"Yule Horror" (A Poem)

Although recently renamed “Festival” in modern anthologies, H.P. Lovecraft’s poem was first published as “Yule Horror” in the December, 1926, issue of Weird Tales.[1] Inspired by the publication’s editor, Farnsworth Wright, the work’s fourth stanza, which refers to Wright as “an abbot and priest” who attends a “devil-wrought feast,” was originally removed from the magazine because the editor felt its reference was too obvious to readers.[2]

There is snow on the ground,
And the valleys are cold,
And a midnight profound
Blackly squats o’er the wold;
But a light on the hilltops half-seen hints of feastings unhallow’d and old.

There is death in the clouds,
There is fear in the night,
For the dead in their shrouds
Hail the sun’s turning flight,
And chant wild in the woods as they dance round a Yule-altar fungous and white.

To no gale of earth’s kind
Sways the forest of oak,
Where the sick boughs entwin’d
By mad mistletoes choke,
For these pow’rs are the pow’rs of the dark, from the graves of the lost Druid-folk.

And mayst thou to such deeds
Be an abbot and priest,
Singing cannibal greeds
At each devil-wrought feast,
And to all the incredulous world shewing dimly the sign of the beast.[3]

Works Referenced

Joshi, S.T. and David Schultz. An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.

Lovecraft, H.P. “Yule Horror.” Weird Tales 8.6 (1926): 846.

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[1] Joshi and Schultz, 92. 

[2] Joshi and Schultz, 92. 

[3] Lovecraft, 846.