The Haunted Oak

Pray why are you so bare, so bare,
Oh, bough of the old oak tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?

My leaves were green as the best, I trow,
And sap ran free in my veins,
But I saw in the moonlight dim and weird
A guiltless victim’s pains.

I bent me down to hear his sigh;
I shook with his gurgling moan,
And I trembled sore when they rode away
And left him here alone.

They’d charged him with the old, old crime,
And set him fast in jail:
Oh why does the dog howl all night long,
And why does the night wind wail?

He prayed his prayer and he swore his oath,
And he raised his hand to the sky;
But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear,
And the steady tread drew nigh.

Who is it rides by night, by night,
Over the moonlit road?
And what is the spur that keeps the pace,
What is the galling goad?

And now they beat at the prison door,
“Ho, keeper, do not stay!
We are friends of him you hold within,
And we fain would take him away

“From those who ride fast on our heels
With mind to do him wrong;
They have no care for his innocence,
And the rope they bear is long.”

They have fooled the jailor with lying words,
They have fooled the man with lies;
The bolts unbar, the locks are drawn,
And the great door open lies.

Now they have taken him from the jail,
And hard and fast they ride,
And the leader laughs low down in his throat,
As they halt my trunk beside.

Oh, the judge, he wore a mask of black,
And the doctor one of white,
And the minister, with his oldest son,
Was curiously bedight.

Oh, foolish man, why weep you now?
‘Tis but a little space,
And the time will come when these will dread
The mem’ry of your face.

I feel the rope against my bark,
And the weight of him in my grain,
I feel in the throe of his final woe
The touch of my own last pain.

And never more shall leaves come forth
On the bough that bears the ban;
I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead,
From the curse of a guiltless man.

And ever the judge rides by, rides by,
And goes to hunt the deer,
And ever another rides his soul
In the guise of a mortal fear.

And ever the man he rides me hard,
And never a night stays he;
For I feel his curse on a haunted bough
On the trunk of a haunted tree.

In this week’s poem, written and published in 1900, the African American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) combines legend with documentary. The Haunted Oak tells the true, horrifying story of a lynching. You can read the indented text of the poem here.

The form Dunbar chooses, and, particularly, the idiom he imitates, with its rhyme-led inversions and archaic diction, might initially seem to distance the narrative from the horror of its subject, but there are advantages, too, which promote a more disturbing encounter for the reader. In particular, Dunbar takes the repetitive patterns of ballad-form to heighten narrative suspense, echo the rhythm of pursuit, and imply a relentless cycle of injustice.

The oak tree bough is the speaker in all but the first of the 16 verses and turns out to be a fine storyteller. From the victim’s wrongful arrest for “the old, old crime”, through his plea of innocence, abduction by the lynch mob and subsequent hanging, the essential incidents are compressed but made clear, and the dramatic impulse maintained. Particularly memorable, though, are those verses (three, 13 and 14) where the bough describes a direct physical encounter with the man’s mental and bodily agony.

That racial violence is perpetuated by the forces of supposed social good is hammered into place by the fierce irony of the last line of verse 11: “Oh, the judge, he wore a mask of black, / And the doctor one of white, / And the minister, with his oldest son, / Was curiously bedight.” “Bedight” means “adorned” or “equipped”. It suggests a hypocritical mixture of disguises, perhaps a combination of the minister’s clerical garb with the robes of the Ku Klux Klan.

Dunbar sees “the curse of a guiltless man” as a continuing force. The judge is tormented as he rides out to hunt, his own soul ridden by “another”, a demonic force, perhaps, taking the form of “a mortal fear”. The oak tree has no escape from the curse: “And ever the man he rides me hard, / And never a night stays he …” The curse blights not only the bough but the whole tree, and travels onwards, inculpating, it’s implied, a far vaster territory.

In his well-known poem We Wear the Mask, Dunbar writes about the bitter experience of concealment. By wearing the mask of the ballad-maker, he is freed to unlock grief and outrage, and expand the range of his poetic talent. The Haunted Oak is among the finest achievements of his too-brief career.