The Shadow-Eater

by Benjamin De Casseres

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Genres: Poetry, Collections

26 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1915

About the author

Benjamin De Casseres (April 3, 1873 – December 7, 1945) (often DeCasseres) was an American journalist, critic, essayist and poet. He was born in Philadelphia and began working at the Philadelphia Press at an early age, but spent most of his professional career in New York City, where he wrote for various newspapers including The New York Times, The Sun and The New York Herald. He was married to author Bio De Casseres, and corresponded with prominent literary figures of his time, including H. L. Mencken, Edgar Lee Masters, and Eugene O'Neill. He was a distant relative of Baruch Spinoza and was of Sephardic descent.

Reviews

[Mark Fuller Dillon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Because I read more poetry than any sane man should, I often run into collections that have been overlooked, forgotten, tossed aside unfairly. THE BARCAROLE OF JAMES SMITH, by Herbert S. Gorman; COLLECTED POEMS, by Robert Gittings; POEMS, by Iris Tree; COLLECTED POEMS, by Elinor Wylie; POEMS, by Nora May French: these merit rediscovery and a reader's full attention.

On the other hand, I also uncover the stench of books dead before they were published, books that make the doggerel of WEIRD TALES and FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES look halfway competent, books erased by the protective amnesia of readers everywhere. NIGHT, by Harold Brainerd Hersey, with its Hallmark greeting-card echoes of Baudelaire; THE BATTLE FIENDS, proof that MEDUSA was not the only mindlessly wretched book by E. H. Visiak; and most recently, THE SHADOW-EATER, by Benjamin De Casseres (Wilmarth Publishing Company, New York, 1917).

Beyond its plodding ineptitude, what makes THE SHADOW-EATER disappointing is the connections of its writer with George Sterling and H. L. Mencken. By the evidence here, they taught de Casseres nothing.

And nothing is what de Casseres offers. I can smell hints of half-digested Nietzsche, hear long drawling echoes of Whitman, but otherwise, nothing. No vivid metaphors, no living imagery, no compelling rhythms or sounds, no technical self-discipline, nothing that might stand out beyond a small-town newspaper's editorial page. There is nothing poetic in his capitalized Abstract NOUNS, in his repeated phrases ("In ITS night, in ITS night!"), in his odes to Nothing. While Leconte de Lisle sang brilliantly of the abyss, de Casseres is merely abysmal.

I have nothing more to say about this nothing. Instead, I leave you with examples of de Casseres in his nakedness.

=====

THE ROTTED IDEAL

Framed in ebon memories her picture hangs there upon the walls of my brain.
'Tis not the face I put there in my youth: that glorious youth of me, slain by its lusts, bitten to death by the baby vampires that swarmed in its blood.
The lost woman of my soul! warm lips, black eyes -- face that was a prism of love shot through by the rays from some dumb despair --
Long has it vanished.
And the dust of my acts have gathered on that brow, and my sins have smitten her cheeks to a pallor, and her eyes welter in two brackish tears --
Tears that have lain stagnant in those bony cups for a myriad soul-cycles.
I have wrought my own decay into that face: it has traveled the way of my own dissolution.
Will it break on my brain-walls and streak all my rottenness anew?
And a spider has woven a web over and around the great frame of ebon and the thin bladder of flesh that once was her face --
A leering, grinning spider has woven his web there,
A leering, grinning spider whose mouth sucks poison from her lips.
Lead on, hell-lights!

=====

THE DEAD WHO LIVE

Up from the nether world in unending procession,
Like the lurid mists at the dawn-time,
Like the black wraiths that ascend from foul crypts,
Arise and ever arise my impulses.
Across the field of consciousness they stalk, anhungered, lust-ravened, lean of their ghastly dreams --
Thou devils of the gone-by!

=====

THE GOD OF NEGATION

I have ascended to the topmost spaces and dragged the cars of the devildare gods from their courses;
They saw me not, but felt me as a Presence that hurled them from the track.
I have in a wondrous Thought undermined the Milky Way and have sown the orbits of the suns with dragons' teeth uprooted from my rebellious soul:
Those eyes of gleaming fire saw me not, but felt me as a movement in the Abyss.
I have numbed the arm of the blind old Artisan, and he shall die at my last Epiphany:
He heard me not, but felt me as the great Destructive Presence.

====

DE PROFUNDIS

Night! Night! Eternal Night, whose black vapors have filled all the sluiceways of Time -- Night! ageless and void, seamless and bald:
Night upgurgling from chaos, upswirl of the noumenal seas, drape me and veil me from the illusory lights of this world!

My being's at nadir,
I pass into my solstice,
I have touched of ITS garment, the black thing IT weaves on ITS sentient looms, ITS great blouse of black which encircles the world fold upon fold --
While we crawl in ITS creases and guess.

Sit I in the night of ITS sleeve,
Withering into eternities,
Bowed in ITS night, in ITS night!

=====

THE SYNCOPATED SPINNER

Yon drowsing Spider that squats there upon Time's rotting timbers spinning her seven webs of a million threads, spinning and weaving from the birth of the Primitive Cycle --
Her criss-crosses, her mazes and labyrinths that are called Eternal Laws by the midges caught in the films
Spun by that drowsing Spider squat there upon Time's rotting timbers:
Awake! thou great spinning demon, shake webs and midge-men into the Nothing, and with the shade of a smirk that I know resume thy loathsome pastime
There squat upon Time's rotting timbers!

=====

THE SLEEPER

My soul fell asleep, asleep in a great city, among the leering faces of her millions;
The iron hoofs of many strange and monstrous animals ground their imprint in my prescient white Self that lay stark and helpless on the highways of the world:
O my Soul, my Soul, awake thou!
The waves have gone over me and crawling things with fiery eyes have wriggled onto the white throne where I ruled,
And the old seven deadly delights have kissed me each one and licked up my strength with their smooth yellow tongues:
O my Soul, my Soul, awake thou!
O the terror of sleep and of Me who am blotted, erased and spun into things that are vile and grosser than compost,
And the long death of Me that drank of this hemlock of earth that brings not the death that is surcease -- only a death of vile dreaming, a lapsing without a forgetting:
O my Soul, my Soul, awake thou!
Out of their crypts stalk my elder old selves, and whilst I stare with the impotent eye set in the head of the dead they drive in the little brass rivets of habit to the core of my being:
O my Soul, my Soul, awake thou!

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark poetry. Deep in thought of life/death, loss, love/ loss. Interesting thought on the lows in life. I got this book from the Gutenberg Project on my Kindle.