Rudyard Kipling:
By D.H. Lawrence:
By Louis MacNeice:
By Thomas Hardy:
(The Titanic and the iceberg that sank her.)
By Siegfried Sassoon:
By Isaac Rosenberg:
By Wilfred Owen:
By Lascelles Abercrombie:
By Robert Service:
By Walter De La Mare:
By Dylan Thomas:
By W.H. Auden:
By Philip Larkin:
By Stevie Smith:
Ireland
By Thomas Keohler:
By William Allingham:
The U.S.
(A protest poem from the [Jewish] author of "The New Colossus", the much better-known poem which graces the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.)
"The Right To Die," by Paul Laurence Dunbar
"The Menagerie," by William Vaughn Moody
(Some of the language of this turn-of-the-20th-century poem might be confusing to us who live 100-odd years later, but once you get past that, the poem is pretty good satire: nature labored for millions of years to produce...a little drunk ["jagged"] guy. Sad.)
"Summer Lightning," by Horatio Colony
"Feast," by Edna St. Vincent Millay
"The Wanderer," by Zoe Akins
"A Dream Deferred," by Langston Hughes
"Sleep," by Bravig Imbs
"Study In A Late Subway," by Muriel Rukeyser
"A Lullaby," by James Agee
"The Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner,"by Randall Jarrell
"Man Is In Pain," by Philip Lamantia
By Nathaniel Hawthorne:
Short stories
"The Devil In Manuscript"
"Dr. Heidegger's Experiment"
"The Haunted Mind"
"The Man Of Adamant"
By Emily Dickinson:
(She hardly ever titled her poems; they were published titled with numbers. I've given the first line of each poem after its number to help in identifying it.)
Poem 67("Success is counted sweetest")
Poem 125("For each ecstatic instant")
Poem 165("A Wounded Deerleaps highest")
Poem 241("I like a look of Agony")
Poem 258("There's a certain Slant of light")
Poem 280("I felt a Funeral, in my Brain")
Poem 286("That after Horrorthat 'twas us")
Poem 288("I'm Nobody! Who are you?")
Poem 301("I reason, Earth is short")
Poem 314("Naturesometimes sears a Sapling")
Poem 315("He fumbles at your Soul")
Poem 338("I know that He exists")
Poem 341("After great pain, a formal feeling comes")
Poem 414("'Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch")
Poem 435("Much Madness is divinest Sense")
Poem 449("I died for Beautybut was scarce")
Poem 465("I heard a Fly buzzwhen I died")
Poem 510("It was not Death, for I stood up")
Poem 650("Painhas an element of Blank")
Poem 670("One need not be a chamberto be Haunted")
Poem 712("Because I could not stop for Death")
Poem 764("Presentimentis that long Shadow on the Lawn")
Poem 976("Death is a dialogue between")
Poem 997("Crumbling is not an instant's act")
Poem 1100("The last Night that She lived")
Poem 1551("Thosedying then")
Poem 1760("Elysium is as far to")
By Edgar Allan Poe:
"A Dream Within A Dream"
"Alone"
"The City In The Sea"
"The Conqueror Worm"
"Dreams"
"Dream-Land"
"Evening Star"
"Fairy-Land"
"The Happiest Day"
"The Haunted Palace"
"The Lake"
"Lines On Ale"
"Mysterious Star!"
"The Raven"
"Spirits Of The Dead"
"Stanzas"
"To"
"UlalumeA Ballad"
"The Valley Of Unrest"
Short stories
"The Masque Of The Red Death"
"SilenceA Fable"
By Fitz-James O'Brien:
"The Demon Of The Gibbet"
Short stories
"The Diamond Lens"
"What Was It? A Mystery"
By Paul Hamilton Hayne:
"At Last"
"Life And Death"
"October"
"The Phantom Bells"
By Kate Chopin:
Short stories
"The Story Of An Hour"
"The Unexpected"
By Stephen Crane:
"A Man Adrift On A Slim Spar"
"A Man Said To The Universe"
"Black Riders Came From The Sea"
"Do Not Weep, Maiden, For War Is Kind"
"I Saw A Man Pursuing The Horizon"
"In The Desert"
"On The Horizon The Peaks Assembled"
"Supposing That I Should Have The Courage"
By Madison Cawein:
"A Ghost Of Yesterday"
"A Woodland Grave"
"Abandoned"
"Autumn Sorrow"
"Death"
"Eidolons"
"November"
"The Owlet"
"Sunset And Storm"
"Uncalled"
Check out my Madison Cawein fan page on Facebook, and like it while you're at it.
By Ambrose Bierce:
"An Inscription"
"Rimer"
Short stories
"An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge"
"The Applicant"
"The Man And The Snake"
"The Moonlit Road"
"Staley Fleming's Hallucination"
By Edwin Arlington Robinson:
"Amaryllis"
"Credo"
"The Dark Hills"
"The Dark House"
"The Flying Dutchman"
"The House On The Hill"
"The Man Against The Sky"
"Mr. Flood's Party"
"The Pity Of The Leaves"
"Richard Cory"
"Souvenir"
"The Valley Of The Shadow"
By E.E. Cummings:
"Buffalo Bill's defunct"
"here is little Effie's head"
"i sing of Olaf glad and big"
"kitty. sixteen, white, 5'11", prostitute"
By Conrad Aiken:
"Chiaroscuro:Rose"
"Clock and Compass"
"Hatteras Calling"
"The Room"
"Senlin: A Biography"
(Another rather long poem, but I like it. It's on three pages.)
"Sursum Corda"
"Winter For A Moment Takes The Mind"
By Amy Lowell:
"The Country House"
"Grotesque"
"Haunted"
"La Vie De Bohéme"
"Middle Age"
"November"
By Voltairine DeCleyre:
"Germinal"
"In Memoriam"
"Ut Sementem Feceris, Ita Metes"
By Jack London:
Short story
"To Build A Fire"
By Elinor Wylie:
"Fire And Sleet And Candlelight"
"Incantation"
"Madman's Song"
"Poor Earth"
"Silver Filigree"
By Hart Crane:
"The Broken Tower"
"North Labrador"
"Paraphrase"
"The Visible, The Untrue"
By T.S. Eliot:
"The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock"
"Rhapsody On A Windy Night"
By Dorothy Parker:
"Interior"
"The Last Question"
"The Leal"
"Unfortunate Coincidence"
"Wail"
By Ezra Pound:
"The Needle"
"Portrait d'Une Femme"
"The Return"
By Clark Ashton Smith:
"The Abyss Triumphant"
"Alexandrines"
"Alternative"
"Antepast"
"Apostrophe"
"Ave Atque Vale"
"Bacchante"
"The City Of Destruction"
"The Harlot Of The World"
"Interrogation"
"Laus Mortis"
"Love Is Not Yours, Love Is Not Mine"
"Luna Aeternalis"
"The Mad Wind"
"Maya"
"The Maze Of Sleep"
"The Meaning"
"The Medusa Of The Skies"
"The Melancholy Pool"
"Memnon At Midnight"
"Metaphor"
By Wallace Stevens:
"The Emperor Of Ice-Cream"
"Valley Candle"
By John Ciardi:
"A Magus"
"The Damned"
"In Place Of A Curse"
"I Wouldn't"
"On An Exalted Nonentity"
"Sea Burial"
"Sermon Notes"
"White Heron"
By Karl Shapiro:
"The Fly"
"The Progress Of Faust"
"Travelogue For Exiles"
Canada
By Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau:
"Bird Cage"
(Translated from French by me.)
By Charles Heavysege:
"Beyond The Sunset"
"The Dead"
"Winter Skies"
By Emily Pauline Johnson (aka Tekahionwake):
(She was Canadian First Nations [Mohawk].)
"At Sunset"
"Fire-flowers"
"In Grey Days"
"Lady Icicle"
"Marshlands"
"Moonset"
"Penseroso"
"Rainfall"
Australia
By Enid Derham:
"Eternal Rest"
"Farewell"
By Roderic Quinn:
"The Camp Within The West"
"The Hidden Tide"
South Africa
By Roy Campbell:
"Tristan da Cunha"
(Tristan da Cunha is a tiny, remote volcanic island in the South Atlantic; when the volcano on it erupted about 40 years ago, the residents were evacuated to England, but ended up moving back out of homesickness.)
"The Zebras"
Nigeria
By Nkiru Njoku:
"Lost Soul"
By Kunle Olawale:
"The Voice Of Pain"
By Bernard Otumun:
"Enslaved"
By Karo Umukoro:
"Illusory Shadows"
By Obaro Unukogbon:
"Echo"
"Fortune And Time"
Germany
By Andreas Gryphius:
"Epitaph for Mariana Gryphius"
"The Vanity of this World"
By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
"The Erlking"
By Göttfried August Bürger:
"Lenore"
By Johann Ludwig Uhland:
"The Black Knight"
By Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff:
"Night Of The Moon"
By Rainer Maria Rilke:
"Black Cat"
"Evening Love Song"
"Lament (O how all things are far removed)"
"Night (O you whose countenance)"
"Night (This night, agitated by the growing storm)"
"The Panther"
By Bertolt Brecht:
"The Solution"
"To Posterity"
By Hermann Hesse:
"A Swarm Of Gnats"
"At Night On The High Seas"
"How Heavy The Days"
"Lonesome Night"
"On A Journey"
By Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche:
Essay
The Gay Science, Section 125: The Madman
(The famous "God is dead" parable.)
Austria
By Georg Trakl:
"Delirium"
"Klage"
"Whispered Into Afternoon"
Switzerland
By Alfonsina Storni:
"Lighthouse In The Night"
Netherlands
By Gerrit Achterberg:
"Blackbird"
"Black Spring"
"Sleepwalk"
"Snow Passage"
Denmark
By Hans Christian Andersen:
Story
"The Little Match Girl"
France
By Charles Baudelaire:
"A Fantastic Print"
"Be Drunk"
"Correspondences"
"Cupid And The Skull"
"Mist And Rain"
"The Cracked Bell"
"The Desire For Annihilation"
"The Enemy"
"The Fountain Of Blood"
"The Love Of Lies"
"Out Of The Depths Have I Cried"
"The Perfume Flask"
"The Sunset Of Romanticism"
"The Vampire"
"Voyage To Cythera"
By Hilaire Belloc:
"Is There Any Reward?"
"Tarantella"
(I think Vladimir Nabokov may have quoted this poem in Lolita.)
By René Daumal:
"Last Letter To His Wife"
"Poem"
"Skin Of Light"
By René Char:
"The Lords of Maussane"
By Guy De Maupassant:
Short stories
"The Apparition"
"A Vendetta"
"The Diary Of A Madman"
"The Terror"
By Emile Zola:
Short stories
"The Death Of Olivier Becaille"
"The Flood"
By Paul Eluard:
"The Deaf and Blind"
Belgium
By Emile Verhaeren:
"Infinitely"
Spain
By Juan Boscán:
"Untitled"
By Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola:
"Alarming Image Of Death"
By Juan de Arguijo:
"Narcissus"
"Storm And Calm"
By Luis Martín De La Plaza:
"In A Shattered Ship"
By Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas:
"The Brief Year of Mortal Life"
"How You Slip From Between My Hands!"
By Juan de Tasis, Count Villamediana:
"Let My Desires Cease"
By Luis de Carrillo y Sotomayor:
"On The Fleetness And Passage Of Time"
By Pedro Calderon de la Barca:
"Those which were pomp and delight"
By Antonio Enriquez Gomez:
"On The Deceptiveness Of Human Life"
By Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer:
"Giant waves that break with a roar"
"The black swallows will return"
By Rosalía Castro:
"Away from the cadence of the waves"
"I do not know what I am eternally seeking"
By Antonio Machado:
"And it was the demon of my dream"
"The embers of violet dusk"
"From the threshold of a dream"
"Over the bitter earth"
"Perhaps, in dreams"
By Juan Ramon Jimenez:
"How, Death, should I fear you?"
"Leave the doors open"
"Tenebrae"
By Federico Garcia Lorca:
"Ballad Of The Moon"
"City That Does Not Sleep"
"Gacela Of The Dark Death"
"The Weeping"
Mexico
By Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz:
"Which contains an amorous fantasy,
content with platonic love"
"She prefers to die rather than
to expose herself to the affront of old age"
"She tries to refute the praises
inscribed on her portrait by Truth,
which she calls passion"
By José Emilio Pacheco:
"The Elements Of The Night"
By Juan de Dios Peza
"Laugh Crying"
By Xavier Villaurrutia:
"Nocturne: The Angels"
"Nocturne: The Bedroom"
"Nocturne: Nothing Is Heard"
"Nocturne: The Statue"
"Nocturne: Dream"
By Manuel Acu#&241;a:
"To An Arroyo" (A un arroyo)
"History Of A Thought" (Historia del pensamiento)
"Inscription In A Skull" (Inscripción en un cráneo)
"Poor Flower" (Pobre flor)
"Sonnet" (Soneto)
"You Will See" (Ya ver#&225;s)
Nicaragua
By Ruben Dario:
"Fatality"
"Nocturne (I want to express my anguish)"
"Nocturne (Silence of the night)"
"Nocturne (You who listen to the heart of night)"
Colombia
By José Asunción Silva:
"Nocturne III"
Chile
By Pablo Neruda:
"Death Alone"
"Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks"
"Fleas Interest Me So Much"
(I translated these next two.)
From One Hundred Love Sonnets:
Sonnet 55
Sonnet 68
Argentina
By Jorge Luis Borges:
Short stories
"The Circular Ruins"
"The Library of Babel"
Uruguay
By Delmira Agustini:
"Debout Sur Mon Orgueil Je Veux Montier Au Soir"
"Immutable"
"In The Light Of The Moon"
"My Sad Muse"
"Nocturne"
"Your Mouth"
By Horacio Quiroga:
(My own translations.)
"Wild Honey"
Poems:
"The Sad Juggler"
And check out and like my Horacio Quiroga Facebook page, Horacio Quiroga Appreciation Society!
Equatorial Guinea
By Marcelo A. Ndongo Mba
"Funeral Lament"
By Juan Chema Muero
"The Loneliness"
Portugal
By Antero Tarquinio de Quental:
"Despair"
"Dream"
"To A Woman"
"To The Unknown God"
By Mario Cesariny de Vasconcelos:
"Poem"
"The Ship Of Mirrors"
"To A Dead Rat Found In A Park"
Italy
By Ugo Foscolo:
"To The Night"
By Gabriele D'Annunzio:
(These two poems are my own translations.)
"O Scythe of Waning Moon"
"Summer Stood Naked"
Short story:
"San Pantaleone"
By Giuseppe Ungaretti:
"The Beautiful Night"
"Oh Night"
"Star"
"Stars"
"Vanity"
"Variations On Nothing"
Ancient Rome
By Ovid:
Excerpt from The Metamorphoses
(This passage tells the story of how Pluto kidnapped Persephone and made her his wife.)
Romania
By George Bacovia:
"All Lead"
By George Cosbuc:
"The Shadow"
By Mihai Eminescu:
"Drowsy Birds"
"Sleepy Birds"
"Years Have Trailed Past"
Greece
By Posidippus:
"Life A Bane"
By Praxilla of Sicyon:
"Adonis In The Underworld"
By Constantine Cavafy:
"Addition"
"As Much As You Can"
"But Wise Men Perceive Approaching Things"
"Candles"
"Che fece...il gran rifiuto"
"Days Of 1903"
"Desires"
"Finalities"
"He Vows"
"Hidden"
"I Went"
"Monotony"
"Remember, Body..."
"Understanding"
"Voices"
"Walls"
"The Windows"
By George Seferis:
"Argonautica"
By Kostas Karyotakis:
"A Clerk"
"A Tree"
"Destruction"
"They Betrayed Virtue and the Last Came First..."
Russia
(Part of the former Soviet Union, like the three countries immediately following.)
By Mikhail Lermontov:
"A Fairy-Tale For Children"
"Clouds"
"The Sail"
By Gavril Derzhavin:
"The Current Of Time's River"
"On A Bird"
By Fyodor Tyutchev:
"As Is The Globe Embraced By Ocean"
"Autumn Evening"
"A Vision"
"Elysium Of Shades"
"Glum Is The Sky"
"Here, At A Meagre Earth"
"It's There, Still There"
"Say Not He Loves Me"
"Silentium"
"Why Moan, Why Wail You, Wind Of Night"
By Vyacheslav Ivanov:
"Clothed In Beauty"
"Heaven Above, Heaven Below"
"Poets Of Spirit"
"The Vineyard Of Dionysus"
By Afanasy Fet:
"Never"
By Innokenty Annensky:
"'I Thought That The Heart...'"
"September"
Estonia
By Marie Under:
"Denunciation"
"Ecstasy"
"Night"
Lithuania
By Albinas Bernotas:
"At Noon"
Armenia
By Atom Yarjanian:
"Prayer"
Poland
By Czeslaw Milosz:
"A Task"
"Meaning"
"Study Of Loneliness"
"Window"
Hungary
By Endre Ady:
"Benediction From A Train"
"Life Terrifies Me"
"Longing For Love"
"Who Come From Far Away"
By Frigyes Karinthy:
"Struggle For Life"
Czech Republic
By Bohuslav Hasi�tejnsk� z Lobkovic:
"Epitaph to Pope Alexander"
(Pope Alexander VI; the Italian for this infamously corrupt Spanish-born Renaissance pope's real name, Roderic de Borja i Borja, was Rodrigo Borgia; his son was the equally infamous Cesare Borgia.)
Bulgaria
By Peyo Yavarov:
"The Guilt Is Not In You"
"To Laura"
Slovenia
By Srecko Kosovel:
"A Suicide In Front Of A Mirror"
"The Daze Of Death"
Iraq
By the Caliph Radhi Billah:
"On The Vicissitudes Of Life"
By Ibn Alalaf Al-Naharwany:
"On A Cat, That Was Killed As She Was Attempting To Rob A Dove-House"
Lebanon
By Ilya Abu Madi:
Excerpt from The Human Clay
Palestine
By Imam Shafay Mohammed bin Idris:
"On Fatalism"
Saudi Arabia
By Ali bin Mohammed Al-Tahmany:
"On The Death Of A Son"
India
(A former British colony, but that doesn't matter too much, at least not to me. India existed long before the British came along and took it over for a while; and Pakistan was carved out of India.)
By Jibanananda Das:
"Sensation"
By Sankha Ghosh:
"A Beggar Boy's Sentiment"
"Being"
"Bet"
"Body"
"House"
"No"
"The Tiger"
By Premendra Mitra:
"The Soul Of Birds"
"Unless Time Flows"
By Sarojini Naidu:
"Autumn Song"
"My Dead Dream"
"The Pardah Nashin"
"Past And Future"
"The Poet To Death"
"To The God Of Pain"
By Rabindranath Tagore:
Crossing, Poem 16
The Gardener, Verse 66
Pakistan
By Sir Muhammed Iqbal:
"A Spider And A Fly"
China
By Bai Juyi:
"The Bloom Is Not A Bloom"
"Night Snow"
By Su Tung-Po:
"Pu Suan Tzu"
"Remembrance"
"Shui Tiao Ko Tou"
(Despite those Chinese titles, these are all in English.)
By Li Po:
"A Homily On Ideals In Life,
Uttered In Springtime On Rising
From A Drunken Slumber"
"The Old Dust"
By Li Tai-po:
"Passionate Grief"
By Du Fu:
"Taking Down A Trellis"
"The Solitary Goose"
Japan
By Ki no Tsurayuki:
"A Singular Thing"
"Ceaselessly"
"In This Endless Rain"
"The Morning Mists"
"On The Path Of Dreams"
"The Parting Year"
"Though I Dip"
"Throughout The Span Of Man"
"Twisting Into Thread"
"While I Gaze Upon It"
By Ono no Komachi:
"Atop This Crag"
The death haikus of three unidentified samurai:
Choko
Enryo
Ginka
South Korea
By So Chong-Ju:
"Leper"
"Noontide"
By Shin Kyong-Nim:
"The River"
Philippines
By Emmanuel S. Torres:
"Walking Home"
Indonesia
By Chairil Anwar:
"At The Mosque"
"Me"
"Willingness"
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