Some random thoughts arising from my recent making of a free index for Lovecraft’s poetry…
* His poetry is surprisingly interested in birds of various types. Almost as much as cats, though I suppose the two form a sort-of natural pairing. One could almost create a small H.P Lovecraft illustrated ‘bird book’ as easily as a ‘cat book’.
* Zoar, though only mentioned twice is obviously a place which Lovecraftians might usefully investigate for associations. It’s a place, rather difficult to discover anything about, in New England and he appears to have associated it with his ill-fated young cousin.
* The poetry as a body is surprisingly light on the Teutonic thundering and Nordic/Saxon racial-memory haughtiness that some might expect from all the leftist hoo-ha of recent years. A small handful of poems from the mid 1910s, that’s all, plus one done as a close translation of a skaldic poet. Modern Odinists may be disappointed.
* The poetry is also light on use of colours. I found no cause to index these (blues, greens, orange etc) though they are implied in subjects such as sunsets. He’s more a poet of faun-haunted summer evenings and dark spectral landscape-moods. Something along the lines of a Lovecraft’s Year artbook might be devised, bringing together and illustrating the month-by-month weather/landscape description in the poetry and fiction. With a focus on examples that have supernatural or mythic elements.
* The Doctor Who writers evidently took the very memorable Tennant-era monsters ‘The Silence’ directly from Lovecraft’s poem “The Wood”, as well as the setting. Another example of their quiet borrowings from Lovecraft in the Tennant-era and then in the Capaldi-era of the series, I’d suggest. ‘The Weeping Angels’ statue-monsters of the Smith-era also seem to owe something to Lovecraft poems such as “The City” and others — although of course the ‘seeing turns you to stone’ idea has ancient roots.
* ‘Time’ and ‘Chaos’ in Lovecraft’s poetry really need separate indexing and close comparative commentary. I’ve skipped them in the index as “Too frequent to index”.
* Appreciation of the poetry suffers somewhat because the characteristics of the ancient myths and figures are not immediately known to modern readers. Even classicist may struggle to recall Polyhymnia (the ancient muse of geometry, as it turns out) and even then you also need to recall the semi-magical nature of geometry in the ancient world. But the names are now easily looked up. Ideally in a reliable encyclopedia or reference work on myth, to avoid the confused and spiralling confabulations of modern pagans. Even then, such a reference can be inflected in rather complex ways, for instance to the Elizabethan incarnation of Astraea as evoked by the royal court in the time of Shakespeare. Lovecraft’s friend Loveman was an Elizabethan poetry specialist and could do doubt have told him much about such courtly masques.
