Hallowe’en in a Suburb by H. P. Lovecraft (Poem)

“Hallowe’en in a Suburb” is a short work of dark poetry written by H. P. Lovecraft. It was first published in March 1928, in The National Amateur, under the slightly shorter title “In a Suburb”. After the author’s death, Arkham House republished “Hallowe’en in a Suburb” in the anthology Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943). It has since been inclued in a number of other collections of Lovecraft’s work including Fungi from Yuggoth and Other Poems (1971) and The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft (2001).

 

About H.P. Lovecraft

Best known for creating the Cthulhu Mythos, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of speculative fiction, much of which falls in the subgenre of weird fiction. During his lifetime Lovecraft’s work received only limited recognition, but gradually caught on and he is now considered to be one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century.

Lovecraft was a great fan of Edgar Allan Poe, who he once described as his “God of Fiction.” He began reading Poe’s work when he was just eight years old becoming significantly influenced by his prose and style of writing. Later influences include Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood.

Lovecraft’s work has inspired many prominent modern-day horror writers including Ramsay Campbell, Brian Lumley, and Stephen King,

 

Hallowe’en in a Suburb

by H. P. Lovecraft

The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,
And the trees have a silver glare;
Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,
And the harpies of upper air,
That flutter and laugh and stare.

For the village dead to the moon outspread
Never shone in the sunset’s gleam,
But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep
Where the rivers of madness stream
Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.

A chill wind weaves thro’ the rows of sheaves
In the meadows that shimmer pale,
And comes to twine where the headstones shine
And the ghouls of the churchyard wail
For harvests that fly and fail.

Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change
That tore from the past its own
Can quicken this hour, when a spectral pow’r
Spreads sleep o’er the cosmic throne
And looses the vast unknown.

So here again stretch the vale and plain
That moons long-forgotten saw,
And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,
Sprung out of the tomb’s black maw
To shake all the world with awe.

And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,
The ugliness and the pest
Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,
Shall some day be with the rest,
And brood with the shades unblest.

Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,
And the leprous spires ascend;
For new and old alike in the fold
Of horror and death are penn’d,
For the hounds of Time to rend.

~~~