Poem of the Week 2014/44

When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls, and the bat in the moonlight flies,
And inky clouds, like funeral shrouds, sail over the midnight skies –
When the footpads quail at the night-bird's wail, and black dogs bay at the moon,
Then is the spectres' holiday – then is the ghosts' high-noon!

Chorus: Ha! ha! Then is the ghosts' high-noon!

As the sob of the breeze sweeps over the trees, and the mists lie low on the fen,
From grey tomb-stones are gathered the bones that once were women and men,
And away they go, with a mop and a mow, to the revel that ends too soon,
For cockcrow limits our holiday – the dead of the night's high-noon!

Chorus: Ha! ha! The dead of the night's high-noon!

And then each ghost with his ladye-toast to their churchyard beds takes flight,
With a kiss, perhaps, on her lantern chaps, and a grisly grim "good-night";
Till the welcome knell of the midnight bell rings forth its jolliest tune,
And ushers in our next high holiday – the dead of the night's high-noon!

Chorus: Ha! ha! The dead of the night's high-noon! Ha! ha! ha! ha!

WS Gilbert, from Ruddigore

Here's another haunted poem for Halloween, though lighter in tone than last week's. It is sung by a ghost, accompanied by a chorus of lesser ghosts, in Act 2 of Gilbert & Sullivan's Ruddigore, which has always been one of my top five favorites among the Savoy operas (the others, since you need to know, are The Mikado, Iolanthe, The Yeomen of the Guard, and The Gondoliers). Ruddigore is a satirical take on Victorian Gothic horror melodramas, a genre, or at least a style (as witness many of Tim Burton's movies) which has had a contemporary resurgence – I think the opera might find an appreciative audience today among fans of steampunk or vampire romances.

The lyrics manage to combine the classic signifiers of creepy haunting: howling winds, bats, black dogs, funeral shrouds, tombstones, and so forth – with a light-hearted air, skipping along on the internal rhymes: after all, this is a description of a party. (It reminds me of early cartoons like Walt Disney's The Skeleton Dance in the Silly Symphonies series.) There's a lot of movement here, much of it swift: things fly, sail, quail, sweep, take flight. This is not a still and solemn time: things howl, wail, bay, sob, and knell.

The nightly gathering occurs at midnight, and we tend to forget how dark and dangerous midnights used to be: in 1887, the year the opera premiered, electric street lights were still a fairly recent innovation in London, and it would be easy for audiences to transport themselves back to the night-time darkness of the earlier part of the century, when the action of the opera takes place.

Suitably for someone who is in but no longer of this world, this ghost uses vocabulary that is a bit archaic. A chimney cowl is "a hood-shaped covering used to increase the draft of a chimney and prevent backflow"; it also prevents birds and squirrels from nesting in the chimney. A cowl can also be the hood of a monk's robe, so perhaps the word is also meant to bring with it the aura of the mysterious monks prominent in the horror fictions of (Protestant) England. A footpad is a robber on foot (as opposed to on horseback); his victims would also be on foot. A night-bird is another term for an owl (another classic sign of spookiness). As for black dogs, I think the color just goes along with the inkiness of the clouds (like funeral shrouds), but it might be worth remembering that Mephistopheles first shows himself to Goethe's Faust in the form of a large black poodle. Except for that possible hint, the devil is excluded from this gathering; this seems like a fancy ball more than a Walpurgisnacht. To mop and mow is to grimace and make sad faces. The ladye-toast would be the woman (more precisely, ghost of a woman) that each man toasts; that is, his sweetheart. Lantern chaps would be the lower jaw or cheek, thin enough to be transparent like a lamp. Cock-crow is the traditional signal of dawn at which ghosts must return to their graves (remember Horatio, in the first scene of Hamlet: "I have heard, / The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn, / Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat / Awake the god of day, and at his warning, / Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air, / Th' extravagant and erring spirit hies / To his confine").

I took this from The Complete Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan, edited by Ian Bradley, though the only annotation on this number is that it is similar to an early poem by Gilbert. Sullivan's music is appropriately haunting and sweeping; there are a number of recordings that are worth checking out, though of course when it comes to Gilbert and Sullivan you can't go too far wrong with D'Oyly Carte.