Black earth beneath bare feet, the ghost’s advance,
as bonfires glitter golden cleansing light.
Ancestors seen (and unseen) in a glance,
they knock the wood of oak and broomstick flight
where bluebells sprout like fingers, risking chance
of transport into faerie’s eerie plight.
The velvet dark, the Pan of necromance,
to shed mundane illusion and all fright.
Hooves hard, the thud and crash of gritty prance,
deep teeth enmeshing blood’s forbidden bite
Here lies the edge and nether world’s expanse
Upon Walpurgis Night we dare to dance.
Walpurgisnacht, the Witches’ Night, is upon us! The veils are thin on this May Eve. Use your power, spells and concoctions to make your deepest dreams come true. Blessed Be.
“WalpurgisNight when the devil was abroad— when graves opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel.” — from Dracula’s Guest by Bram Stoker.
“The speaker in this case is a middle-aged witch, me- tangled on my two great arms, my face in a book and my mouth wide, ready to tell you a story or two. I have come to remind you, all of you:
Do you remember when you were read to as a child?”
So begins Anne Sexton’s book Transformations, a dark and prophetic retelling of fairy tales. True to the Brothers Grimm, she did not balk at gory details, but rather added her own peculiar and twisted endings where the characters live not so happily ever after. Anne Sexton took on many topics with her unique brand of “Confessional” poetry, but her fairy tale interpretations are perhaps the most interesting.
Into the Forest Dark
Most fairy tales, before they were Disney-fied, were pretty terrifying. Don’t forget their origins. They were told by Medieval grandmothers in thatched cottages who had a vested interest in notifying the children of all the evil and malicious things that lurked before them. Death, plagues and hunger were rampant, not to mention wild animals, thieves and kidnappers. Children had good reasons to be scared. It was a dangerous business, going outside your door. Fairy tales could act as a sort of guide to warn them and toughen them to the fact that life would not be easy.
Anne Sexton’s life was not easy either, fraught with mental illness, an abusive childhood and finally ending in suicide at age forty-six.
Fellow poet and editor Maxine Kumin has said that Anne Sexton read and referenced fairy tales like most writers read the Bible or Greek myths. She was always attracted to the work of Andersen, Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. She herself had been read to as a child by her beloved grandmother.
In Transformations, Sexton takes these tales and revises them for the 20th century, warning the reader of modern day evils. The princesses and heroines, rather than living happily ever after, end up in the quagmire of trappings that include jealousy, egotism, mediocrity, old age, and just plain bad marriages.
I’ll be looking at several of these poems over the next few days. Stay tuned as I explore Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, and more. But first up — that innocent ingenou with skin white as snow and hair black as coal, who decidedly had an aversion to apples…
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Beauty fades, but dumb is forever. Furthermore, no one escapes the ramifications of vanity… There is an evil queen, a fragile virgin, a hunter, some helpful dwarfs and, of course, a handsome prince.
“Once there was a lovely virgin called Snow White. Say she was thirteen. Her stepmother, a beauty in her own right, though eaten, of course, by age, would hear of no beauty surpassing her own.”
“Beauty is a simple passion, but, oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes…”
The evil queen is so jealous, she orders her huntsman to track down Snow White, kill her and bring back her heart for the queen to eat. But the huntsman cannot bring himself to kill the girl. Instead he kills a boar and brings back that heart.
“The hunter, however, let his prisoner go and brought a boar’s heart back to the castle. The queen chewed it up like a cube steak. Now I am fairest, she said, lapping her slim white fingers.”
This is the first of many times Snow White will escape death. She then ventures further into the forest where “the birds called out lewdly and the snakes hung down in loops, each one a noose for her sweet white neck.”
Eventually she comes upon the cottage of the seven dwarfs, and all should have gone well. Except the evil queen returns, still seeking to kill Snow White who makes the dumb mistake of opening the cottage door. Thus she falls prey to the queen’s poison dress and comb. After saving her twice, the dwarfs warn her not to open the door to strangers, but Snow White just can’t seem to learn her lesson.
“Snow White, the dumb bunny,
opened the door and she bit into a poison apple and fell down for the final time.”
The dwarfs put her in a glass coffin. A prince, passing by, sees the coffin and decides he must have the beautiful creature inside it. While his men carry the coffin home, Snow White’s body is jarred, causing her to spit up the poisoned apple. She then awakens.
Of course, she marries the prince. But what will be her final fate?
“Meanwhile Snow White held court, rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut and sometimes referring to her mirror as women do.”
The poem bleakly suggests that Snow White will become exactly like her evil stepmother, a vain and aging one-time beauty, haunted by, and beholden to her own reflection in the mirror. The entire poem can be read HERE.
And finally, here is a lovely word/ music/ pictures rendition of this poem. (Running time 7 minutes.) Hope you like it!
There is an incline in the forest where bluebells blossom, dense as grapes, heady as lilac. I stretch out on my back. Green stems, like octopus tendrils, tangle my hair. The land shifts perpendicular. Down, down I slide, damp earth brushing my elbows. I land with a soft jolt onto ripe grass. The smell is beetroot, radish and earthworm.
Consider magic.
Underground rogues, fey and trolls
guard hidden treasure
beneath marbled walls. They keep
secrets, bargain dark wishes.
From a fog, metallic as pyrite, they emerge. Blue skin, sapphire eyes that stare still as stone. One of them hands me a violin. Aged from wear and tear, its wood is warped, strings stretched. With a rickety bow, I play. Joyful noise spills from my fingers.
Histories and Mysteries 