A Poem from Death's Jest-Book

Published in 1849, Thomas Lovell Beddoes' Death's Jest-Book is a revenge tragedy brimming with deceit, murder, sorcery, and vengeful spirits. Focusing on two brothers (the honorable knight Wolfram and the nefarious duke Melveric), the play, as scholar Michael Bradshaw attests, is Beddoes' magnum opus, in which the author recycles elements from his previous works and refines them into a highly polished masterpiece. During the course of the plot, Melveric, after being rescued by Wolfram during a crusade, turns on his brother and murders him. With the aid of a necromancer, Wolfram returns from the dead to haunt and destroy his conniving sibling. The poem below is whispered to Melveric by a chorus of disembodies voices who eerily remind the traitorous man that vengeance for Wolfram’s unjust death will quickly come. Interestingly, the poem makes a modern - and slightly altered - appearance in Tim Burton's film Beetlejuice (1988) as the incantation read by Otho during the seance scene.

As sudden thunder 
Pierces night; 
As magic wonder, 
Wild affright, 
Rives asunder 
Men’s delight: 
Our ghost, our corpse and we 
Rise to be.

As flies the lizard 
Serpent fell; 
As goblin vizard, 
At the spell 
Of pale wizard, 
Sinks to hell: 
Our life, our laugh, our lay 
Pass away.

As wake the morning 
Trumpets bright; 
As snow-drop, scorning 
Winter's might, 
Rises warning 
Like a sprite: 
The buried, dead, and slain 
Rise again. 

Works Referenced

Beddoes, Thomas Lovell. Death’s Jest-Book. 1829. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Bradshaw, Michael. "Third-generation Romantic Poetry: Boddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon." The Cambridge History of English Poetry. Ed. Michael O’Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 542-560.