Two Crows Exploring Weird Tales Vol 5, No. 1

TWO CROWS: EXPLORING WEIRD TALES Vol. 5, No. 1â€"PART 17 This week my sequence of posts analyzing a single issue of Weird Tales from 1925 takes a little bit of a strange turnâ€"or does it? The next feature in the magazine, filling the remainder of the page that begins with the ending of “The Ocean Leech” by Frank Belknap Long, Jr. is a poem. But what’s this? A poemin a collection of posts dissecting pulp fiction? Well, sure, “Two Crows” is indeed a poem, and poetry was not at all an uncommon prevalence in the pulps, although from what I can inform they slowly ran out of style as the magazines progressed (or, some may argue, dissolved) into the Nineteen Fifties. And this being… …we must always expect a weird and unique poem. I’ll go forward and paste the complete poem right here. Two Crows Two crows flapped over dismally (So wearily, so drearily) To the blackened limb of a blasted tree; The shells flew screaming overhead, And the field was covered thick with lifelessâ€" The earth reeked with its dead. One crow lamented to hi s mate (So wearily, so drearily): “How long, how lengthy must we now wait For the taste of meals that was so good Before the shrapnel shattered the wood And loaded the ground with useless? “The odor sweet of dying males” (Lamented he so drearily), “How surprisingly pleasant was it when I sensed it first with ravished breath! But I am sated, and sick to dying, And would fain lie yon with the useless.” A shell got here moaning by way of the air (So drearily, so eerily) And burst the place the crows have been plaining there; It shivered the wreck of the blasted tree, And bits of crow fell bloodily Among the tangled useless. Quite a maudlin little piece there, made more poignant when you do the maths between the tip of World War I and the publication of this magazine. It’s easy to imagine that greater than one of the authors revealed therein have been veterans of that terrible struggle, and here we've a forlorn story of battle fatigue and the suicidal despair so often a part of post traumatic stress disorder. Francis Hard was truly Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Talesfrom , together with the problem at hand. And certainly, according to the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Mr. Wright “was drafted into the US Army in 1917 and served within the infantry in WWI.” This goes to indicate that although we’ve seen some fairly foolish stuff right here, and have had some fun with outmoded concepts and retro culture and language, there’s much more to be heard in these yellowed old pages, and lots nonetheless to be learned. â€"Philip Athans Finding the Personal in the Procedural Take a deep dive into “show vs. inform” by concentrating on your level-of-view character’s emotional experience of each scene on this online tutorial from Writer’s Digest. About Philip Athans