World Dream Bank: Some Things Are Dark

Some Things Are Dark

by Edna St Vincent Millay; (late?) 1940s

Some things are dark--or think they are.
But, in comparison to me,
All things are light enough to see
In any place, at any hour.

For I am Nightmare: where I fly,
Terror and rain stand in the sky
So thick, you could not tell them from
That blackness out of which you come.

So much for "where I fly": but when
I strike, and clutch in claw the brain--
Erebus, to such brain, will seem
The thin blue dusk of pleasant dream.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Erebus: not our Antarctic volcano. In Greek myth Erebus is the dark borderzone of the underworld; the dead pass through on their way to Hades.
This poem was probably written in the late 1940s. And written from experience. Millay at this time was not well, and suffered nightmares (example); she died in 1950. The poem was published posthumously in Mine The Harvest, in 1954.

--Chris Wayan