Intro: The prose section:

He begins by distancing himself from the “opinion” or “report” from anonymous persons in Hungary or Germany around the beginning of the prior century (early 1700’s); they believed that dead persons left their graves at night and went to their former homes where they sucked their friends and family dry of blood – without awakening the victims.

The person who’s blood was taken would in turn become a vampire. Thanks were owed to the local clergy who proposed staking the vampires in their graves. Only this action prevented a huge number of vampires running riot and taking over the world.These same folks speculated that vampires originated from an excess of animal spirits (the part of humans that the animal-like in a rare recognition that we are mammals). These animal spirits took control of the body when the brain – the human part – died. The human, possessed by its own animal-part instead of demons – was able to roam away from the grave at its leisure.

The second idea as to the origination held that it was indeed demons that possessed the body when the original owner died and left it behind. The demons were then given corporality, and were free to seek their pleasure (usually human blood or souls). He hears the third idea from voyagers arriving from the Dutch colonies in America; they believe that if after the birth of the child the obstetric and others present burn the placenta and other after-birth material. The destroyed umbilical cord was supposed to provide a skin-suit for a hopeful demon; they want to appear human so badly that any discarded human substance is workable. (Way cool, right?)

Stagg then digresses into interesting speculation about what the demons must do if a piece of human material isn’t available. They must use the material of animals.

Verse section:

Stanza One: The unknown wife begins by asking her husband, Herman, why he is pale, and why his cheeks have lost their color. She entreats him to “speak!”

Stanza Two: Why, she wonders, does he mourn during the night instead of resting? Is he suffering from some unnamed grief?

Stanza Three: Why is his breast heaving and his heart throbbing? She knows there will be relief if he speaks because grief shared is grief halved. But talk, please talk.

Stanza Four: She contrasts his current pale appearance with his formerly ruddy, manly looks. His eyes have dimmed and they display the internal gloom she can feel him emanating.

Stanza Five: She has noted that at midnight he pants and can’t catch his breath, as though some supernatural power were trying to pull him into death. His sleep is now restless, and he groans frequently, tossing and turning as though in horror. She entreats him, Herman, to share with her the grief which is weighing down his heart.

Stanza Six: He now speaks to her, Gertrude.

He asks her how he can tell her the anguish he feels, especially since his fate is weird, and one he can’t keep concealed long even if he wished to do so.

Stanza Seven: Gertrude is now speaking.

Come on Herman, tell me what’s bothering you so much? What is it that is bothering you so much? I can practically see you beating your breast and pulling your hair out.

Stanza Eight: She knows his grief isn’t common and his pain isn’t common (nothing common – read as low-class) about him. She entreats him some more to speak; he will be relieved, and she will certainly be able to help him.

Stanza Nine: Herman speaking.

repeated twice for emphasis: “Oh Gertrude…” the cause of my grief is horrid, and it is a heavy load that causes me to eat my heart out in despair.Stanza Ten: He finally tells her that his grief is over the recently deceased Sigismund, his “dear friend.” He had attended him to the crypt, “the silent house of death.”

Stanza Eleven: He cried and mourned his passing like any real friend would. But his friendship was ill paid, inasmuch as he, Herman, would soon follow Sigismund in death.

Stanza Twelve: (note the repeat of “must follow) No” human art or skill/ no power can save him from his fate.

Stanza Thirteen: Sigismund, once his dear friend, has now become his persecutor. He is malevolent, and is torturing his, Herman’s” soul.

Stanza Fourteen: It is during the night when men are soundest asleep, that his soul “vigil keeps (watches for evil,)” with greater attention than hell usually knows.

Stanza Fifteen: The ghost of Sigismund roams from the tomb “the low regions of the dead,” in order to haunt Herman as he lays in his own bed.

Stanza Sixteen: Sigismund crawls “close to my side \\ and drinks away my vital blood,” and Herman doesn’t understand how this is possible but knows it must be demonic.

Stanza Seventeen: Sigismund “sucks from my veins the streaming life, / and drains the fountain of my heart!” (isn’t this great writing. Almost two centuries later, it still carries the same power!) He laments to his “dearest wife” the “unutterable (unspeakable)” pain he is suffering.

Stanza Eighteen: When it is full, “surfeited, the goblin dire,” from its banquet of “suckled gore (think of the nutrients and manner in which a baby suckles here)” the goblin returns to its “sepulcher” until the following night.

Stanza Nineteen: The next night he returns, and once more “from my veins life’s juices drain,” while Herman slumbers in “anguish” mourning both Sigismund’s fate, and his own. Is it any wonder he is restless?

Stanza Twenty: Herman shares that he expects this night to be his last, for his soul is torn with agony, and there is little left for Sigismund to take.

Stanza Twenty-one: Sad as his own fate is, what is worse is knowing that after his own death, he will become in turn goblin-like Sigismund, he knows he will then seek to drink her life. “Your friend by Herman shall be drained,” he tells her.

Stanza Twenty-two: He asks her, as “soon as he’s dead and laid in earth,” to drive a javelin through him, preventing him from rising, if she wants to avoid his own fate.

Stanza Twenty-Three: Watch with me (repeated twice) with a carefully concealed light, until you hear my dying breath, “parting groan.”

Stanza Twenty-Four: When Vesper rings out from the nearby convent, my body shall be cold. (Vesper is a service between 4:00 PM and midnight – so this injunction makes little sense, apart from its emotional appeal, its invocation of the Holy, and its purpose in the rhythm scheme.

Stanza Twenty-Five: And just as I die and the bell chimes, turn your light upon me, and you shall scare the goblin from my side by making him visible.

Stanza Twenty-Six: The narrator is now addressing his audience – us. Gertrude watched all ngith by her sleeping, dying husband, mourning his fate. She loved him. (Typical helpless female here, but then she is expected to stake him into this tomb? Sense and continuity issue?)

Stanza Twenty-Seven: As the vesper bell chimed, Herman died.

Stanza Twenty-eight: At that moment she pulled the lantern from under her cloak where it had been hiden, and she beheld a dreadful sight. The “shade of Sigismund – sad sight!” (Double purpose to the word shade: it is ghost and it is shadow.)

Stanza Twenty-nine: The Shade “indignant rolled his ireful eyes,/ That gleamed with wild horrific stare;/ and fixed a moment with surprise, / beheld aghast the enlightening glare.”

Stanza Thirty: Now we get a great description: he has cadaverous jays besmeared with “clotted carnage over and over,/ and his horrid whole appeared / Distent (distended) and filled with human gore!

Stanza Thirty-one: The spectre fled with a “hideous scowl,” leaving his screaming Gertrude behind. She then, in typical female fashion, fainted. Herman, dead, just lay there on his bed.

Stanza Thirty-two: The next day a council was held, and a decree issued that “shuddering nature should be freed / from pests like these before it was too late.” (Of course, for poor Herman, it was already too late. Collateral damage?)

Stanza Thirty-Two: The choir (one assumes a bunch of clerics?) then burst in to the crypt where Sigismund has lately been buried, and they found him within his tomb, warm as though he were alive, “undecayed.”

Stanza Thirty-three: His face was stained with blood, and his eyes were red and frightful. In fact, he looked alive in all ways except for motion. He lay still.

Stanza Thirty-four: They carry poor Herman to the same crypt, lay him next to Sigismund, and drive stakes through both “carcasses,” attaching them firmly to the earth.

Stanza Thirty-five: This staking “finished their career(s)” and neither shade was any longer able to roam. Their friends and family no longer need feel any fear from either man. They both “quite keep the slumbering tomb.” (Quiet as silent, and quiet as motionless.)