Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

The pages of our calendars are flying off like autumn leaves. To the delight of children, we are nearing that annual candy-scavenge in America: Halloween.

Our celebrations of the eerie and macabre are pretty bland compared to the holiday’s origins, but as long as people gather in the dark to scare each other with spooky stories, we won’t have entirely lost the awe and mystery of Samhain / Samhuin (SAH-win or  SOW-in – rhymes with cow)

This was the first day of the new year in the ancient Celtic calendar, the beginning of the “darker half” of the year. ‘Samhain’ is Irish Gaelic. ‘Samhuin’ is Scottish Gaelic. Special  bonfires were lit, for protection and cleansing. It was believed to be a time when the veils between worlds thinned, so faerie folk came amongst humans, and the spirits of the dead could visit their kin.

Tales of the supernatural have always held a fascination for humankind, be they about ghosts, witches, fairies, the dead – or the undead – or ‘things that go bump in the night.’ Here’s an assortment of unsettling poems from poets, some of them world-famous, and some you may not already know.

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Hughes Mearns (1875–1965) wrote this poem in 1899 for his play, The Psyco-ed. It was inspired by reports of a man’s ghost haunting the stairs of a house in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Later, it became the lyrics for a song called I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There.

Antigonish

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!

Go away, go away,
don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away,
and please don’t slam the door… (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…

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