Justin Geoffrey

(ca. 1905-1926) A eccentric, notoriously Baudelairean poet [REH Door; HPL Doorstep (online text)]. His works include the following, though it is not clear if some of these titles refer to individual poems or to collections:

Geoffrey came of a boringly prosaic family, and there were no poets, musicians, or lunatics among his ancestors of the last five hundred years. His forebears were an old English family of country squires, who became impoverished and came to New York in 1690 to rebuild their fortunes. Justin himself showed no signs of strangeness until he was ten years old, when he slept outside a deserted house in Old Dutchtown. Thereafter, he was haunted by vivid and extraordinary dreams. He became solitary and prone to wandering at night. His family tried to discourage his new interest in poetry, but he was capable of violence if interrupted. He detested the courses in school and condemned their triviality and uselessness, caring nothing for sociology, economics, philosophy, science, or current events. He contended that mathematics, far from being the one solid source of facts in the universe, was actually the most unstable and unsure. But he did know much of ancient history, magic, and languages, and stubbornly used obsolete words and archaic phrases. He finished high school unwillingly and refused to attend university. Instead, he ran away from home. His poems were first published at age seventeen, through the help of a friend who found him suffering and starving in a garret in Greenwich Village. He was thin almost to emaciation, with a narrow-bridged nose and a face like a hawk’s. His eyes blazed with an inner passion and his tousled black hair fell over a pale, high, narrow forehead. [REH House (online text)]

Around 1921, Geoffrey traveled in Hungary. At the time, he was already queer-acting and mumbled to himself; a tavern-keeper said Geoffrey's actions and conversations were the strangest of any man he ever knew. After viewing the Black Stone (1) near Stregoicavar, he wrote his poem The People of the Monolith. His madness may have been intensified by the influence of the Black Stone. [REH Black]

Toward the last, his dreams merged terribly with his waking thoughts, and his dying shrieks and blasphemies shocked even the hardened keepers at the sanitarium. He died at age twenty-one [REH House], in 1926 [HPL Doorstep].

John O'Dare read Geoffrey's Towers in the Sky [REH Door].

Quotations

''Aristius slept no more for he had thrown open Doors not meant for human hands, and had felt dark winds blow cold on his fear-mad face from Outer Gulfs."
—Towers in the Sky [REH Door]

Behind the Veil, what gulfs of Time and Space?
    What blinking, mowing things to blast the sight?
I shrink before a vague, colossal Face
    Born in the mad immensities of Night.
—Unknown title [REH House. James Conrad believed this verse described the view from the House in Old Dutchtown.]

Drowsy and dull with age the houses blink,
On aimless streets that youthfulness forget—
But what time-grisly figures glide and slink
Down the old alleys when the moon has set?
—Unknown title [REH House; Arkham (online text). Possibly a description of Old Dutchtown or of Arkham.]

Strange-eyed Life strides on with mask and staff, etching his art against the sky like statues on Arcadian hills, and only in dreams do men see the face of Life without his mask.
—The Roads of Justin Geoffrey [REH Door].

They lumber through the night
With their elephantine tread;
I shudder in affright
As I cower in my bed.
They lift colossal wings
On the high gable roofs
Which tremble to the trample
Of their mastodonic hoofs.
—Out of the Old Land [REH Roof. Possibly a reference to the Toad.]

They say foul beings of Old Times still lurk
In dark forgotten corners of the world,
And Gates still gape to loose, on certain nights,
Shapes pent in Hell.
—Probably from The People of the Monolith [REH Black; also quoted in REH House, in Derleth's continuation of Howard's uncompleted fragment. Possibly a reference to the Toad.]

Tread not where stony deserts hold
     Lost secrets of an alien land,
And gaunt against the sunset’s gold
    Colossal nightmare towers stand.
—Unknown title [From the first draft of REH Children (online text), but omitted from the final draft; copied by Derleth into his continuation of the fragment REH House. See Robert E. Howard bibliography (poems A–H), Wikipedia, retrieved 06/24/2024.]
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