“Messenger, The“

   Poem (sonnet); written at 3:07 A.M., November 30, 1929. First published in the Providence Journal (December 3, 1929), in B.K.Hart’s column “The Sideshow”; rpt. WT(July 1938).

   Hart had read “The Call of Cthulhu” and expressed mock outrage at the fact that HPL had set the tale in part in a boarding-house at 7 Thomas Street in Providence, where Hart himself had once lived. He threatened (in a “Sideshow” column of November 30, 1929) to send a “large and abiding ghost” to HPL’s residence at 3 A.M. HPL accordingly wrote the poem shortly after the designated time of the ghost’s arrival. Winfield Townley Scott (“A Parenthesis on Lovecraft as Poet” [1945]; rpt. FDOC) believed the poem to be “perhaps as wholly satisfactory as any poem [HPL] ever wrote.”

   See Donald R.Burleson, “On Lovecraft’s ‘The Messenger,’” CryptNo. 57 (St. John’s Eve 1988): 15–18.