Robert Ervin Howard’s “Song at Midnight” opens with a speaker listening in fog and rain as an old gibbet creaks on a bare hill. The scene is deliberately Gothic, but the poem quickly moves from description to a strange debate among death’s creatures. The gibbet sings of its lost victims, a raven remembers vanished feasts, and from the ground a slow-worm gives the final, unanswerable speech. The central idea is transience: every human structure of punishment, and every human body that once hung from it, is ultimately swallowed by the same slow processes of decay.
The form feels like a gruesome ballad. Couplets drive the lines forward—hill/chill, me/tree, maid/parade, rust/crust—while the phrase “gallows tree” recurs like a refrain, keeping each voice tethered to the same rotting object. The rhythm is not mechanically regular; it swells and falls with an incantatory lilt, closer to a song overheard than to a formal stanza. The opening four lines establish the weather and the noise: the gibbet is not merely seen but heard, “creaking a song in the midnight chill,” and its “grisly refrain” moans through fog and rain. The verb “crowned” matters too: the gibbet is a ruined king on a bare hill, its authority literal but already decaying. From there the poem becomes a sequence of voices. The gibbet itself speaks first, and its question is chilly with nostalgia: “Oh, where are the men who came to me / And danced all night on the gallows tree?” That word “danced” turns execution into a dark social ritual, and the list “gallant and peasant, man and maid” stresses death’s refusal of rank.
Imagery of decay performs the poem’s argument. The gibbet complains that its chains are “broken and red with rust” and its wood “sealed with the moldy crust.” It is less a machine of justice than a neglected monument, asking whether men have forgotten their “debt” to it. The raven answers only with hunger: it remembers “feasts” on the gibbet tree, not justice. Then the slow-worm under the gallows foot reframes the whole scene. Death, it says, is “spoils for a crow to loot,” but the final consumer is the worm. The hanging bodies become “the fruit of the gallows”; the word “fruit” is deeply unsettling, turning human remains into harvest. The worm’s boast is both grisly and philosophical: “Here I have gnawed on this marrow good, / Where now I gnaw on this crumbling wood.” Men and their works are exactly the same to the earth—food.
What makes the poem significant is its inversion of power. The gallows is an emblem of law, punishment, and public terror, yet here it speaks as a has-been, abandoned by the men who once gave it bodies. The raven and kites had their turn; the slow-worm has the last word. The “long parade” of the hanged and the instrument that killed them end in the same place, reduced to bones, noose, and worm-eaten wood. Howard builds a miniature danse macabre, but the final dancer is the lowest form of life. The shivering human listener at the opening says nothing after that; the poem leaves human judgment outside the frame. It is a song about the end of songs, a midnight lesson that neither the scaffold nor its victims outlast the appetite of the worm.