Last time in our Halloween Series, an A. E. Housman poem combined with music had death on a knife edge. Placed at the end of the growing year in northern places, Halloween comes at a time in a yearly cycle that suggests death. Note: that statement includes the word “cycle.” Humans have memory, and song, and eventually writing, so we know the turning round — the end of the growing comes before the white none of winter and before the regreening of spring.

Should it be so with death, that full nothing? Some hope and believe that so, though we can have no memory of that. But even one life has many turnings, places we pass through and leave. Today’s piece ends by portraying that we open and close gates of memory, gates that are no longer there.

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote this poem of a non-threatening ghost. It’s an earlier work, and some see the ghost as a wisp of her not-long-departed girlhood. I’ll add that the choice of having the ghost appear in a garden speaks to the placement of Halloween in a harvest/leaving time of the year. Gardens have needs: nutritious soil, water, sun, and care. Perhaps they need ghosts from time to time as well?

“She paused—then opened and passed through a gate that once was there.”

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The music I composed and played for Millay’s “The Little Ghost”  shows South Asian influences, what with harmonium, tambura, and my vibrato note electric guitar playing. You can hear that combination of words and music with the audio player below. No player to be seen?  This highlighted link is an alternative, it’ll open a new tab with its own audio player.