It’s Halloween, and the stage is set.
Raise Hell!
Category: art
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Raise Hell!
Architectural Idea of the Hall of Pandemonium from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Joseph Michael Gandy (1771-1843) -
In Robes of Sorrow
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch’s high estate.
(Ah, let us mourn! — for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him desolate!)
And round about his home the glory
That blushed and bloomed,
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.From “The Haunted Palace” by Edgar Allan Poe
A Spectre by an unknown artist, early 1900s; John Rylands Research Institute and Library -
Just a Thin Veil
Just a thin veil, between this world
And that world of beauty and love,
Just a thin veil that hides the view
Of our Spirit loved ones above!
~ Gertrude Tooley Buckingham, “Just a Thin Veil,” 1940s
The Haunted Mere by Alfred James Munnings (1878-1959); The Munnings Art Museum -
Curses!
A southwest blow on ye
And blister you all o’er!– Caliban, The Tempest, Act I, scene ii
Tempest, act I, scene II, the inchanted [sic] island : before the cell of Prospero — Prospero, Miranda, Caliban, & Ariel … [graphic] / painted by H. Fuseli ; engraved by I.P. Simon. 1797. Folger Shakespeare Library -
The Head of John
“Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do but show us masks.” – from Salome, Oscar Wilde
L’Apparition, 1876, by Gustave Moreau, Musee d’Orsay -
My Ghost?
My ghost? Do you suppose I’m fool enough to go to the expense of keeping one of my own, when there are so many charming ones in my friends’ closets?
~Edith Wharton, “The Eyes,” Tales of Men and Ghosts, 1910
The Haunted Room by Alfred James Munnings (1878-1959), Painted at a Farmhouse on Exmoor; The Munnings Art Museum -
In a Dark Wood
How They Met Themselves, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, British, 1828-1882 “Rossetti’s drawing How They Met Themselves was a doppelganger image of a young couple meeting their ghostly doubles in a dense wood. Its first version was completed during his honeymoon in 1860 and it was reworked as a coloured version in 1864. Writing of what Dante Rossetti called his ‘bogie picture’, William said: ‘To meet one’s wraith is ominous of death, and to figure Lizzie as meeting her wraith might well have struck her bridegroom as uncanny in a high degree. In less than two years the weird was woefully fulfilled’ (Dante Gabriel Rossetti: his family letters I: 207).”
From The Victorian Web: The Séance Diary of William Michael Rossetti
