Good Writin': Two Excerpts from H. P. Lovecraft's "Fungi from Yuggoth."

Good Writin’: Two Excerpts from H. P. Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth.”

January 25th, 2008

Very few readers of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction know that Lovecraft was a reasonably accomplished poet as well as a prose stylist. In fact, Lovecraft began reading–and writing–poetry at a very early age: he had read Homer’s Odyssey and produced his own “young readers” abridgement of the epic by age six! Lovecraft is generally not known as a poet, however, because, unlike his prose, very little of HPL’s poetry was ever published outside of letters and amateur-press ‘zines. The majority of Lovecraft’s poetry is modelled on “Georgian,” that is, 18th Century, British verse forms. Lovecraft adored Alexander Pope, John Dryden, and other topical satirists of their day, and modeled his own verse very closely on theirs; hence, much of HPL’s poetry is based on “current events” of Lovecraft’s time and experience, especially events and controversies within his amateur press circles. While these poems may very well have been extraordinarily witty to the folks who understood their allusions, to contemporary readers they read much like extended “in-jokes” that make little sense outside of their original contexts. Furthermore, Lovecraft’s poetry often comes across as very stiff and stilted, as HPL was more concerned with the “harmonious regularity of metre” than with the imagery, ideas, and symbolism which truly fuel poetry.

Nonetheless, Lovecraft has produced some poetry of extraordinary beauty and power. None of his verse works are as stunning as his sonnet sequence “Fungi from Yuggoth” (1929-30). In these thirty-six sonnets, Lovecraft has created a number of fourteen-line mini-narratives, poetic remixes of several of his prose works, and gorgeous congeries of weird words that evoke the same delerious atmosphere of his best-known stories.

For your appreciation, I present you two of my favorite sonnets:

XV: Antarktos

Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly
Of the black cone amid the polar waste;
Pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly,
By storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced.
Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses,
And only pale auroras and faint suns
Glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources
Are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.

If men should glimpse it, they would merely wonder
What tricky mound of Nature’s build they spied;
But the bird told of vaster parts, that under
The mile-deep ice-shroud crouch and brood and bide.
God help the dreamer whose mad visions shew
Those dead eyes set in crystal gulfs below!

XXI: Nyarlathotep

And at the last from inner Egypt came
The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;
Silent and lean and cryptically proud,
And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.
Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,
But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;
While through the nations spread the awestruck word
That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.

Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;
Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;
The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled
Down on the quaking citadels of man.
Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,
The idiot Chaos blew Earth’s dust away.