By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, October 29, 2006; BW12

My favorite poem for Halloween was written in the 16th century: the hundredth poem in "Caelica," a book-length sequence composed over a lifetime by Fulke Greville (1554-1628). He was Lord Brooke, an eminent statesman under Elizabeth I and James I, and a close friend of his fellow poet Philip Sidney. Greville's sonnet analyzes the experience of seeing spooks or devils. The devils, he says, are psychological, the products of "hurt imaginations." They are not less fearsome, or less real, for coming from inside the mind:

In night when colours all to black are cast,

Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;

The eye a watch to inward senses plac'd,

Not seeing, yet still having power of sight,

Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,

Where fear stirr'd up with witty tyranny,

Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offence,

Doth forge and raise impossibility:

Such as in thick depriving darknesses,

Proper reflections of the error be,

And images of self-confusednesses,

Which hurt imaginations only see;

And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,

Which but expressions be of inward evils.

In this observant description, the "inward sense" of fantasy stirs up the "self-offence" of monstrous visions. The "witty tyranny" of human imagination dominates and discomforts.

Greville's poems were edited for the general reader, with an introduction by the late Thom Gunn (1929-2004). Born in England, Gunn came to California in his 20s and became a San Francisco poet. In his last couple of books, Gunn wrote astringent, soulful and unsentimental poems about the years when AIDS killed many people he knew. This poem by Gunn can be read as a variation, perhaps a reversal, of Greville's poem:

About ten days or so

After we saw you dead

You came back in a dream.

I'm all right now you said.

And it was you, although

You were fleshed out again:

You hugged us all round then,

And gave your welcoming beam.

How like you to be kind,

Seeking to reassure.

And, yes, how like my mind

To make itself secure.

Whereas the 16th-century poet Greville gives a reassuring, rational analysis of fear, the modern poet Gunn ends his poem with a sardonic, unsettling analysis of reassurance. The welcome hugs of his dream, where loss is restored, is an imagining; like the devils of Greville's poem, the friend who comes back "all right" and "fleshed out" is forged within the mind: "forged," as in the work of both the blacksmith and the counterfeiter. Both poets bring fiery, candid attention to how the mind operates. Their poems exemplify the lucid, rational mind acknowledging the power of the irrational -- the urgent realities that generate our dreams and nightmares.

(Fulke Greville's sonnet can be found in "Selected Poems of Fulke Greville," edited and with an introduction by Thom Gunn. Univ. of Chicago Press. Copyright © 1968 Faber and Faber. Thom Gunn's poem "The Reassurance" is from his "Collected Poems." Noonday Press. Copyright © 1994 by Thom Gunn.)