Hark.
Can you hear it?
Can you hear the dead leaves quietly chattering
swirling about
in tiny eddies
on this
the most especially strange
of all the nights of the year?
Look.
Moonlight.
Pumpkin month and a season of shadows.
Listen.
That other sound, gently thrumming, off in the distance …
A horse.
A horse that carries a father and son –
the thrumming a pounding as closer they come.
***
My son, why have you covered your ears?
What can it possibly be that you hear?
Father, I want the music to stop.
It’s beautiful, and it calls to me,
But I just don’t want it near to me.
My son, that is only the sound of the river,
Splashing and singing while making its way.
Dear boy, sweet boy, come here, my dear.
Come follow me, and you shall hear
Such music as can slake the ear
Like water slakes the thirst.
Father, O Father, can you not hear?
The song of the Halloween King draws near!
My son, why have you covered your eyes –
Buried your face in my cloak? Fear not.
We soon will be home, and full of good cheer.
Your mother will give you warm soup for your chill.
It’s true we must hurry, but please don’t be frightened,
For home is not far – just over the hill.
Father, a king is calling to me.
A tall white king is following me –
A tall white king with attendants in train.
A tall white king – over there, can’t you see?
My child, my lovely, come closer to me.
Such beautiful, curious things to see –
So very close: the Land of Faeríe –
And you no longer alone!
My child, my lovely, come closer to me.
Such beautiful, curious things to see –
So very close: the Land of Faeríe –
And you no longer alone!
My son, why do you shrink from the night?
Why do you press against me – so tight?
Father, please help me! Oh, why can’t you see?
Father, please save me! He’s now reaching out to me!
Help Me Please Help Me! He’s Latched His Hand Onto Me!
My son, my son, what can the matter be?
Why are you pushing yourself hard away from me?
So very unsafe – the horse runs so quickly!
Soon we’ll be home, and you can sleep soundly.
My son, you are mine, entirely mine,
For I am your father – outside of time.
Happy, my son, in the land of moonshine,
Together – forever – as one.
***
Hark.
Can you hear it?
No longer the thrumming, the galloping humming,
for they have arrived.
The father dismounts,
carrying his boy, apparently sleeping,
who’d suddenly stopped his wriggling wiggling
struggle against the age-old enemy
always on lookout for little ones.
Laid on his bed, the boy does not move.
His mother in panic – she shakes him and cries.
It breaks like the dawn that their child is gone.
Hear the boy’s mother? – her weeping and wailing?
Look.
The mist is rising, and slowly dissolving.
The black is gradually turning to gray.
Listen.
Among the sounds of the gentle old river
additional tinkling chuckling whispering
not to be heard the day before –
the sound of a small boy
talking to someone …
or maybe
just singing
alone.
Bio
Dan Thompson (PhD) is a U.S. Army veteran and former journal editor whose creative and critical work has appeared in a wide range of literary and scholarly journals, including, within the past year, issues of Feral, Canary, Eclectica, The Raven Review, The Good Life Review, Black Coffee Review, Rat’s Ass Review, and Jerry Jazz Musician, among others. In an earlier life, he worked as a music producer for educational videos and as a disc jockey at a country music radio station.
Author's note
This poem in three sections has two notably different structures. The first and third (free-verse) sections are entirely original and are intended to frame the middle section, which is my retelling of my own (already-loose) translation of Goethe’s Erlkönig (1782) – perhaps the most famous example of dark fantasy in poetry by a major European writer during the early years of literary Romanticism.
Although Goethe is rightly credited with the authorship of his famous poem, it should probably be noted that he did not create his canonical poem “out of whole cloth,” but was inspired by his reading of Johann Gottfried von Herder’s version of the traditional Danish ballad known as Elveskud (Elf-shot).
Herder, who created the first German rendering of this old and widespread Scandinavian tale (of which there were numerous variants), titled his rather loose translation Erlkönigs Tochter (Erl-king’s Daughter), published in 1778. Herder’s version tells the story of how Sir Oluf, riding late at night enroute to his wedding the following day, comes upon elves dancing in a clearing in a grove. He dismounts at the approach of the Erl-king’s daughter, who shakes his hand and invites him to dance with her. He declines the offer, after which she asks him three more times, each time offering him a more valuable gift. After he refuses the third gift, she strikes him, and he immediately becomes deathly pale. She then lifts him onto his horse, and sends him homeward. The following day he is found by his bride – dead.
Goethe, however, made two notable changes to this narrative. In the folktale, the protagonist is not only an adult male but also a nobleman; and against an evil supernatural entity, the nobleman may be presumed to have been a sympathetic figure – even among “commoners.” And the fact that the evil spirit is woman-identified – an “evil temptress” waylaying a fine, upstanding member of the nobility – would apparently have passed without comment during the time that the tale was developed among oral storytellers. In Erlkönig, however, it is not the Erl-king’s daughter who is the antagonist, but the Erl-king himself. Nor is the victim an adult, but instead a child – a more sympathetic figure than a nobleman, but also reflective of the contemporaneous belief that children were more sensitive to “otherworldly” phenomena than adults (such as the boy’s father), whose senses have been blunted by the workaday human social world, and are therefore less able to perceive the supernatural.
Other than the narrator’s, there are three distinct voices in Erlkönig: the terrified child’s, the reassuring father’s, and the wheedling Erl-king’s (indicated by italicized text in “The Halloween King”), who, although at first attempting merely to convince, and even bribe, the boy to join him in the Otherworld, also clearly has the ability to simply “take” the youth by killing him, which, by the end of the narrative, he has done – Goethe’s echo of the deadly punishment inflicted by the elf-king’s daughter in the traditional Danish tale.
