I love prose poems. Prose poems sacrifice the agility of line breaks for the raw power of the sentence. Poems with line breaks are undersized receivers who run intricate routes. Prose poems are strongside linebackers waiting to unleash a terrible fury.
Dating back to early practitioners such as Arthur Rimbaud and Clark Ashton Smith, prose poems have been a welcoming home for freaky hallucinations. “The Terrible Angel” by Russell Edson fits this description perfectly.
In a nursery a mother can’t get her baby out of its cradle. The baby, it has turned to wood, it has become part of its own cradle.
The mother, she cries, tilting, one foot raised, as if in flight for the front door, just hearing her husband’s car in the driveway; but can’t, the carpet holds her…
Her husband, he hears her, he wants to rush to her, but can’t, the door of the car won’t open…
I picture a young couple agonizing for months over crib choices, resulting in many arguments over size and structure, only for it to ultimately absorb the child into its rectangular form. Once aiding in the freedom of movement, the carpet and automobile have now imprisoned their owners. The poem makes an interesting choice in revealing that the baby has already turned to wood. Thus, the chance for saving the child is already a remote possibility and the conflict quickly becomes whether the couple will survive this ordeal.
The rhythm of this poem also imprisons its subjects. The mother and the father want to make quick strides to the baby but the poem never lets more than a few words escape together before a comma slows everything down. All told, there are twelve commas and one semicolon in four sentences. After five short stanzas, Edson concludes with a long stanza.
In the nursery the wooden baby stares with wooden eyes into the last red of the setting sun, even as the darkness that forms in the east begins to join the shadows of the house; the darkness that rises out of the cellar, seeping out from under furniture, oozing from the cracks in the floor … The shadow that suddenly collects in the corner of the nursery like the presence of something that was always there …
In this final stanza, the parents drop out completely. The sentences are almost free from the prison of punctuation with only two commas and one semicolon making an appearance. This freedom from halting punctuation is the result of a powerful entity—the eponymous character. The mother as part of the carpet is stripped of her humanity but the baby’s consciousness has been awakened. This suggests the baby will be consumed by the darkness and live on, which is pretty badass.
Like any respectable horror film, disparate phenomena fuse together at the end to form a supernatural entity that cannot be stopped. The poem ends with an ellipsis, suggesting that as soon as the characters piece everything together, their lives are over. Also, instead of revealing the description of the terrible angel, the menace of the house is left dangling so that readers can bring their own fears to the poem. I’ll take that over Jason stalking vacuous campers every time.
