As I survey the ever-growing violence of Halloween displays in my neighborhood, I wonder if we’ve begun to replace fear and mystery with plain old boring gore.
Bodies hanging from trees, intestines spilling from graves, and all manner of dismembered, bloody zombies: where’s the imagination?
Luckily, I have some tips (tricks?) for writing a Halloween poem that will send shivers down the spine–because your words will be that chillingly fresh. Let’s use the power of poetry to recapture the meaning of “spooky.”
There are plenty of Halloweenish poems out there beyond Poe’s classic The Raven. One of my new favorites is “Theme in Yellow” by Carl Sandburg.
Theme in Yellow
I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o’-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.
—Carl Sandburg
Read the poem aloud several times and see what you notice. How do the images, colors, sounds and lines make you feel the way you do? (For more details about exploring poems, check out How to Read a Poem, which digs deeply into those messy, tasty poetic innards.)
One site describes this Sandburg poem as “harmless” and “cute.” Oh, I beg to differ.
No matter how many times I read this poem, the last four lines strike me as creepy. Perhaps the enjambment and lack of comma before “And, ” turning this clause into a run-on, is just enough to add a breathlessness that makes me not so sure the children are completely fooled as they chant beneath that full moon.
How do you read “Theme in Yellow?” And how can this poem inspire you to write your own?
1) Make one person or object your star
You don’t need to replicate an entire graveyard cast of characters to write a scary poem. Sandburg focuses on a pumpkin. Paisley Rekdal, in her stunning poem Bats, focuses, well, on bats (though the poem, like most good poems, is about so much more). By zeroing in on one subject, you are more likely to write about it in detail and make it come alive.
Need some ideas?
• Cats. But maybe a white one.
• A piece of candy left in the street
• Something hidden under a pile of leaves
• A costume malfunction
• An egg-smeared window
• The cousin of Frankenstein
• A runaway mummy
• Those plastic spider rings everyone hates
2) Wake the senses
Halloween is all about laying your eyes on scary sights, hearing the howl of wind, getting goosebumps, and tasting candy corn. Notice how Sandburg not only describes the visions and colors of the scene but implies feeling and sound by touching the air with the chill of dusk and ghostly songs. Take a moment to freewrite about your subject first, exploring every sense that comes to mind. Sometimes you may need to use similes, metaphors, or personification to see your subject in a different light–or darkness.
3) Don’t say it all
What makes most poems and stories spooky is knowing when to stop. If you don’t use any sensory language, of course, you won’t grab your reader in the first place. But if you overkill, so to speak, telling them exactly what to experience to the very end, well, that’s the suburban lawn covered with plastic corpses. (For more on the tingly subject of Mystery, see the book How to Write a Poem).
Sandburg leaves us wondering about the pumpkin’s “fooling.” What mystery can you leave in your poem?
4) Make it a treat
Why keep your poem to yourself this Halloween? Post online for friends to read or even give one away on the spooky night itself. Just make sure you attach it to a piece of candy first, or you will wake up to the scariest Halloween sight ever: toilet paper hanging in your front yard’s skeletal trees.
Photo by Rich, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Tania Runyan, author of How to Read a Poem and How to Write a Poem. This post originally appeared at the website How to Read a Poem.
Click to get 5-Prompt Mini-Series
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- Flowers of California: Lily of the Nile - October 13, 2022
- Flowers of California: Crape Myrtle - October 5, 2022
Laura Lynn Brown says
Horrors
What goes on in that house?
Do they hate children?
Are they stingy?
Do they mock each other
behind their backs
or worse,
right to their faces?
Why do they bother?
For the sick trick
costumed as a treat?
I don’t know why
I knock every year
except out of hope.
Nope.
New fall, same old
nameless chewy blob
not even worth
the orange and black papers
they’re wrapped in.
And they only gave me one.
Tania Runyan says
Haha, I love this, Laura! I do *not* love those candies! What a great topic for a Halloween poem.
Rick Maxson says
Laura, wasn’t there a house like this in every neighborhood!? Somewhere where there was a Boo Radley or a Riff-Raff old man who never left the light on and was maybe truly scary. Shouldn’t eat candy from a house like that anyway.
g says
hey
fuck u😂🤣❤
Monica Sharman says
Introvert Invited to a Party
They cackle, sneak and sidle
up close, hiss the word
party
and the shivers creep
past her weak knees.
She could handle
the plastic costume, the man-sized
spider on cotton cobwebs,
even unspeakable chemicals
molded into candy corn
—but a house haunted
with acquaintances? faces
she’s never seen? the blurred
murmur of living-room small talk
and shallow laughter closing in,
reaching cold fingers to strangle,
suffocate, suck the life from her veins
like a vampire at its victim?
She braves it, faces
dark shadows of fears, calls
the RSVP number, barely breathes
yes, and Jekyll-Hydes herself
into the life of the party.
Monica Sharman says
If anyone says I’m guilty of the overkill Tania mentioned in her #3, I would say, “Guilty as charged.” Oh, well. It was still fun to write. 🙂
Tania Runyan says
Monica, this is FABulous!
Rick Maxson says
Nice acrostic, Maureen. Love the Gs and EEs.
Rick Maxson says
I should never do this at 2 am.
Rick Maxson says
Monica, I love this. CArol and I are going to an Alice Halloween party next weekend (she as The Queen of Hearts; me as a contemporary White Rabbit) and your poem is a perfect description for an introvert at a party. Deliciously creepy.
Maureen says
Bloodlust (Acrostic)
Hasten headless horsemen three.
Alight the bridge, you omens be!
Look to the graves beyond gnarled tree;
Lie low there hanged men guilty-free.
Owl’s but a portent, all ghosts can see
When witches whelp, ghouls gruesome flee.
Entreaties end, swords fall, and he
Exclaims he’s dead — alas, like me!
No better bite might I give thee.
Tania Runyan says
I love this acrostic, Maureen! Quite vivid and rhythmic as well.
Taryn says
Wow interesting I like it 👍 great job.
Rick Maxson says
The Decay of Volume One
Ocherous binding, Volume I, long in waiting
for my return from the world of hours;
the dragons are old, the princess
sleeps on her gold gone gray.
Behind me is a precious world, a journey
unknown and inevitable, the dreaded bath
I must take, two lives like soap bubbles aloft
collision bound by a single breath.
Where are the rats who ate their tales,
the mice who blindly tattered pages
keeping the children lost, the jumbled spells
leaving the apples impaled on thorns.
The stories in pieces now, my fingers
struggling with pages of confetti
made from golden locks of hair,
the rag of a faded hood, a splintered basket.
The witches words melt like a flakes
of snow, only a bag of tricks now,
a cackle from a dark box, on a house
of crumbs, where lived a boy.
In a shadowed wood the years have made
from improbable things, buried
in the colors of October, I sit with a faded book
at a table disappearing at both ends
Rick Maxson says
ooops ! S5-L1 should read “melt like flakes”
Tania Runyan says
Rick, this is sumptuous!