For Halloween week, two by Robert Herrick. The first:
The Hag
1. The hag is astride,
This night for to ride;
The Devill and shee together:
Through thick, and through thin;
Now out, and then in,
Though ne'r so foule be the weather.
2. A thorn or a burr
She takes for a Spurre:
With a lash of a Bramble she rides now,
Through Brakes and through Bryars:
O're Ditches, and Mires;
She followes the Spirit that guides now.
3. No Beast, for his food,
Dares now range the wood;
But husht in his laire he lies lurking:
While mischeifs, by these,
On Land and on Seas,
At noone of Night are a working.
4. The storme will arise,
And trouble the skies;
This night, and more for the wonder,
The ghost from the Tomb
Affrighted shall come,
Cal'd out by the clap of the Thunder.
The second:
The Hagg.
The staffe is now greas'd,
And very well pleas'd,
She cockes out her Arse at the parting;
To an old Ram Goat,
That rattles i' th' throat,
Halfe choakt with the stink of her farting.
In a dirtie Haire-lace
She leads on a brace
Of black-bore-cats to attend her;
Who scratch at the Moone,
And threaten at noone
Of night from Heaven for to rend her.
A hunting she goes;
A crackt horne she blowes;
At which the hounds fall a bounding;
While th' Moone in her sphere
Peepes trembling for feare,
And night's afraid of the sounding.
– Robert Herrick
Two poems by the same poet, on the same theme, using many of the same images – the flying witch, the noon of night (that is, midnight), fear spread among wild animals, the Devil (the Ram Goat in the second poem is an image of a devil) – even the same title (with an additional g in the second), & yet I find the effect of the two very different.
Both hags are clearly "bad", of, if you prefer, outside of standard societal norms, but with Hag 1 there's something frankly appealing about the picture: she's powerful, insouciant, with a literally Devil-may-care attitude. She has the traditional witch/pagan link to the Natural world: she rides out at night, soaring through the sky, fearless of wind or rain; the references in Stanza 2 to her using a thorn as a spur & a prickly vine as a lash are reminiscent of poetic descriptions of the fairy-world (see, for example, A Midsummer Night's Dream or the Queen Mab speech in Romeo & Juliet). And even though the fairy-world is darker & more menacing than we of the modern age like to think, there is still something appealing about it, something striking & beautiful, as in any natural mystery. We could live side by side with this world & feel not unease or danger but the richness of unseen possibilities.
Hag 1 causes mischief (or mischeifs, as the seventeenth-century spelling has it) but implicit in the word is a sense of playfulness, something that is more an inconvenient prank than a serious threat. And the harm that is being done isn't shown affecting humans, at least directly; it's the forest predators (who are themselves possible dangers to people) who cower in their caves until the hag passes. She causes storms (like the Weird Sisters in Macbeth), but, again, the danger doesn't seem to threaten humans directly. Instead we get the extremely picturesque image of ghosts, themselves frightened by her powers, coming out when the thunderclaps are most violent. Hag 1 seems to have great power, which, at some level, is always appealing, or at least intriguing, to people. She soars above, heedless. She is linked to Nature, but can also manipulate it (mostly, it seems, for theatrical effect; her actions don't seem to have any purpose more specific than stirring things up). It's an image that charms.
Hag 2, on the other hand, is much grosser. The first stanza describes some sort of sexual encounter with a devil, & not a charming, sophisticated devil either (like Goethe's Mephistopheles), but an old goat (click here for one of Goya's images of witches consorting with Satan in the form of a giant goat). The staff that is greased might refer to the stick she uses as her air-borne steed, but it has an unmistakably phallic undercurrent; perhaps she & Satan are using some sort of dildo. Her parting shot is an offensive fart. It's a physical encounter, but a mostly unappealing one: greasy, smelly, gagging.
Hag 1's appearance is never mentioned, except for what's implicit in the word "hag". Hag 2's appearance is described a little more fully. She is wearing a haire-lace, which seems to be a wig of some sort with a lace base. So she probably is bald, or balding, & her wig is dirty (& if the wig is dirty, she herself is probably not clean either). We are made conscious of her ass & her farts. It's a crude picture. Her familiars are a little crowd of black cats, of nasty disposition, scratching at the Moon, as if they would scratch it out of heaven. The moon is often associated with Hecate, a goddess who became associated with witchcraft, as well as with night-time & changeability. Hag 2 shoves her butt at the Devil & her cats claw at the Moon: she certainly seems to bite the hand that feeds her, but mostly in a crude, fairly nasty way: nothing insouciant here! She also haunts & hunts through the forest, but it's a little unclear what she's hunting for – whatever it is, she's out to harm; even Night & the Moon fear her hunting. Even the sound of hunting (so often invoked by composers) is ugly here: her horn is cracked (another unavoidably phallic reference, to a damaged instrument), producing a sound that produces fear & trembling. We have the feeling in both poems of supernatural forces, but with Hag 1 they seem at play & with Hag 2 at work.
Happy Halloween!
These poems are from The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, edited by Tom T. Cain and Ruth Connolly, published by Oxford University Press.
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