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Fortean Poetry & Poems

(This poem works best if you hear it recited by an Innuit hunter, after you've had too many shots of Seagram's Very Own, by the light of a bottle-gas stove.....I couldn't get to sleep until daybreak)

"The Cremation of Sam McGee"
By Robert W. Service

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he'd often say in his homely way that "he'd sooner live in hell."

On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see;
It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.

And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,
And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead were dancing heel and toe,
He turned to me, and "Cap," says he, "I'll cash in this trip, I guess;
And if I do, I'm asking that you won't refuse my last request."

Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no; then he says with a sort of moan:
"It's the cursèd cold, and it's got right hold till I'm chilled clean through to the bone.
Yet 'tain't being dead—it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains."

A pal's last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;
And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale.
He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;
And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.

There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid, because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: "You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it's up to you to cremate those last remains."

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows— O God! how I loathed the thing.

And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;
And I'd often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.

Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;
It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the "Alice May."
And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;
Then "Here," said I, with a sudden cry, "is my cre-ma-tor-eum."

Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;
Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;
The flames just soared, and the furnace roared—such a blaze you seldom see;
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.

Then I made a hike, for I didn't like to hear him sizzle so;
And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.
It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don't know why;
And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.

I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;
But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;
I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: "I'll just take a peep inside.
I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked"; ... then the door I opened wide.

And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door.
It's fine in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm—
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
 
Lloyds Bank Advert

The advert features horses running along a beach, with crowds of people going to see them. It's a bit abstract as bank adverts go - no mention of bank services or products, just horses rolling up and being admired and stroked.

We watch mainly recorded TV so don't see many adverts. I caught this one during Ch4's Secrets of the Gladiators.

Anyway... it immediately reminded me of The Horses by Edwin Muir.

In the poem Humanity has more or less wiped itself out with a catastrophic nuclear war and we're back to the Stone Age.
Suddenly a load of horses miraculously turn up from nowhere, giving us hope.

When I did the poem for A Level I imagined the horses arriving exactly as in the advert, charging along a seashore. That's not the case in the actual work. They are described as resembling a wave. Nothing can dislodge my vision of the beach-horses though!

So... it's a poem with a scifi theme, depicting a miracle. Fortean enough? Also, did the poem inspire the advert? I wouldn't be surprised.

The Horses
 
escargot said:
Lloyds Bank Advert

The advert features horses running along a beach, with crowds of people going to see them. It's a bit abstract as bank adverts go - no mention of bank services or products, just horses rolling up and being admired and stroked.

We watch mainly recorded TV so don't see many adverts. I caught this one during Ch4's Secrets of the Gladiators.

Anyway... it immediately reminded me of The Horses by Edwin Muir.

In the poem Humanity has more or less wiped itself out with a catastrophic nuclear war and we're back to the Stone Age.
Suddenly a load of horses miraculously turn up from nowhere, giving us hope.

When I did the poem for A Level I imagined the horses arriving exactly as in the advert, charging along a seashore. That's not the case in the actual work. They are described as resembling a wave. Nothing can dislodge my vision of the beach-horses though!

So... it's a poem with a scifi theme, depicting a miracle. Fortean enough? Also, did the poem inspire the advert? I wouldn't be surprised.

The Horses
Click to expand...
I remember a short story similar to this. The arrival of the horses gave everybody hope.
 
lordmongrove said:
A poem.
Click to expand...

It is exactly the sort of rot that kids produce to order, if they have studied the shopping-list of "poetic techniques" they are meant to master for GCSE. He has, bless him, even managed to include some feelings, so it must be authentic!

I'm wondering whether the Dead Swans poem was consciously intended as a riposte to the notion of the Dying Swan as a balletic subject and the myth that swans sing before they die.

It was Coleridge who wrote the couplet to a bad singer:

"Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing
"Should certain persons die before they sing!" :evillaugh:
 
I think John Betjeman, whatever you might think of his other stuff, gets the right sort of balance of sense of place, creepiness and tongue-in-cheek humour to reproduce the atmosphere of a certain type of old fashioned English Forteana.

A lot of people like A Shropshire Lad and its story of the "ghost of Captain Webb", but here's A Lincolnshire Tale, focused on Betjeman's thing for old churches. I love the climactic next to last verse; it really is very sinister and quite humorous at the same time.

Kirkby with Muckby-cum-Sparrowby-cum-Spinx
Is down a long lane in the county of Lincs.
And often on Wednesdays, well-harnessed and spruce,
I would drive into Wiss over Winderby Sluice.

A whacking great sunset bathed level and drain
From Kirkby with Muckby to Beckby-on-Bain,
And I saw, as I journeyed, my marketing done,
Old Caisterby tower take the last of the sun.

The night air grew nippy. An autumn mist roll’d
(In a scent of dead cabbages) down from the wold,
In the ocean of silence that flooded me round
The crunch of the wheels was a comforting sound.

The lane lengthened narrowly into the night
With the Bain on its left bank, the drain on its right,
And feebly the carriage-lamps glimmered ahead
When all of a sudden the pony fell dead.

The remoteness was awful, the stillness intense,
Of invisible fenland, around and immense;
And out on the dark, with a roar and a swell,
Swung, hollowly thundering, Speckleby bell.

Though myself the Archdeacon for many a year,
I had not summoned courage for visiting here;
Our incumbents were mostly eccentric or sad
But – the Speckleby Rector was said to be mad.

Oh cold was the ev’ning and tall was the tower
And strangely compelling the tenor bell’s power!
As loud on the reed-beds and strong through the dark
It toll’d from the church in the tenantless park.

The mansion was ruined, the empty demesne
Was slowly reverting to marshland again –
Marsh where the village was, grass in the Hall,
And the church and the rectory waiting to fall.

And even in springtime with kingcups about
And stumps of old oak-trees attempting to sprout,
‘Twas a sinister place, neither fenland nor wold,
And doubly forbidding in darkness and cold.

As down swung the tenor, a beacon of sound,
Over listening acres of waterlogged ground
I stood by the tombs to see pass and repass
The gleam of a taper, through clear leaded glass.

And such lighting of lights in the thunderous roar
That heart summoned courage to hand at the door;
I grated it open on scents I knew well,
The dry smell of damp rot, the hassocky smell.

What a forest of woodwork in ochres and grains
Unevenly doubled in diamonded panes,
And over the plaster, so textured with time,
Sweet discolouration of umber and lime!

The candles ensconced on each high panelled pew
Brought the caverns of brass-studded baize into view,
But the roof and its rafters were lost to the sight
As they soared to the dark of the Lincolnshire night:

And high from the chancel arch paused to look down
A sign-painter’s beasts in their fight for the Crown,
While massive, impressive, and still as the grave
A three-decker pulpit frowned over the nave.

Shall I ever forget what a stillness was there
When the bell ceased its tolling and thinned on the air?
Then an opening door showed a long pair of hands
And the Rector himself in his gown and his bands.

. . . . . . . . . .

Such a fell Visitation I shall not forget,
Such a rush through the dark, that I rush through it yet,
And I pray, as the bells ring o’er fenland and hill,
That the Speckleby acres be tenantless still.
Click to expand...
 
Saw this earlier and realised we had no suitable thread.

Fby61rdXgAIKix0.jpeg
 
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