Recorded in January 2022. Written in November 1929.
This poem is very curious, as being a rare species of sonnet written in the horror genre. It also tells a self-contained and effective short story within an incredibly small number of words. There is a quintessentially Lovecraftian tone in it, and it seems, as it were, to be a representation of the author's works in miniature. Lovecraft went on to write an entire cycle of horror-sonnets, containing thirty-six poems, called “Fungi from Yuggoth.”
The history of this poem is as follows: The protagonist of H. P. Lovecraft’s famous story “The Call of Cthulhu” is Henry Wilcox, who lives at the Fleur-de-Lys building at 7 Thomas Street. "Now Bernard K. Hart, literary editor of the Providence Journal, and author of a regular column, ‘The Sideshow,’ read the story in an anthology, and was astounded to find that Wilcox’s residence and his own were one and the same. Feigning offence, he vowed in his column of 30 November, 1929, to send a ghost to Lovecraft’s home at 3 a. m. to scare him: Lovecraft promptly wrote the poem ‘The Messenger’ at 3:07 a. m. that night. Hart published the poem in his column of 3 December." (Joshi and Schultz 2001:29).
These are Hart's words: "I shall not be happy until, joining league with wraiths and ghouls, I have plumped down at least one large and abiding ghost by way of reprisal upon [Lovecraft's] own doorstep in Barnes street... I think I shall teach it to moan in a minor dissonance every morning at 3 o'clock sharp, with a clinking of chains." (Although Lovecraft, knowing that obscurity is the mother of horror, alludes, in excellent taste, not to a ghost, but to an indefinite "thing.")
The judgement of a notable literary critic on this poem is interesting to consider. “Winfield Townley Scott, he who had referred to the bulk of Lovecraft’s verse as ‘eighteenth-century rubbish’—calls The Messenger ‘perhaps as wholly satisfactory as any poem he ever wrote.’” (Joshi 1996:462).
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Transcript:
The thing, he said, would come in the night at three
From the old churchyard on the hill below;
But crouching by an oak fire's wholesome glow,
I tried to tell myself it could not be.
Surely, I mused, it was pleasantry
Devised by one who did not truly know
The Elder Sign, bequeathed from long ago,
That sets the fumbling forms of darkness free.
He had not meant it—no—but still I lit
Another lamp as starry Leo climbed
Out of the Seekonk, and a steeple chimed
Three—and the firelight faded, bit by bit.
Then at the door that cautious rattling came—
And the mad truth devoured me like a flame!
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The music is "Tormented Souls" by Myuu.
