The Sleeper by Edgar Allan Poe

The Sleeper

by Edgar Allan Poe
 
At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And softly dripping, drop by drop,
 
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.
The rosemary nods upon the grave;
The lily lolls upon the wave;
 
Wrapping the fog about its breast,
The ruin moulders into rest;
Looking like Lethe, see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not, for the world, awake.
 
All Beauty sleeps! – and lo! where lies
Irene, with her Destinies!
Oh, lady bright! can it be right –
This window open to the night?
The wanton airs, from the tree-top,
 
Laughingly through the lattice drop –
The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,
Flit through thy chamber in and out,
And wave the curtain canopy
So fitfully – so fearfully –
 
Above the closed and fringéd lid
’Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid,
That, o’er the floor and down the wall,
Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall!
Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?
 
Why and what art thou dreaming here?
Sure thou art come o’er far-off seas,
A wonder to these garden trees!
Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress!
Strange, above all, thy length of tress,
 
And this all solemn silentness!
The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
Which is enduring, so be deep!
Heaven have her in its sacred keep!
This chamber changed for one more holy,
 
This bed for one more melancholy,
I pray to God that she may lie
Forever with unopened eye,
While the pale sheeted ghosts go by!
My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
 
As it is lasting, so be deep!
Soft may the worms about her creep!
Far in the forest, dim and old,
For her may some tall vault unfold –
Some vault that oft hath flung its black
 
And wingéd pannels fluttering back,
Triumphant, o’er the crested palls
Of her grand family funerals –
Some sepulchre, remote, alone,
Against whose portals she hath thrown,
 
In childhood, many an idle stone –
Some tomb from out whose sounding door
She ne’er shall force an echo more,
Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!
It was the dead who groaned within.
 
Recommended reading:
The Complete Stories and Poems by Edgar Allan Poe (1966)

 
Video by Jack Kost – 2025.
 
Photograph: Moon Over Trees (2024), by Jack Kost.
 
Wind Sound Effect by freesound_community from Pixabay.

Scanners (1980) - still blows my mind … kind of:

Review by Jack Kost

 

Whenever I hear the subject of “guilty pleasures”, Scanners (1980) is one of the movies I immediately remember.

At the time I first watched Scanners, I’d already seen director David Cronenberg’s previous cinematic ventures into the “body horror” genre: Shivers, Rabid, and The Brood.

I wasn’t too impressed with any of those movies.
They had interesting concepts, but were flawed, and often hampered by wooden acting.
Scanners is no exception, sadly, but it still entertains me.
If I had to make up a category, I guess Flawed but Fun would fit.
 
Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly – I enjoyed.

Videodrome, The Dead Zone, Dead Ringers, and eXistenZ – I loved.

Naked Lunch – I hated.

Eastern Promises and A History of Violence were both thought-provoking and gripping conventional thrillers, breaking away from his principal horror genre.

I have yet to see his other works.
 
Scanners, released in the United States on January 14, 1981, is a mix of horror, science fiction, and espionage-thriller, with a James Bond-esque plot of world domination.

The Scanners of the title are people with an invisible mutation: a form of telekinesis enabling them to link, control and even destroy humans and computers by the power of thought.
This is a fun movie to be enjoyed simply for what it is: fantasy.
Whenever I watch Scanners, I ignore the numerous plot holes and inconsistencies.
I wish I could ignore the lousy acting in particular … however, that’s simply impossible.
Stephen Lack, as great and jovial a guy as he is, in my movie-watching experience, gives the worst performance of a lead actor I have ever seen.
He acts as if he’s in a daze and says his lines in a droning monotone.
He’s so wooden; I felt I could have made a solid bookcase just out of his performance!
The man was cheated out of his Razzie Award!
I laugh every time I see and hear him deliver the line:
“The future! You murdered the future!”

On the plus side: this movie made me a fan of Michael Ironside.
He’s excellent as the villain, Revok, and his presence in a movie has always inspired me to view it.

Ironside, along with Patrick McGoohan, Jennifer O’Neill, and Lawrence Dane, all give good performances.

The special effects fall into the “good for the time” category, but even with no CGI at the time it was made, and a limited budget, Cronenberg still did a great job.
The vein and eyeball-popping final battle between the hero and villain will make you smile at how fake it all looks.

For all its faults and fall-shorts, there’s still a lot to enjoy in this movie, and no blog about Scanners would be complete without mentioning the landmark exploding head scene.

This effect alone makes Scanners a classic must–see … even if you do have to ignore the fact that there is not one spot of blood or gore on either Michael Ironside, or the table at which they were seated!

When I first saw Scanners, I knew very little about the story, so this scene had a similar surprise element of the head falling out of the hole in the bottom of the boat, in Jaws, or the shock ending of Carrie.
It was a long time before a making-of documentary revealed to me how they achieved the exploding head effect in Scanners: a latex life-cast was made of actor Louis Del Grande’s head:

The cast was fitted with a plaster support, filled with dog food, fake blood, rabbit liver, portions of burger, syrup, and sealed with wax.
After numerous failed attempts to produce a convincing effect, special effects artist, Gary Zeller, finally took a shotgun, positioned himself low behind the seated dummy, and blew its head off!

The resulting effect is … even now … mind blowing!