LITERARY INFLUENCES




"In the pale azure dawn like Ligeia reborn
I tore free of my sleep - sepulchre"

Ligeia is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. I wrote a paper on this subject.
Click on the link to see the full-text.
Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe

"Thou art darkest Gabrielle
Lilith who rode the steed
Thou art pale Hecate
Rising from Thessaly"

Robert Graves believed that before the advent of Christianity, matriarchal societies all over Europe worshipped the White Goddess in at least one of her forms. You can read up on this vision of his in his book "The White Goddess". This was very much a nature religion. The Goddess stood for the 3 universal themes of birth, love and death. Throughout history she has returned in many different names and forms: Artemis, Isis, Persephone, Hecate, Kali... Hers is a very ancient religion, which can be traced back to ancient Greece (Thessaly), but presumably it goes way further back in time...
I wrote my dissertation on this subject. I added it here in 3 parts:
Introduction: Critical reception of the poet Robert Graves
What is Romanticism?
The White Goddess

"For thee Endymion
I forsake the cerements of this star-flung tomb"

Endymion by John Keats is about a young shepherd who, like the good protagonist of a Romantic poem, is involved in a whole series of celebrations of nature. Luna, the goddess of the moon, falls in love with him and descends from her place among the stars to show herself to him.

"I should compare them
To a warm Summers day
But to the letter, it is better
To lichen their names to a grave"

Shakespeare's most famous love poem begins with the following sentence:
"Shall I compare thee to a Summers day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate."

"My ambition is to slay anon
A sinner in the hands of a dirty God"

"Sinners in the hands of an angry God" by Jonathan Edwards was a very influential work in the 18th century. It is representative for the puritanical dogma that God is almighty and that man totally depends upon God's mercy for his salvation.

"All damned in this inferno
Where even Virgil averts his eyes"

Latin writer Virgil wrote a story about a journey through hell. In Dante's "Divina Comedia" Virgil takes up the role of tour guide through hell once again. He leads Dante through all nine of the infernal circles.

"Benighted like ill-fated Usher
The House of Bathory shrouded
'Neath grief's dark facade"

"The Fall of the House of Usher" is another short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Roderick Usher is yet another of Poe's crazed narrators.

"All heil, all heil, all heil the serpentine's gift"

Macbeth by Shakespeare Act I Scene III:
Macbeth: Speak, if you can - what are you?
1 Witch: All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!
2 Witch: All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!
3 Witch: All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be King hereafter.
This is the prophecy of the three witches, which Macbeth uses to justify his murder on the king of Scotland to claim the throne himself. This prophecy turned out to be his curse in the end, driving him to his terrible act and eventually to his own downfall.

Dark nature clasp my soul
Around Her throat mine arms enfold
To sleep, perchance to dream
And then…
To dusk and flesh ascend

Hamlet by Shakespeare Act III Scene I:
...To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause - ...
Hamlet is above anything else undecisive. He should kill his uncle to avenge his father's murder, but he hesitates. He should love Ophelia, but he hesitates. In this scene, he thinks about killing himself. But even then he is undecisive. He is afraid to plunge into the dark. He doesn't know what dreams death would bring him, so he doesn't commit suicide.

And Lo, the wrath of god swept down
"Thou art no more an angel filled
With light, but a leech to be abhorred
And thou shalt suffer My burning will"...
Quoth this raven: "Nevermore"

The last line originates from Poe's "The Raven". The crazed narrator of the poem is traumatized by the death of his beloved Lenore and interprets the ordinary shrieking of a raven as a sign from the other world. As the bird continues to make the same sound, he believes it is mocking him in his everlasting sorrow by repeating "nevermore". The way the quotation is used in the song, I believe it illustrates Lucifer's equally everlasting rebellion against God's judgement.
To see the full text of the poem, click on the link below.
"The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe

And the earth was without Fall and void
And darkness was upon the face of the deep

The Bible - The Book of Genesis 1:2
And the earth was without Fall and void
And darkness was upon the face of the deep
Thus begins the first book of the Old Testament, describing the world as it was before the Creation and before the Fall of Man.

Beneath the tightened leather strop
Of the basque of the houndervilles

"The Hound of the Baskervilles" is a crime novel by Arther Conan Doyle. Owing to regional mythology of the British Isles, the murderous dog in the story looks like a demonic hellhound. In the end, Sherlock Holmes discovers that the guilty was not quite as supernatural...

Born of a jackal in the Vatican
To a loathsome flock
I have crept behind the drapes
And a wizard there is not

In "The Wizard of Oz", Dorothy discovers the 'wizard' is actually an old man hiding behind a curtain in the throne room. He fooled the inhabitants of the fairy land of Oz into thinking he possessed great powers. Kind of like the pope in the Vatican then I suppose.

I smell the fleur du malcontent
The hellish stench
Of Judas in the dozens

"Les fleurs du mal" or "The flowers of evil" is a volume of 19th century poetry by Charles Baudelaire. It deals with decadence, eroticism and blasphemous subjects. At the time, the poems were thought to be 'an insult to public decency'. The publication ban even lasted untill 1949, well into the twentieth century.