Halloween Poems

Here’s a selection of classic poems about ghosts, goblins and spirits for All Hallows’ Eve, the night when the division between earthly reality and the spirit world vanishes:

• William Shakespeare,
  The Witches’ Spell from Macbeth (1606)
  
  
• John Donne,
  “The Apparition” (1633)
  
  
• Lord Brooke Fulke Greville,
  Sonnet 100 (1633)
  
  
• Robert Herrick,
  “The Hag” (1648)
  
  
• Traditional ballad,
  “Tam Lin” (recorded by Francis James Child, 1729)
  
  
• Robert Burns,
  “Halloween” (1785)
  
  
• George Gordon, Lord Byron,
  “Darkness” (1816)
  
  
• Edgar Allan Poe,
  “The Raven” (1845)
  
  
• Edgar Allan Poe,
  “Ulalume” (1847)
  
  
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
  “Haunted Houses” (1858)
  
  
• Christina Rossetti,
  “Goblin Market” (1862)
  
  
• Paul Laurence Dunbar,
  “The Haunted Oak” (1903)
  
  
• Robert Frost,
  “Ghost House” (1915)
  
  

And there’s more: a contemporary Halloween poem from our 9/11 anthology, Poems After the Attack:

• Tony Brown,
  “Dispatch from the Home Front: Halloween 2001”
  

Another contemporary Halloween poem from our archive of InterBoard Poetry Competition winners:

• Jim Doss,
  “Searching for Poe’s Grave on Halloween, Baltimore, MD” (2004)
  

And from other About.com sites, more Halloween lit:

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
  “Totentanz” (in German, with its English translation, “Dance of Death,” trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring)
  
  
• Halloween reading,
  from ClassicLiterature.about.com