Week 11: More Visual Digital Poetry, Danse Macabre + Halloween Poem

This is more of the same work from the experiment promt:
§Try a "digital" poem, or poem in programmable media, or indeed one using links or HTML as a fundamental dimension
I was pretty stuck as to what to do with this this time around. I couldn't really find another poem that someone else wrote that was immediately striking to me. So I went back to some things I have written before and came across a little poem I did a while back around Halloween. It was written for my friend, Ben, who understands all things grim. I love Camille Saint-Saens' Dance Macabre suite, so I decided to incorporate that into this. Honestly, I am not entirely happy with the way this worked out. I wanted to work on it a bit more to reconfigure the text so it is actually part of the image, not separate from it. But I need more time to fool around with that. I just got a brand new laptop, and it involves the latest version of Windows that I am still getting used to. Anyway, here's the poem. Same deal as with the cowboy poem below.


(from Wikipedia) This image is the Dance of Death in the German printed edition, folio CCLXI recto from Hartman Schedel's Chronicle of the World (Nuremberg, 1493) thought to be created by Michael Wolgemut (b. 1434, Nürnberg, d. 1519, Nürnberg). There was also a Latin printed edition of the same year. It seems not to be by Hans Holbein the Younger, as often stated. He was not alive at the time of its publication in 1493.



Grim Tidings, What Ho!

Or

Symphony Composed for My Dear Friend Ben in Anticipation of All Hallows Eve

I: Music Most Macabre

(Listen to Saint-Saens' "Danse Macabre" Suite)

Rotting corpse giggling, laughing beneath the full moon.

It spins, dancing to wretched fantastic grim tunes.

Such as those of a skeleton choosing the key

A ribcage with heart strings still intact, plucked with glee.

It sings lines and such rhymes which cause mortals to swoon.

A black adder sounds lower bass pitches o’er way

By headstones molded over, dead flowers decay.

The tick tock of the clock the bell tower chimes twelve

Ancient hour of mischief, souls helpless do delve

Into magic most evil, most horrid they say.

Soon the soldier of doom and much merciless pain

Will strike down these sounds sinister, witness the rain

Washing over and over commanded by he

That cares not if you rot for all eternity.

Slowly singing halts. Thunder booms o’er the refrain.

‘Tis the end of this song, decrescendo my dear

For this storm will wreck all of our practice, I fear.

Deathharmonic struck down by a tempest and flood.

And our maestro dear Satan will cry tears of blood

Till he hears we’ll be here Hallows Eve every year.