The Vampyre (Strigoiul) by Vasile Alecsandri
I have been making an effort to read more – I have found it hard to motivate myself to do much of anything active, even reading – and decided to pick up one of my Christmas gifts which was a collection of vampire classics given to me by my parents in law. It contains gothic vampire tales, a number of which I hadn’t read before. This was quite a treat, as I studied the field for a few assignments during my MA.
Amongst the many short stories, was one poem: The Vampyre, by Vasile Alecsandri, which can be found here if you'd like to read it: https://abrahamstoker.blogspot.com/2014/05/vasile-alecsandri-vampire.html - it is a quick read.
I am not an expert on poetry, despite my own amateurish scribbles, but I do enjoy a gothic story, and that is what I found here.
Alecsandri was writing in the late 1800s and had this particular poem published in the English Illustrated Magazine in 1886. It has been suggested that Bram Stoker would have likely read this poem as his own sister (Matilda), also a writer, had her work published in the same issue.
The Vampyre is a narrative poem, written using a sexain* structure with iambic tetrametre, the narrative along with the language used are very much of the time – gothic in theme and style. The structure is broken into three acts, containing four stanzas each. In the first act, the scene is set in a tremendously gothic use of language, pathetic fallacy oozing from each couplet.
... Dost thou see a ruined cross Weatherstained, o'ergrown by moss, Gloomy, desolate, forsaken, By unnumbered tempests shaken? (Stanza 1)
It continues on this vane, elaborating on the description with detail about no grass growing, no birds singing, no people lingering. The final stanza in this act introduces the potential ‘Vampyre’ of the title in the form of a phantom, or spectre, and then ‘a Vampyre’s corpse’!
The second act changes in tone, moving to view a young couple in a tryst. It is initially almost warm,
‘Love’s fond story often told
floats in whispers through the air.’ (Stanza 5)
But the mood soon switches when they are disturbed by ‘Restless, pale, a shape I see’ which is identified as a horse. Oddly, the young man soon mounts and rides away, leaving his young lover alone in the night in fear of her gentleman’s life if he should confront the dread Vampyre.
In the third act, the young man is seen speeding along on his steed; a white blur in the night. The suspense is built again with the horse and rider described as a ‘wild storm-fiend’ who are then attacked by some unseen force. At this point, they keep their feet (and the rider his saddle) and continue towards the ‘ruined cross’, whilst near the river ’A thousand flutt’ring flamelets glide’. At this point, I began to question what story was being told; the flamelets along the river conjure images of the pitchfork wielding mob descending on Mary Shelley’s Creature – a victim of circumstance indeed. This image is furthered by the closing couplet in which the horse and rider fall to their deaths down the cliff.
At last, in the final stanza of the act, with a great cacophony of cries and shouts, the Vampyre rises from his grave.
There seem to be a few interpretations here: in the first thought, the young man is an innocent victim, riding through the night and being mistaken for a legendary vampire only to be chased to his doom, but that raises the question of why he then rises as a vampire (if it is him, and not a vampire conveniently hanging around). A second possibility is that the young man is in fact the vampire all along, that he was attacking the maiden and is chased from her by the mob – falling to his ‘death’ to rise again.
The ending is such that it remains to be seen what happens to the vampire does once he rises from the grave, in a way the poem feels like a vampire origin story as the creature isn’t told to have done anything classically vampiric throughout the tale. He is named a vampire but does not kill anyone or do anything other than (apparently) rise from a grave.
This reminded me of ‘The Outsider’ (Lovecraft, 1926) which tells the tale of a being who lives confined to a tower. The lonely storyteller decides to venture out one day and find others; when he arrives at a warm and welcoming building bustling with people, his arrival is greeted with screams of terror and it is revealed that the narrator is not a trapped and innocent human, but a monstrous creature. Despite his appearance, The Outsider does nothing to deserve such mistreatment and it Is a sad ending that has the poor creature returning to his life of dark isolation in the bowels of the ruined tower from whence he came. A definite lesson on judging on appearances which is perhaps seen in this poem – though maybe the poem is more mistaken identity than judgement – they both remain tragic in their ending and leave you feeling perhaps some sympathy for the ‘monster’ depicted.
Unless of course it is a different interpretation entirely – the vampire exists truly, luring the young man away from his tryst to kill him then return and take the maiden as well. This is pure conjecture of course, as it isn’t even hinted at in the final act.
Whether or not Stoker or Lovecraft read the work of Alecsandri, there are clearly parallels to be drawn with use of desolate, dark settings for mysterious and terrifying deeds; gallant young men attempting to protect shy maidens; and, potentially dangerous yet unseen monsters.
*Sources I read disagreed on the definition of sexain and sestet, with one arguing that a sestet is any six-line stanza, and the other suggesting that it is only a sestet in the final stanza and all others would be called sexain, so that is what I have used here.