BARS Blog

Clay Franklin Johnson is the author of A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems (Gothic Keats Press, 2021). His collection’s eponymous poem was presented at “Ill met by moonlight”: Gothic encounters with enchantment and the Faerie realms in literature and culture, a conference organized by the Open Graves, Open Minds Project (OGOM) with the University of Hertfordshire. In December 2024, Clay’s poem “The Faery Wood” won the Highly Commended Award, one of two prizes given for the Brian Nisbet Poetry Award in Huntly, Scotland. His writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Rhysling Award, Elgin Award, received Honorable Mention in The Best Horror of the Year, and has appeared in publications such as Nightingale & Sparrow, The Fairy Tale Magazine, Abyss & Apex, and Gramarye, among others. Clay has writing forthcoming in Fairies: A Companion from Peter Lang, Oxford in 2025.

Clay’s contribution includes five poems (with background) and I will include links to some longer poems below the verse. We at BARS hope you enjoy these Keatsian explorations of memory, location, loss, and much else beside. And a brief reminder that we are still open for further poetical/artistic contributions to our series, which I hope will continue throughout the year!

“Keats Stone” — Brief background behind the poem:

“Keats Stone” was written on the bicentenary of Keats’s death. Besides the refrain (and epigraphs) of violets and daisies throughout, the most important inspiration behind the piece was Fanny Brawne’s sewing stone of polished white carnelian (the “love-charm”) that she gave to Keats before he left for Italy, as well as her letters that he just could not bear to read — letters which were “too worldly”, as Joseph Severn wrote. In honor of Keats, I have also included allusions (some direct quotes, written in italics) to “Ode to a Nightingale”, Endymion, Lamia, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, “This living hand” fragment, and a line from both Keats’s first known letter to Fanny and one of his last that he ever wrote (addressed to his friend Charles Brown, but very much about Fanny).

Keats Stone

I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave—thank God for the quiet grave—O! I can feel the cold earth upon me—the daisies growing over me—O for this quiet—it will be my first.

Violets were his favourite flowers, and he joyed to hear how they overspread the graves. He assured me that he seemed already to feel the flowers growing over him.

The letters I put into the coffin with my own hand.

Buried like a burning bright star beneath
Elfin seas of deepest blue violets,
Breathing deep to drink an Orphean sleep
Of whispering enchantments nepenthean,
Sibilant and serpentine, listening
For liminality in quiet breathing,
Coiling, creeping between each and every
Melting shade of Lamian glamoury,

Pouring spell-craft into a melody
Captured deep within a white carnelian—
A love-charm from Endymion’s brilliant queen,
Love-touched with bewitcheries and love-dreams
Like love-deaths from nightingale ecstasies,
Sight-reading skies of opal and pearl
Singing to the stars of another world

Buried like a burning bright star beneath
Untamed grasses of wild white daisies,
Winding entwined through elfin seas
Of deepest blue violets, breathing deep
To drink its Lethean sleep, emerging
From the glamoury of perilous shadow
As dreamy ghost-paths glistening like snow,
Slithering lucid and luminous
Through faerie-song of silver voices,
Melodies from noctilucent clouds
As if the moon melted into the echo
Of its own interlunar music,
And the skies dripped liquid moonlight
Like tears frozen and spellbound
By astral visions of liminal shine

Buried like a burning bright star beneath
Elfin seas of deepest blue violets,
Beneath ghostly paths of wild white daisies
Glistening like a meadow of snow
Lies in the earth a pale carnelian stone,
Oval-shaped, a fragment of cloud-lightning
Cradled within a hand of bone,
Dry of blood but never once cold,
Changed by death and decay
But untouched by the quiet grave,
For deep within that living piece
Of feverish liminality streams
Red life born from death of a single star-beam:
Burning eternal as a buried love-charm
Singing one song of two broken hearts

Beneath violets and daisies
Restless atop a poet’s grave,
Rests in the earth the mortal remains
Of an immortal name, for when inwrapt
In the hour of crepuscular embrace
Fate cut his thread of liminality,
Silver-spun by incorporeal light
When the Queen-Moon wept ecstasies
Upon Endymion’s eternal sleep,
He welcomed the air of quiet death
By smiling on his own despair, grasping
In his still living hand his brightest star,
Brighter than bright, fairer than fair,
Whispering with Orphean charm
Soft words of his dying last breaths

Touch has a memory: eternity.
Shall I awake and find all this a dream?
But when he fell into a sleep
Of unapparent immortality,
Slipping beneath the elfin seas
Instead of into her arms, it was her
Sewing-stone of polished white carnelian
That captured the echoing shards
Of two self-consuming stars,
Tracing each shape of cold mortality
Between two ever-beating hearts,
Voicing their voiceless memories
Upon visions of spring that never came:
For if Life let two hearts divide
Then may Death let love reunite

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
For not even breathing deep to drink
Of his Lethean sleep could unsee
And forget what can never be unseen,
Thus, placed lastly within his winding-sheet,
Unopened and unread, were feverish
Love-letters that he could not bear to read—
Do I wake or sleep? No, there is no music,
There is no extinguished spirit beneath,
For he has journeyed far beyond the reach
Of his Orphean liminality,
Where her loving last words are too worldly
For a heart that once loved with otherworldly scars:
His whose name was writ in water
And captured by the stars.

“Lines Written by Moonlight at Whitby Abbey” — Brief background behind the poem:

“Lines Written by Moonlight at Whitby Abbey” was, like the title suggests, mostly written in situ during a full moon at Whitby Abbey, or “in the wild”, to go with one interpretation of your theme. It leans more toward the Gothic, tinctured heavily with a Draculaean sort of influence (not surprisingly), but it somewhat “lightens up” near the end, so to speak. The main influence that I want to highlight here was my beloved dogs, both of whom I lost within a year of one another. As an animal lover who has never got on well with people, their deaths had a profound influence on my life and writing at the time, and for years after.

Without going into too much detail (it’s still difficult to write about), one year after I lost my chocolate lab, Blue, I was living abroad and on a particularly fine day in Nottinghamshire I found myself at Newstead Abbey. This was no accident, for besides my interest in Byron, my foremost desire was to visit Boatswain’s Monument, to honor both my Blue as well as Byron’s own beloved dog. So, first thing in the morning, I walked directly to the monument and paid homage to the memory of my dear Blue, then, after wandering the grounds for some time, returned to pay my respects to Boatswain. However, as I wandered the gardens that afternoon, I received news from back home that my dear basset hound, Anna, had died. Thus, unexpectedly and in a sort of tragic coincidence, I made one final visit to the monument.

Lines Written by Moonlight at Whitby Abbey

“Full of the dark resolve he took his sullen way.”
—Thomas Warton

Within the shadows and madness of Night,
Where each whisper floats upon moon-silver
And soft voices breathe upon me like ice,
I wait impatient for Her haunted eyes,
For Her look of poetry without words
That speaks to me Keatsian without verse,
Without living warmth, touched by the cold hand
Of Death, sick with suicide-whisperings
Lingering on each disembodied breath,
Listening deeply I hear no sweeter mystery

I thus breathe in each poisonous thought,
Each sugary strand of silent silver,
Ice-mists of cold enchantment, frosted moon-glow,
Wreathed upon my throat like an amulet
Of whispering witch-crystal, awakening
My eyes to the night-creatures of moonlight:
The skeletal-fingered bat, slithering
Things of opal serpent-scale, eyes of white,
And the silent shadows of the night-wolf,
Dripping living rubies for the blood is the life

And yet, as I trace each silent shadow,
Each deathless whisper of cold persuasion,
Floating on each silver-slithering beam
Shimmering with dreams of waking illusion,
I am consumed by Her frozen witch-flames,
Consumed by moonlight, each creature of Night,
And as I absorb Her deathly light, I too
Feel myself absorbed,—changed—metamorphosed
By Her all-intoxicating madness,
Beloved to all that is shadowful and strange

My eyes at once embrace this change, alive
Yet unalive, living yet death-dreaming,
Moon-changed until ice-stones become my eyes,
Yorkshire-frosted like ghost quartz, crystalized,
Capturing the death-sparkle of black moonstone—
Raven feather black, corpse-black, a black ice
Consuming my flesh like witches’ frostbite:
The creeping Night inspiring death to all life,
Until only a beam of cold moonlight
Tracing the traceries of Gothic stone remains alive

And yet it does not live, it does not breathe,
It has no eyes and thus it does not see—
But something exists, something watches me,
A pale ghost-light, a shadow lingering,
Capturing the cold night-glow of moonlight,
The frosts of midnight, dark ephemeral
Fleeting as Night’s transience immortal:
Yes, It is the night eternal, the darkness,
It is the spirit of night-existence
Watching without eyes Its children of the night

As It watches, I feel Its cold gaze,
I feel Its seduction and I again change:
My eyes, still silvered, materialize,
Appear before me like eyes of corpse-light,
A self-reflection of the demon-self,
The face behind the glass, pale and grave-cold,
Captured as magic-lantern necromancy,
Sapphire-flames of the plague-dead, the death-fires,
Dancing as phantasmagoria ghost scenes
Blending two phantasies of one reality

These ghastly eyes, moon-spun with gossamer
Thread of glowing decay, are my very own,
And yet, not my own, too pale, much too cold
As if plucked by the skeletal fingers
Of Death, ripped and torn out like vile jellies
Of living sapphire, living emerald,
Taken from the light and given to Night—
She, Her, It, the Darkness, the true Night Spirit,
Possessing my once warm and living eyes
Within a single beam of haunted moonlight

Then, from a passing shadow of night-mist,
Glistening wet like vitreous black opal,
Fleeting by upon a floating ghost-cloud
Carrying each color of pestilence,
There came a change: within the imprisoned
Beam of moonlight, and around those ghastly,
Still-watching eyes, there appeared a strange face,
Yet familiar as it took shape in the mists,
As if gazing into polished moon-glass
And finding the gaze of my own self-eclipse

The incessant, never-ending windchill
Of the North Sea’s ever-deepening cold,
Gathering its breath for eternities,
Where even Death exists with frost in its bones,
Was nothing to the ice I felt when that face
Materialized, for I knew it was mine,
Like those ghastly eyes, ever watching me—
And yet, still anguishing with self-regret,
I felt a cold peace pierce my still-living heart
And I closed my eyes to this beautiful night-world

I open my eyes and find the night changed:
No longer do I see those ghastly eyes
Watching me in that haunted beam of moonlight,
Nor that face,—that face—a self-reflection
Of all the calms and comforts of the grave—
No, I see myself now captured within
A moon-shadow, colder than its beams of light,
Between two Gothic arches of intricate
Stone-craft, and beneath the many-petalled rose,
Lying still in the silent darkness, my eyes closed

I have now self-possessed that hideous thing
Imprisoned in that most singular beam,
But, as I examine each familiar
Feature, I realize a beautiful truth:
My flesh is not grave-cold, nor touched by decay,
But instead glows otherworldly glacé,
Ethereal silver, a cold eternity
Touched by Night’s incurable moon-cancer,
Eating away each living impurity
Until Death has left its pale immortality

As I look with new eyes, in macabre
Curiosity, I realize a new change:
The night-creatures exist in a new light,
Living in harmony as any life—
The bat, no longer skeletal-fingered,
Caresses the midnight-air with leathered
Softness, and the opal-scale slithering
Of the serpent now glistens amethystine,
Crescents noctilucent, emerald-rich,
And vivid eyes of azurean argent

The night-wolf, most beloved of all, dissolves
Into ghosts of my beloved dogs lost:
I see my chocolate Blue watching me
With his sublime eyes of otherworldly fire,
Joyous, amber-like, wild as volcanian light—
I remember these eyes, always and ever,
For once they closed, and closed forever,
Holding him in my arms as he died,
They would come to haunt my each and every night,
But now they live again, with all joy of living light

And my droopy-eared hound, Anna, freckled
With patches of cream and soft brown, cow-like,
Whom I lost while I wandered heart-broken
At Boatswain’s tomb in honor of my Blue,
Missing my last chance at one last good-bye,
Now greets me again with her same languid
Yet ever-loveable curiosity—
And thus Night reveals another secret:
The silent shadows, ever watching me,
Have been my faithful friends, ever waiting for me

Within the shadows of Night, I exist
Only as a haunted beam of moonlight,
For the shadows are no longer silent,
And each whisper sings within me a sleep-
Persuading melody—but I cannot sleep,
I cannot die, nevermore to close my eyes
Upon all that is shadowful and strange,
For to Her there is no death, there is no change,
And no more each night do I listen deeply,
For I now hear Her, and I hear no sweeter mystery.

“The Queen of the Night” — Brief background behind the poem:

“The Queen of the Night”, besides being a poem about the night-blooming cereus and nocturnal pollinators (the long-nosed bat and sphinx moth, in particular), was very much inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft’s brilliant Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), hence the epigraph, and also by all the wonderful creatures buzzing about the area where I was living at the time that summer. Each day brought the constant hum of the annual cicada (most around the area had green eyes), while by night my yard was aglow with the “flickering ghost-lights of fireflies”—sometimes at twilight I both heard and saw a particular kind of owl. Strangely enough, Mary Shelley wrote of a similar experience in her notes to Percy’s poetical works, which somewhat influenced the second stanza of my poem:

“By day, multitudes of ephemera darted to and fro on the surface; at night, the fireflies came out among the shrubs on the banks; the cicale at noon-day kept up their hum; the aziola cooed in the quiet evening. It was a pleasant summer, bright in all but Shelley’s health and inconstant spirits…”

The Queen of the Night
 
“Is not this the witching time of night? The waters murmur, and fall with more than mortal music, and spirits of  peace walk abroad to calm the agitated breast. Eternity is in these moments. Worldly cares melt into the airy stuff  that dreams are made of.” 
—Mary Wollstonecraft

How enrapturing is the night
Whose darkness breeds eternity,
Whose voice of immortality
Speaks to me within dreams divine,
Othering me with ecstasies
Of incorporeal light

A noctilucent glamoury
Lures me to its vespertine life:
Flickering ghost-lights of fireflies,
Bioluminescent blue ghosts
Alive and luciferous;
The green-eyed cicadae, rising
From a grave-like sleep to sing
In swarms of unburied crypsis;
And the cooing aziola,
The watcher owl, watching
For what waits in the fading light

Seduced by night-music, nocturnes
Of unseen bewitchments, hypnotized
By wandering will-o’-wisp light
And its illusions of movement,
I trace its aerial secrets
Into the thickening darkness,
And as I creep deeper, deeper
Into the sylvan night, I find
A lifeless flower withered white

But as I watch the moon goddess
Rise sublime, I gaze with wondrous
Melting eyes as the lifeless flower
Stirs with life, night-sick and alive
It blooms beneath the moon’s
Luminous gaze of lustral light

Yet, under the spell of lunacy’s madness,
Not even the moon can appease
Such leafy malevolence—
A lunar-synthesis of Orphic
Metamorphosis She exists
In other light liminality

Diaphanously She dances
With Nature’s witchery, scenting
The haunted air as Her petals bloom
With moon-cancer, a fragrance like
Vanilla orchid touched by
Phantasmal light, an aphrodisiac
For nocturnal pollinators
That sleep by day and wake all night:

The long-nosed bat flittering
In fits of nectar ecstasies,
Skeletal-fingered wings glistening
In echoes of light, unfurling
Its demon-like tongue, numb, dripping
With opium on the moon-vine,
A Dionysian smile thick with pollen
Catching the moonlight like fairy dust

And the worm-tongued sphinx moth,
White-lined, untouched by the death-mark,
Unclothed by the white-witch ghost
Whose sole frailty is deathlessness,
Yet possessed by fay-wingèd night magic
Of the owlet enchantress black witch,
Swing-hovering the opening petals
In fear of what waits with death’s kiss:

In illuminated darkness She blooms,
Unveiling a pale, tendrilled creature—
On a single night Her white spider renewed,
Lustrous and twisted in delicious solitude

How enrapturing is the night
Whose darkness breeds eternity,
Whose voice of immortality
Speaks to me in dreams divine,
Othering me with ecstasies
Of incorporeal light,
And as I gaze deeper, deeper,
Ascending into visions sublime,
I melt away into the darkness
And become one with the night.

“My Mélusine Illusion” — Brief background behind the poem:

I am including a fragment (five short stanzas) from my long poem “My Mélusine Illusion”, which is rather Shelleyan in nature and Coleridgean in spirit (see epigraphs to understand that allusion). The piece
itself is a bit mad, to be fair, but beyond the stanzas of somewhat hallucinatory madness, as well as the
literary elements of folklore and legend, it is essentially a metaphysical retelling of the faery Mélusine’s story written in a more positive light. However, the 4th and 5th stanzas below were directly inspired by
lines 47-67 of Keats’s Lamia. The Mélusine of my poem is still a sort of Keatsian femme fatale of
glamourie and spell-craft, but written from a more feminist perspective.

A fragment from “My Mélusine Illusion”

Ascending deeper, deeper
Into her abysmal deeps,
Between the liminality
Of an Orphean dream
I see, with other seeing eyes,
Her visionary unseen —
Stranged by sea-change
My eyes open to the sublime,
Divined, imparadised
In visions of luciferous light

And there I found Her,
(Or was it She who found me?)
My darling faery Mélusine,
Once worshipped as the Faerie Queen
Or some immortal deity,
Unlimited, everlasting,
An undefined divinity,
She was born to find
Her own eternity
In metamorphosis divine

The daughter of faery Présine
And the king of Albany,
She was never meant to haunt
The haunted woods of Coulombiers,
Or be a whisperer of dark
Like Mephistophelian lies,
She is no unknown tower ghost,
Alone, forgotten, lost,
Known only by its haunting cries

No, She is no coiling Lamia
Who warms a mortal soul
With silver serpent-scale,
Glistening amethystine
With noctilucent crescents
Of venomous green, viperine,
An emerald-rich arsenic
Cancerous-sick to the kiss,
Ruinous as Castleton bleu
Fracturing in mercurial blooms
The gilt-golden ormolu,
Breathing illusion and lies
Upon those beguiled
By snake-charméd eyes

No, She is no snake sorceress,
She is no devil of the forest,
No seductress water-nymph
Inspiring fits of nympholepsy,
No poisonous sea-witch bubbling
Potions of Circean ecstasy,
No illusory fata morgana,
No phantom, no shadow,
No fairy-tale monster,
And She is no demon-lover
Who, with wicked arts, charms
The artless by enchanted fountains,
Reflecting a Narcissean charm
In glamouried waters bleu-jaune,
Illusioned upon magic lands
Of faery castle Lusignan

“Ghosts of 1816” — Brief background behind the poem:

I was hesitant to include this poem for it was written years ago and I no longer write in this more formalized, rhyming structure; however, the piece was indeed inspired by that “haunted summer” of 1816, and it certainly goes with one interpretation of your theme “in the wild” since a part of it was written at Villa Diodati (on the publicly accessible grassy knoll next to it, that is) during my Frankenstein-inspired travels of 2016.

Ghosts of 1816 

“My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me...I saw the hideous phantasm...and I wished to exchange  this ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around...the dark parquet...the moonlight struggling through, and  the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond. I could not so easily get rid of my hideous  phantom; still it haunted me.” —Mary Shelley, Introduction to Frankenstein (1831 edition)

Deathlike beneath the cold ray of the moon
Bathing in its sinful silver-white shine;
Enshadowed in the distance as my gloom-
Teased eyes glean over one last sanguine line,
Reading by moonlight in wickedness divine.
Teeming now with thoughts that God may impugn,
I pour the perfumed peridot,
And set imagination loose
In the opalescent louche,
Raising the unhallowed arts in poetic woe.

The sky told a story that haunted me
As the galvanized air lit up with light;
It was a tempest meant so fittingly
To raise Death’s shadowy forms of delight.
And yet who could say that this dreary night
Did not console the ghost-gleamed literati?
The livid hues and shades of death
Inspired the spark of creation,
Infusing life with re-animation
To thick my lab-maddened blood with its stifled breath.

My dark imagination murmurs in
Subtle numbness, a drowsy sense among
Sour smells writhed in softened yellow-grey skin
As moaning escaped its mold-flowered tongue—
To the galvanometer I now clung,
Watching its death-plucked eyes and wrinkled grin.
The drops of the ice-cold drip
Releases the ethereal spirits,
Creating dew-frosted ringlets
From a pontarlier I now lovingly sip.

As I drink I think of Ariel sails,
Sleepless gossamers toward my blonde-haired harlot;
Her cerulean blue eyes bring back tales
Of her sinister-sweet lips, dark scarlet,
Made for the tear-soaked attic of my Gothic Charlotte.
The poetry of swirling herbal trails
Presage my dark seduction:
The green anise that did benumb
My tongue as a bitter drop of laudanum
Brought forth my faery-borne glitter-eyed abduction.

Suddenly, in a conscious memory,
Solemn, serene, in mysteriousness
I gazed upon the ice of Chamonix;
Cheating despair in moonless wilderness,
Musing and anxious in the calm darkness
Upon the peak in awful majesty.
Discovering undiscovered solitudes
On this wind-swept edge—one more step, never,
Yet I wished to fall, and fall forever
Through swift vapors in Nature’s breathless altitudes.

Dark vibrant colors begin to take me,
Jade and emerald gems, light golden hues,
Fragrant oils released, death-white and ghostly,
With blood reds, Veronese greens and lush blues—
An aesthetic paleness in herbal dews
Stirs the madness in chilling melody.
The licorice sweetness I crave
Of delirium and nightmares,
Beckoning for other-worldly cares
From the enviable qualities of the grave.

This elixir of life brings back my ghosts
To roam freely in imagination;
Visions of the spectre-barked dead that toasts
To solemn delights of putrefaction
As breasts with eyes watch with satisfaction.
Bitter wormwood, its herbaceous taste boasts
Of what its poison does to a sweet face,
Twisting in Nature’s poetic madness,
Brooding over Her loveliness
That the sallow effects of Death will one day grace.

Links to longer poems / Conclusion

“The Fires of Ecstasy at Samhuinn”
The piece was inspired by Edinburgh’s Samhuinn Fire Festival that took place atop Calton Hill on 31 October 2018, which, of course, also happened to have been Keats’s birthday (his writing was in mind during the composition). Besides certain imagery taken “in the wild” during the ceremony, the poem has a more mythological influence. I am also attaching the illustration to the email, which represents the metamorphosis of the goddess Brìghde (associated with spring) into the blue-skinned Cailleach (from Old Irish Caillech, “veiled one”), also known in Scotland as Beira, Queen of Winter — this metamorphosis is essentially the very essence of the poem.

“The Hecatean Ides; or, The Dark Spirit of Shelleyan Solitude”
This piece is a bit complicated and perhaps overly esoteric, so I won’t go into obscure detail — I’ve
already written you quite an eyesore of background notes as it is (my apologies for that). I will only add
that it was heavily influenced by Shelley (Laon and Cythna, Alastor and Prometheus Unbound, most
especially), as well as the mythology of Diana of Nemi, and, oddly enough, my wanderings at Castle
Howard in Yorkshire.

Thanks for joining us once again for another Romantic Poets in the Wild. It’s poetry month now (cruelest month, Wordsworth’s birthday, et cetera) so we hope you’re out there reading, writing, and thinking about poems. Join us next time for the photography of Will Sherwood! (and maybe a surprise or two along the way)