The Best Gothic Poetry of the Victorian Era
Dreamlike and macabre, gothic poems give voice to our inner darkness. From haunted lovers to cruel goddesses, Victorian gothic poetry is alive with strange characters and dark themes. Beauty, grief, and horror mingle in an exchange of blood in these immortal verses by the Victorian era’s darkest luminaries.
Gothic Literature & Victorian Anxieties
Victorian writers of the mid to late 19th century adapted the gothic literature that had been pioneered by authors of the previous generation (think Mary Shelley and Lord Byron). Writing about dark themes and supernatural subjects, they poured their anxieties and fears into their work, resulting in gothic poems that tell us as much about the Victorian era as they do about the poets who wrote them.
For instance, the era’s obsession with death and mourning is a major factor in the popularity of this genre of poetry. In a time before widespread vaccination and reliably sterile medical procedures, death was lurking around every corner. New discoveries such as photography, electricity, and the theory of evolution had left people feeling uncertain about the future and their place in the universe. At the same time, rampant capitalist expansion led to rapid industrialization and urbanization that made people feel out of touch with nature as cities became crowded and choked with the fire and smoke of industry.
Then, of course, there’s the famous Victorian prudery. While it’s an exaggeration to say that, as the old idea goes, onlookers would faint at the sight of a woman’s ankle, there was nevertheless a high degree of cultural discomfort with the body and the erotic in this era, particularly in the Anglosphere. This led to desire (especially queer desire) being pushed underground and relegated to the realm of the monstrous—to the gothic.
All these swirling anxieties find their expression in the poetry of the era.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson - In Memoriam A.H.H.
Renowned English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson worked on this sprawling poem throughout his life, triggered by the sudden death of a close friend. Its hundreds of stanzas circle themes of loss and longing as the poet struggles to come to terms with a seemingly meaningless universe.
He famously muses that nature is “red in tooth and claw,” meaning that no cosmic law governs the savage natural world:
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law—
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed—
Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal'd within the iron hills?
No more? A monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match'd with him.
O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.
Edgar Allan Poe - “Annabel Lee”
Known for his weird tales and stories of horror, Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most indelible voices in American gothic literature. His short stories delved into dark obsessions from murder and madness to premature burial, but his poems more frequently circled themes of romantic longing and grief. Poe’s young wife died of an illness, and his grief is reflected in poems like “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven” which are haunted by ghostly maidens and profound sadness.
In “Annabel Lee,” Poe’s speaker laments the death of his lost love, the childlike words and galloping meter making it feel like a dark nursery rhyme:
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
Emily Dickinson - “Because I could not stop for Death”
American poet Emily Dickinson’s tiny stanzas of marching iambs brimming with energy and life might not seem very gothic at first glance, but their frequent obsession with death tells a different story. Just look at her most famous lines:
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
Lyrics like this one and “I heard a fly buzz when I died” reveal the reclusive poet’s ruminations on themes of mortality and legacy. Dickinson’s poems were deeply idiosyncratic and personal, but they share the Victorian era’s wider concerns with confronting death.
Christina Rossetti - “Goblin Market”
Christina Rossetti was associated with a British literary and art movement called the Pre-Raphaelites, who rejected modern aesthetics and strove to emulate a romanticized medievalism. Her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a famous Pre-Raphaelite painter, and he illustrated her fascinating narrative poem “Goblin Market.”
In it, two sisters encounter a mysterious market run by “goblin men” who sell beautiful fruits but demand a steep price. The poem takes the form of a dark fairytale, weaving together fantastical and unsettling images:
“Lie close,” Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
“We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”
“Come buy,” call the goblins
Hobbling down the glen.
Robert Browning - “Porphyria’s Lover”
Robert Browning was known for his poems that took the form of dramatic monologues exploring the often disturbing psyche of a fictional character. In this case, he presents the perspective of a man who strangles his lover Porphyria with her own long, yellow hair in an effort to preserve her love and perfection forever. It concludes:
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!
It’s steeped in horror with a touch of dark humor, a unique expression of the dark impulses lurking deep within the human psyche. Browning’s fascination with the hidden workings of the mind reflects the Victorian era’s emerging understanding of psychology and the new field of psychoanalysis.
Oscar Wilde - “In the Forest”
Irish author and playwright Oscar Wilde was one of the main proponents of an art and literary movement called Aestheticism, which held that art should exist outside of concerns for morality or social function. Its motto was “art for art’s sake,” and critics at the time found this idea to be decadent and corrupting, especially when confronted with works such Wilde’s salacious and gory play Salomé.
Wilde mused on themes of art and corruption in his famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, but his early poetry is more purely concerned with creating beautiful sounds and images. Wilde draws on the classical Greek stories he loved to create visions of frolicking nymphs and fauns and dreamy landscapes suffused with queer desire and melancholy in poems like this one, “In the Forest”:
Out of the mid-wood’s twilight
Into the meadow’s dawn,
Ivory limbed and brown-eyed,
Flashes my Faun!
He skips through the copses singing,
And his shadow dances along,
And I know not which I should follow,
Shadow or song!
O Hunter, snare me his shadow!
O Nightingale, catch me his strain!
Else moonstruck with music and madness
I track him in vain!
Charles Algernon Swinburne - “Dolores” [Our Lady of Pain]
Charles Algernon Swinburne was another Aestheticist poet, whose work reflects themes of desire and corruption. In this poem that scandalized polite society, Swinburne imagines a goddess of lust and desolation called Dolores, “Our Lady of Pain,” and composes a litany to her that reads like a twisted prayer:
Love listens, and paler than ashes,
Through his curls as the crown on them slips,
Lifts languid wet eyelids and lashes,
And laughs with insatiable lips.
Thou shalt hush him with heavy caresses,
With music that scares the profane;
Thou shalt darken his eyes with thy tresses,
Our Lady of Pain.
Charles Baudelaire - Les Fleurs du Mal
Across the English Channel, the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s dark, decadent 1857 book of poems Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) was called “an insult to public decency.” In it, he declares, “One should always be drunk, on wine, on poetry, as it suits you.”
Baudelaire would be a major influence on later French poets of the Modernist movement, as well as the Aestheticists. Ennui, despair, and longing haunt the pages of this collection, shot through with dark, bitter humor that makes it go down like a glass of sweet absinthe.
Its very first poem “To the Reader” throws down the gauntlet, daring readers to look away:
Boredom! He smokes his hookah, while he dreams
Of gibbets, weeping tears he cannot smother.
You know this dainty monster, too, it seems —
Hypocrite reader! — You! — My twin! — My brother!
(translated by Roy Campbell)
The Legacy of Victorian Gothic Literature
Modern audiences tend to think of the Victorian age as one of repression, excessive propriety, classism, and colonialism. These elements were certainly present, creating underworlds populated by marginalized outsiders. The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of rapid change and upheaval, as people grappled with finding their place in the universe. All these factors led to the very anxieties that created the conditions for gothic poetry and fiction to flourish during the era.
Much of the imagery we now associate with goth culture–such as frightening bats, veiled widows, and pale, consumptive waifs–comes directly from Victorian cultural productions. From Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Poe’s tales and poems, the vampires, ghostly women, and macabre monsters of the Victorian era continue to haunt us to this day.
Next time you feel the urge to explore the darker corridors of literature, pick up some Victorian gothic poetry, and luxuriate in the shadows.
