Always, There Is The Night and Other Poems

Abstract

Always, There Is the Night is certainly the one of my poems most closely-related to Crosses to Cullens. It deals with the reinvention of ideas and themes across time through the lens of the vampire. However, where the article functions to explore the ideas of sexuality and romance in relation to the vampire, Always is much more a commentary on capitalism, avarice and the physical and spiritual fallout of their running loose. In this, I see it as one in a long line of such comparisons, leading all the way back to Marx’s description of capital as ‘dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour’ (Marx, 1887: 163).

The Run, by contrast, is less closely-connected. Instead of giving light to a facet of the vampire that I could not include in the paper, it represents my attempt to capture a sense of the sublime awe of nature on which Romantic literature (and the Gothic which grew out of it) was founded. The poem describes a natural force which the people contrasted against it cannot overcome, then ‘pans up’ to a greater force only a few metres away.

Finally, Amphora is a direct way of addressing the sexual elements of the vampire mythos. Though it does not deal directly with vampires, and owes much more to Greek myth and its reinventions, the poem is an attempt to grasp the kind of ‘feverish’ desire for another that often characterises both vampires’ frequent attitudes towards their prey, and the allure of the creatures themselves towards others. However, I alloyed sexual desire with a more emotional sense of intimacy.