Song of the Day - 30th October

It is spooky season and I have written not one but two Hallowe'en songs, both called confusingly, "Hallowe'en"!

The first is by Madison Julius Cawein, an American poet who was the son of a herbalist. His output numbered thirty-six books and 1,500 poems. His writing presented Kentucky scenes in a language echoing Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. He soon earned the nickname the "Keats of Kentucky".

This poem is a story of a lost love, returning as a ghostly revenant on Hallowe'en!

Get the music for this song for free - find out how here.

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Hallowe’en

By Madison Julius Cawein

It was down in the woodland on last Hallowe'en,

Where silence and darkness had built them a lair,

That I felt the dim presence of her, the unseen,

And heard her still step on the ghost-haunted air.

It was last Hallowe'en in the glimmer and swoon

Of mist and of moonlight that thickened and thinned,

That I saw the gray gleam of her eyes in the moon,

And hair, like a raven, blown wild in the wind.

It was last Hallowe'en where starlight and dew

Made mystical marriage on flower and leaf,

That she led me with looks of a love that I knew,

And lured with the voice of a heart-buried grief.

It was last Hallowe'en in the forest of dreams,

Where trees are eidolons and shadows have eyes,

That I saw her pale face like the foam of far streams,

And heard, like the leaf-lisp, her tears and her sighs.

It was last Hallowe'en, the haunted, the dread,

In the wind-tattered wood by the storm-twisted pine,

That I, who am living, kept tryst with the dead,

And clasped her a moment and dreamed she was mine.