Carmilla’s Kindred: The Vampiress in Verse

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Women Write About Comics celebrates the 150th anniversary of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla with a series of posts on female vampires in nineteenth-century literature.

The figure of the vampire entered literary history with German poet Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s 1748 piece “Der Vampir”. Ossenfelder’s vampire was a predatory man, and the female of the species would not appear until later. When the time came, however, it was once again the poets who dreamt up many of the earliest examples. Before J. Sheridan Fanu wrote Carmilla, a veritable pantheon of vampiresses was to be found in verse.

It is Robert Southey who can lay claim to introducing vampires to English literature. His first published contribution to the vampire canon was a poem that originally appeared in 1799 as “A Ballad, Shewing How an Old Woman Rode Double, and Who Rode Before Her”. Southey would later republish and revise the poem, in the process lending it the rather more succinct title “The Old Woman of Berkeley” (Vamped.org has a detailed article on the poem’s convoluted publication history)

According to Southey’s introduction, the poem is based on a story “related by Matthew of Westminster, and Olaus Magnus, and is also to be found in the Nuremberg Chronicle.” It depicts an elderly, ailing woman calling for her two pious children – a monk and a nun – and confessing that she has lived a life of sin and black magic:

“All kind of sin I have rioted in,
And the judgement now must be;
But I secured my children’s souls,
Oh! pray, my children, for me!

I have suck’d the breath of sleeping babes,
The fiends have been my slaves:
‘I have ‘nointed myself with infant’s fat,
And feasted on rifled graves.

‘And the Fiend will fetch me now in fire,
My witchcrafts to atone;
And I, who have rifled the dead man’s grave,
Shall never have rest in my own…’

She requests an elaborate funeral, which involves her coffin being bound in consecrated chains and surrounded by church bells that toll over the next three days and nights, “To drive from thence the fiends who come/To bear my corpse away”. Even the church itself is to be locked tight for the period.

She passes away and the funeral is performed in accordance with her wishes. Over the course of the next three days, the church is surrounded by the hideous roar of unseen fiends. Finally, an earthquake strikes and knocks the church open, allowing infernal forces access to the old witch‘s corpse:

And in HE came, with eyes of flame,
The Fiend to fetch the dead,
And all the church with his presence glow’d
Like a fiery furnace red.

He laid his hand on the iron chains,
And like flax they moulder’d asunder;
And the coffin lid, which was barr’d so firm,
He burst with his voice of thunder.

And he bade the Old Woman of Berkeley rise,
And some with her Master away;
And the cold sweat stood on the cold cold corpse,
At the voice she was forced to obey.

She rose on her feet in her winding sheet,
Her dead flesh quiver’d with fear,
And a groan like that which the Old Woman gave
Never did mortal hear.

The story ends with the old woman being carried away on horseback by the Devil, never to be seen again – although her shrieks are heard for miles around.

18th-century woodcut showing a naked witch screaming as the Devil takes her away on horseback (illustrating Robert Southey's ballad "The Old Woman of Berkeley")
1799 illustration for “The Old Woman of Berkeley”

Although “The Old Woman of Berkely” often turns up in discussions of early vampire poetry, this classification is questionable. Yes, the witch rises from her grave; but it is implied that she is being carried straight to hell in a parody of the final resurrection, not left to linger in the manner of a vampire. She does mention sucking the life from infants, which is certainly vampire-like. Note that this occurred during her life rather than after her death, and is presented as just one detail in a list of sins, most of which have no specific relation to vampirism (as an aside, Southey would later change the line “And feasted on rifled graves” to “I have call’d the dead from their graves”, adding cannibalism to the mix).

While the poem is not about a vampire in the strictest sense, it does show that Southey was interested in the key ingredients of the vampire motif. He explored the theme more directly in his 1801 epic poem Thalaba the Destroyer.

The narrative of Thalaba deals with the Domdaniel, “a Seminary for evil Magicians under the roots of the Sea” mentioned in a previous volume, Denis Chavis and Jacques Cazotte’s Continuation des Mille et Une Nuits (translated into English as Arabian Tales: Or, A Continuation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments). In Southey’s poem, the magicians of Domdaniel hear a prophecy that they shall be overpowered by the descendant of a man named Hodeirah. They try to escape this fate by killing Hodeirah; but the prophecy turns out to be self-fulfilling: they neglect to kill his son, Thalaba, who swears vengeance. Backed by Azrael, the Angel of Death, Thalaba pursues a long journey until he finally confronts the sorcerers in Domdaniel, giving his life and receiving a reward from the Prophet Mohammed in the hereafter.

The world through which Thalaba journeys is riddled with demons and monsters. The magicians take advice from a Teraph – the torn-off head of a newborn baby that acts as a demonic oracle – while their toolkit includes a severed hand worked into a magical Hand of Glory. Elsewhere, we learn of flesh-eating Gouls and an animated statue that guards a certain garden. Not all of these elements come from the legends of the Middle East; this is not surprising when we consider how, in his hefty footnotes to the poem, Southey reveals a considerable contempt for the aesthetics of the Islamic world.

In one note, explaining why he had a character quote from Job, he comments that he would have included a quotation from the Koran only “if the tame language of the Koran could be remembered by the few who have toiled through its dull tautology.” He derides the non-figurative illuminations in Persian manuscripts as being “as absurd to the eye as nonsense-verses to the ear” and goes on to remark that “[t]he little of their literature that has reached us is equally worthless.” As for Chavis and Cazotte’s Arabian Tales, from which he borrowed the setting of Domdaniel, Southey confidently assures us that “they have lost their metaphorical rubbish in passing through the filter of a French translation.”

While clearly captivated by the exotic imagery of the Arabian Nights, Southey shows no interest in any sort of cultural fidelity and freely inserts folkloric concepts from further afield – including what has been hailed by the British Library as arguably the first appearance of a vampire in English literature.

During the course of the story, Thalaba falls in love with a maiden named Oneiza, only for her to suddenly die on the day of their wedding. Together, Thalaba and his father-in-law Moath visit Oneiza’s grave at midnight to call her forth:

“Now! now!” cried Thalaba,
And o’er the chamber of the tomb
There spread a lurid gleam
Like the reflection of a sulphur fire,
And in that hideous light
Oneiza stood before them, it was She,
Her very lineaments, and such as death
Had changed them, livid cheeks, and lips of blue.
But in her eyes there dwelt
Brightness more terrible
Than all the loathsomeness of death.

Moath is aghast at the sight. “This is not she!” he exclaims. “A Fiend! a manifest Fiend!” A divine voice calls upon the two men to strike her, and Moath obeys:

…Moath firm of heart,
Performed the bidding; thro’ the vampire corpse
He thrust his lance; it fell,
And howling with the wound
Its demon tenant fled.
A sapphire light fell on them,
And garmented with glory, in their sight
Oneiza’s Spirit stood.

There follows a tender moment where the angelic spirit of Oneiza, replacing the hideous vampire, encourages Thalaba to complete his quest so that they can meet again in paradise.

Southey had clearly done research into the topic of vampires, as the above sequence is accompanied by a long footnote discussing allegedly true vampire cases like that of Petar Blagojević. What stands out, however, is less the resemblance that the Oneiza episode bears to its historical inspirations, and more how much it prefigures a famous plot thread in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: the death, resurrection and final slaying of Lucy Westenra.


Next: Otherwordly women in the poetry of Coleridge and Keats.,,

Series NavigationCarmilla’s Kindred: Belles Dames sans Merci >>
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Doris V. Sutherland

Doris V. Sutherland

Horror historian, animation addict and tubular transdudette. Catch me on Twitter @dorvsutherland, or view my site at dorisvsutherland.com. If you like my writing enough to fling money my way, then please visit patreon.com/dorvsutherland or ko-fi.com/dorvsutherland.

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