All Hallows Night
by Lizette Woodworth Reese
Two things I did on Hallows Night: — Made my house April-clear; Left open wide my door To the ghosts of the year. Then one came in. Across the room It stood up long and fair — The ghost that was myself — And gave me stare for stare. ═══════════════════════
Though a minor figure in the landscape of American literature, Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856–1935), poet laureate of Maryland from 1931 until her death, published fifteen books of poetry over the course of a long career as an English teacher in the schools of her native Baltimore. Her first book, A Branch of May, appeared in 1887, in the waning light of the Fireside Poets, whose sentimental inclinations are evident in much of her verse. At the same time, especially toward the end of her life, her range extended to the unsettling sense of self-appraisal that characterized formally-inclined lyric poets of the early twentieth century — Sara Teasdale, for example, and Edna St. Vincent Millay — whose careers overlapped her own.
Today’s Poem, one of the section of “New Poems” in her in her 1926 Selected, reflects this modern turn. A lifelong Episcopalian, Reese wrote many poems rooted in the seasons and feasts of the liturgical year: Candlemas, for example, as well as “Hallowmas,” the little run of days encompassing All Saints and All Souls. Unlike that earlier poem, which appeared in her 1893 A Handful of Lavender, “All Hallows Night” indulges in a delightfully eerie little ghost story.
But it also hints, though with a reversal of perspective, at Christ’s tale of the unclean spirit that returns to find its house — the human soul — “empty, swept, and garnished.” Although it’s autumn, the housekeeper here has tried to do a spring cleaning, to sweep her house, or her soul, “April-clear.” But for all that effort, and all her confidence in leaving the doors wide open, what comes back to haunt her is the unwelcome, inescapable specter of herself.
Possibly it’s her own reflection in a mirror, her eye catching the eye of her reversed image, an unnerving if fleeting experience for a person alone in a house. But the scriptural allusion that frames the whole poem renders that reflection darker and more threatening — is this only the first of a whole company of unwholesome presences, all presumably manifestations of her own worst nature, coming back to make themselves at home? The abcb quatrains, whose opening tetrameter and trimeter lines seem to indicate common meter or ballad meter, yet continue in trimeter instead, disturb that expectation and contribute to the atmosphere of unquiet that haunts the scene, to give the reader, like the speaker, “stare for stare.”
The reference to the weird parable (if that's what it is) of the unclean spirit did not occur to me but it's a plausible connection. I wonder if there was a custom of cleaning the house on All Saints Day, as a sort of welcome or invitation to them. I notice this is not the eve, i.e. Halloween.
If we cannot look ourselves in the eye, with a sense of peace or joy, who can we look in the eye?