The Dead Live

We are always looking for a poet who speaks to us directly, in almost personal terms. But that is what all true poets do - they can reach further and deeper into our lives than any prose writer can in ways that are still largely mysterious. Like music, poetry touches us like nothing else can. However it accomplishes this, it is non-rational, using language almost like signals that trigger emotions and ideas. In his introduction to Conrad Aiken's Selected Poems, Harold Bloom wrote: "Aiken's flaws are palpable enough: his rhetoric is too consistently eloquent, and frequently he gives us poetry rather than poems. And yet it is poetry, cognitive music, free of all ideology, and courageous in confronting family madness, solitude, death-as-annihilation, chaos."

I first knew Aiken as the author of a short story that I read when I was a boy - a boy about the same age as the boy in the story. It was "Silent Snow Secret Snow," and the story's haunting portrayal of a boy's fantasy world in which it is always snowing captivated me when I was living in the American South, where snow was a very rare and, for me, magical occurrence. I quickly divined the power of snow to slow things down: snarling traffic, closing schools, knocking out power.

Like everyone else, I, too, am always on the lookout for a poet who I feel speaks directly to me. Aiken is not such a poet, but he is a fine, serious writer of poetry. In his late poem "Hallowe'en" he appeals to us to restore to the holiday its original meaning and function. In many Catholic countries, including the Philippines (where I write this), there is a tradition for remembering the dead, not as they were, but as they still are - gone but a part of us and of our ongoing lives. 

Hallowe'en

I

All Saints', All Hallows', All Souls', and Hallowe'en,

which is the evening of the last of October,

and the harvest moon full:

and the first of November, Allerheiligen,

and the second of November, Allerseelen.

The moon, dead brother, lights her bonfire

behind Sheepfold Hill, old corpse-fire

blazing through the oaktrees, the bone-fire

which, in the forests, the priests called ignis ossium.

And again you come to complain and to haunt me,

you and the others, the homeless: the bells

trill in the twilight, held by no fingers,

touched by no hand of the living, the voices

under the bronze cloud circle the bonfire,

wing-voice and bat-voice and tree-voice:

and the spotted pebble, flung hissing in flames,

is lost in the ashes, and with it your soul.

It is you at the fire's edge, grandfather—!

your skeleton dancing, the pumpkin-head glaring,

the corpse-light through the pierced eyes and slashed mouth,

you, past the gas-works and the power-plant drifting,

and the old car-tracks and the railroad crossing,

but not, no, not again to the Heath of Simmering

where you watched little rafts of gay candles

floating like fireflies down the Danube, the souls

of those who had drowned in the river! There you

with alien eyes saw the ancient god, there heard

with alien ears the Allerseelen, Allerheiligen,

the candles on grave-mounds, and the flowers,

the procession of the living with wreaths

to the hillside cemeteries in the mountains,

and, after dark, the processions of the dead

to the lost threshold, the lost hearthstone.

And now you come back to complain and to haunt me,

you, and my brother, and the others.

Was your vision of god not enough, that you come

for the vision of the not-yet-dead, and the cricket's

chirp on the still-warm hearthstone?

II

ln the old time, the old country,

these two days, these two holy days,

were devoted to the dead. At the end of summer,

in the first haze of autumn stolen in from the sea,

at Samhain, the end of summer,

salt smell of kelp mixed with scent of the windfall

and whirled up the chalk path at daybreak,

we sacrificed a white horse to the sun-god

and kindled great fires on the hills

and nightlong we danced in circles

with straw-plaits blazing on pitchforks.

We sacrificed too to the moon-god,

an effigy, a simulacrum,

on this night, Hallowe'en, for we knew

the spirits of the dead were released, and would come

to rattle our latches and sit at the table. At Vespers,

in the dank churchyard, in the ossuary,

where the bones from an over-full graveyard were crammed,

we went in and knelt among bones. And the bones

(wing-voice and tree-voice and wind-voice)

suddenly were singing about us

joined in complaint and besought us

for prayers and more prayers, while the candles

flickered in the draft on grave-mounds.

Then on clean cloth we laid out the supper,

the hot pancakes, and the curds, and the cider,

and banked well the fire, and set the chairs round it,

said a prayer, and to bed.

In the old time, the old country:

but now none remembers, now they become

the forgotten, the lost and forgotten. O lost and forgotten,

you homeless and hearthless, you maskers and dancers,

masquerading as witches, as wild beasts, as robbers,

jack-o'-lantern leaping in the shadows of walls,

bells thrilling at the touch of bone fingers,

you come back to abuse and to haunt us,

you, grandfather, and my brother, and the others:

to the forgetful house, yourselves not forgetful,

(for the dead do not forget us, in our hearts

the dead never forget us)

you return to make mischief and to enter the house

you return once more to remind us.

The pumpkin-head lit with a candle, the cry

help the poor, help the poor, help the poor!

comminatory cry from door to door

and the obolos paid that the ghost be laid:

it is our ancestors and children who conspire against us

life unlived and unloved that conspires against us

our neglected hearts and hearths that conspire against us

for we have neglected not only our death

in forgetting our obligations to the dead

we have neglected our living and our children's living

in neglecting our love

for the dead who would still live within us.

III

All summer it rained: day after day, from morning

to sodden noon and eave's-drop eve, it rained:

day after day the heavens and the clouds complained.

Heavy the honeysuckle poll with over-ripe blossom:

rank the myrtle by the doorstep: bleeding the bosom

of the rainsick rose who broke her heart on the tomb.

The dry wells filled, and the vaults, and the cisterns:

and the cellars with underground music: the furrows of clay

glittered with water: rotten under water the wheatfield lay.

In the drear suburb, beyond the greenhouse, and the stonemason's,

on the Cove Road, among the marble shafts and porphyry basins,

and the cold eyeless angels with folded wings,

(there where we fished as children

looking over our shoulders at tombstones)

at last, undermined by water, the headstone fell,

sank softly, slowly, on the grave-mound,

and lay thus, a month neglected, on hollow ground.

And the spirit, the unappeased houseless spirit,

whose dwelling should be in ourselves, those who inherit,

even as our dwelling is in the tomb,

homeward once more looks now for prayer and praise

to be with laurels blest

and in our breast

live out his due bequest of nights and days.

IV

And so it is you at the dark's edge, grandfather,

revenant again to complain and to haunt me,

cavorting at the fire's edge, leaping through the flames,

while the moon, behind Sheepfold Hill,

lights her old bonfire, old bone-fire, and our ancestors

gather down from the hillside, gather up from the sea-wall,

and come home to be warmed. You, from the Geissberg,

the 'Rhine full of molten gold, and the Neckar Valley

echoing the slow psalm of the curfew,

from 'a lecture by Humboldt,' and a ship at sea

'which, as she took up the winds,

and rose in triumph over the waves,'

was a symbol to you of our relation to god:

'the absolute, the eternal, the infinite, a shoreless sea,

in unconscious rest, all its powers in repose,

to be used at man's will.' And the Iphigenie

von Tauris, at Heidelberg read with delight,

while the little Humboldt, 'his small face flushed,

eyes small, bright, and piercing,'

transcribed the last page of his Kosmos.

'And I thought, as he moved off, helped by his servant,

had I waited a twelvemonth, I would never have seen him.'

All Hallows' Even, Hallowe'en,

the evening of the last of October,

and the harvest in-gathered:

and the first of November, Allerheiligen,

and the second of November, Allerseelen.

Was your vision of god not enough, that you come

for the vision of the living, and the cricket's

small share of the hearthstone? Or is it some other,

some humbler, more human, news that yon crave?

Your children?—Long dead; and Cousin Abiel, the Quaker;

and the house with the hawthorns torn down;

and your own house a chapel; and the whaleships

departed: no more shines the eagle

on the pilot-house roof at the foot of the hill.

Yet no, not these are your loves, but the timeless and formless,

the laws and the vision: as you saw on the ship

how, like an angel, she subdued to her purpose

the confused power of ocean, the diffused power of wind,

translating them swiftly to beauty,

'so infinite ends, and finite begins, so man

may make the god finite and viable,

make conscious god's powers in action and being.'

Was it so? is it so? and the life so lived?

O you who made magic

under an oak-tree once in the sunlight

translating your acorns to green cups and saucers

for the grandchild mute at the tree's foot,

and died, alone, on a doorstep at midnight

your vision complete but your work undone,

with your dream of a world religion,

'a peace convention of religions, a worship

purified of myth and of dogma:'

dear scarecrow, dear pumpkin-head!

who masquerade now as my child, to assure

the continuing love, the continuing dream,

and the heart and the hearth and the wholeness—

it was so, it is so, and the life so lived

shines this night like the moon over Sheepfold Hill,

and he who interpreted the wonders of god

is himself dissolved and interpreted.

Rest: be at peace. It suffices to know and to rest.

For the singers, in rest, shall stand as a river

whose source is unending forever.

Aiken's appeal for the dead is most succinctly stated in the lines 

it is our ancestors and children who conspire against us

life unlived and unloved that conspires against us

our neglected hearts and hearths that conspire against us

for we have neglected not only our death

in forgetting our obligations to the dead

we have neglected our living and our children's living

in neglecting our love

for the dead who would still live within us.


We have a tradition of "restless spirits," walking the earth, like Hamlet's ghost, with a score left unsettled. These spirits are perturbed because of our neglect of them, our habit of forgetting people as soon as they are dead. But the dead have a place in our lives, if we allow them one. Even if we do it only once a year, it is an important reminder. Happy Hallowe'en.