Lucia di Lammermoor.

Yeah, that opera. Madness, murder, all the good stuff.

I have trouble reading Chelsea Quinn Yarbro anymore, the grim sections disturb me more than they used to.

sweet! Thanks, David!

Alone

Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then - in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life - was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,

From the lightning in the sky

As it passed me flying by,

From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

************

Practically a primer for a teen goth journal entry.

A stanza from the Donne:

*******

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

Heh. Jen's going to arrive from her flight, check into the board and be very pissed she wasn't around for this conversation.

Hec, I have an anthology of poetry also called Acquainted with the Night that might qualify as Gothy.

What else is in that, sj?

Just reading the setup for Lucia di Lammermoor sounds goth as all get out:

The story concerns a feud between two families, the Ashtons and the Ravenswoods. When the opera begins, the Ashtons are in the ascendancy and have taken possession of Ravenswood Castle, the ancestral home of their rivals. Edgardo (Sir Edgar), Master of Ravenswood and last surviving member of his family, has been forced to live in a lonely tower by the sea, known as the Wolf's Crag.

Oooh, and it ends with a suicide in a graveyard.

What else is in that, sj?

I just got in, let me go check.

How could I forget Anna Akhmatova:

last toast

here’s to the ruin of this house
to the villainies we do
to our coupled severance
here’s to you

to the lies lips issue forth
to the cold weather of your eyes
to the world’s being dumb and coarse
to the god who let us die

How could I forget Anna Akhmatova:

Russians know how to bring the bleak.