Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. It’s when dark stories, poems, and imaginations run wild. Dressing up in costumes from pop culture, folklore, horror, and any other genre. One year, I read Edgar Allan Poe poems and stories in round-robin style with friends into the late hours. I’ve even donned an Edgar Allan Poe costume.
It was even more fun when I could take my daughter trick-or-treating around the neighborhoods where we lived, but this year, that is not happening this year.
While becoming a teenager usually means a shift from trick-or-treating to Halloween parties, it doesn’t mean I can’t still have some fun with traditions. Halloween and horror movies have been here all month long, so that tradition continues. This year, pumpkin carving, s’mores by the firepit, and handing out candy will replace all those steps I got walking door-to-door.
I leave you with this Edgar Allan Poe poem from Poetry Foundation.
The Conqueror Worm Lo! ’t is a gala night Within the lonesome latter years! An angel throng, bewinged, bedight In veils, and drowned in tears, Sit in a theatre, to see A play of hopes and fears, While the orchestra breathes fitfully The music of the spheres. Mimes, in the form of God on high, Mutter and mumble low, And hither and thither fly— Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things That shift the scenery to and fro, Flapping from out their Condor wings Invisible Wo! That motley drama—oh, be sure It shall not be forgot! With its Phantom chased for evermore By a crowd that seize it not, Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot, And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot. But see, amid the mimic rout, A crawling shape intrude! A blood-red thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude! It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs The mimes become its food, And seraphs sob at vermin fangs In human gore imbued. Out—out are the lights—out all! And, over each quivering form, The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, While the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, “Man,” And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.
