Day 3 of ‘A Scare a Day’ – ‘The Dark Ladie’

Today’s poem is from a lesser known writer, Anne Bannerman. One of the great things about these kinds of challenges is finding new authors and I have high hopes that Anne Bannerman will be new to some!

Bannerman was a Scottish poet who was particularly known for her sonnet cycles and her Gothic ballads. Today’s poem is ‘The Dark Ladie’ (read it here) and it formed part of her 1802 collection Tales of Superstition and Chivalry. The collection brings together many of the aspects of the early Gothic across its range of poems – a variety of different ‘wild’ locations, historic pasts, magical dealings and obscure mysteries.

What I find particularly interesting about ‘The Dark Ladie’, and one of the reasons I enjoy it, is how much it leaves unsaid, unspoken or unknown. Gothic ballads often contain a straight tale – a vengeful ghost, an undead lover, a skeleton priest and a mistake of a marriage. Bannerman’s tale leaves us with as many questions as answers. Quite literally. She chooses to leave us with several questions:

But where Sir Guyon took her then,

Ah ! none could ever hear or know,

Or, why, beneath that long black veil,

Her wild eyes sparkle so.

“Or whence those deep unearthly tones,

That human bosom never own’d;

Or why, it cannot be remov’d,

That folded veil that sweeps the ground?”

The poem chooses to use a number of narrators and we are left with fragments of knowledge stolen, partial views of the scene. We are left overall, though, with a striking image – a woman, with a black veil down to the floor, whose eyes burn despite their covering, whose actions are few, deliberate, and inexplicable, and whose voice speaks in tones no human ever used…