I’ve written before about the Vampire Literary Canon—some of the most popular works that cemented the vampire’s place as literature’s favorite monster. But before vampires worked their way into novels (like Bram Stoker’s Dracula), novellas (like J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla), or even short stories (like Polidori’s “The Vampyre”), many of the earliest appearances of these creatures in Western literature occurred in poetry. Below are a few of my favorite examples of early vampire poems:
- “Der Vampyr” by Heinrich August Ossenfelder (1748)
Originally written in German by the poet Heinrich Ossenfelder, “Der Vampyr” is generally considered to be the first well-known poem to take as its subject the vampire, though it does so metaphorically. The speaker of the poem is a man frustrated by the rebuffs of the woman he is courting, and he imagines himself as a vampire sneaking into her room at night to kiss her and drain her life’s blood away. Vampirism as a metaphor for rape and male violation of female innocence would continue to be a major theme throughout vampire literature for centuries to come.
You can read the poem online here.
- “The Bride of Corinth” by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1797)
Only a few decades later, another German poet tackled the topic. Several years before publishing his famous tragic play Faust, Goethe published a poem in German “Die Braut von Korinth” (“The Bride of Corinth”), giving us possibly the first female vampire in literature. The poem follows a Greek youth who travels to the city of Corinth to meet with his betrothed, only to find that her family has converted to Christianity while he remains a pagan. Still, his betrothed comes to him at night, and they feast together, pledge their love, and exchange tokens. When morning approaches, she reveals that she has risen from the grave to claim her bridegroom and drink “the life-blood from his heart.” The poem ends with her request that they be burned together on the same pyre so that their souls can return to “the ancient gods.” Vampirism is often set up in opposition to Christianity, and early folk beliefs held that those who were ex-communicated or committed the sin of suicide were in danger of becoming such night-stalking creatures. But in this poem, rather than mourning her state of damnation under Christianity, the bride is defiant and full of righteous passion for her old religion.
You can read the full text of the poem here.
- “Christabel” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1797, 1800)
This one you’ve probably heard of—“Christabel” is one of the best-known poems by British Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poem was published in two parts, with more intended, but Coleridge never finished it. The narrative follows a noblewoman named Christabel who, while out for a midnight walk, comes across a mysterious woman named Geraldine. As she brings Geraldine home with her, strange occurrences suggest that she is not quite human—the dog whines as she passes, flames behave unnaturally in her presence, she is pained and weakened by iron, and she seems able to see and talk to ghosts. Then Christabel and Geraldine undress and lie down together to sleep, in a suggestive passage. Though the poem never mentions vampirism explicitly, it hints heavily that Geraldine is a supernatural being of some sort and the literary world has come to regard her as the prototypical lesbian vampire that would foreshadow such later characters as Carmilla.
You can read the poem for yourself here.
- “The Vampyre” by John Stagg (1812)
But, of course, undertones of homosexuality aren’t just for female vampires! “The Vampyre” by minor British poet John Stagg is considered to be the first stand-alone poem about a vampire (as opposed to brief episodes in longer narrative poems like in Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer) written in English. The poem is framed mainly as a dialogue between Herbert and his wife Gertrude, in which Herbert explains that he is being haunted by the specter of his dear deceased friend Sigismund, who comes to him at night and drinks his blood. At the moment of Herbert’s death, Gertrude sees this specter of Sigismund for herself. The next morning, the townspeople lay Herbert’s body on top of Sigismund’s in his tomb, and drive one stake through them both—uniting them in death and hopefully ending the cycle of vampire and victim. Though the poem is in English, the German names of the characters pay homage to the tradition of vampire poetry that was already building up in German literature.
You can find the text of Stagg’s vampire poem here.
What do you think of these poems? Do you have any other vampire poems to recommend? Share your thoughts in the comments!