Stephen King mentions this poem in his Danse Macabre. Children look at death as a poet looks at it with experimentation. "Horror movies are not sophisticated, and because they are not, they allow us to regain our childish perspective on death - perhaps not such a bad thing...Children see more intensely. The greens of lawns are, to the child's eye the color of lost emerarlds... the blue of the winter sky is as sharp as an icepick, the white of new snow is a dream blast of energy. And black is much blacker. Much blacker indeed."
Here is the final truth of horror movies: They do not love death, as some have suggested; they love life. They do not celerate deformity but by dwelling on deformity, they sing of health and energy. By showing us the miseries of the damned, they help us to rediscover the smaller (but never pettey) joys of our own lives. They are the barber's leeches of the psyche, drwaing not blood but anxiety... for a little while anyway."
Richard Eberhart, “The Groundhog,” 1936:
In June, amid the golden fields,
I saw a groundhog lying dead.
Dead lay he; my senses shook,
And mind outshot our naked frailty.
There lowly in the vigorous summer
His form began its senseless change,
And made my senses waver dim
Seeing nature ferocious in him.
Inspecting close his maggots’ might
And seething cauldron of his being,
Half with loathing, half with a strange love,
I poked him with an angry stick.
The fever rose, became a flame
And Vigor circumscribed the skies,
Immense energy in the sun,
And through my frame a sunless trembling.
My stick had done nor good nor harm.
Then stood I silent in the day
Watching the object, as before;
And kept my reverence for knowledge
Trying for control, to be still,
To quell the passion of the blood;
Until I had bent down on my knees
Praying for joy in the sight of decay.
And so I left: and I returned
In Autumn strict of eye, to see
The sap gone out of the groundhog,
But the bony sodden hulk remained.
But the year had lost its meaning,
And in intellectual chains
I lost both love and loathing,
Mured up in the wall of wisdom.
Another summer took the fields again
Massive and burning, full of life,
But when I chanced upon the spot
There was only a little hair left,
And bones bleaching in the sunlight
Beautiful as architecture;
I watched them like a geometer,
And cut a walking stick from a birch.
It has been three years, now.
There is no sign of the groundhog.
I stood there in the whirling summer,
My hand capped a withered heart,
And thought of China and Greece,
Of Alexander in his tent;
Of Montaigne in his tower,
Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.
