Once long ago, I found myself sitting on a park bench in the gathering twilight. I happened to be dreaming but was far too agitated to realize this. I’ve always been a high-strung person, even in my sleep. I suffer from sleep paralysis and am frequently visited by the terrifying apparitions that contemporaries call “the shadow people,” but which I believe the ancients tended to refer to as succubi or incubi. In Old English these entities are called the nightmæres, malignant spirits that oppress one’s sleep.
However, the dream that I was having on the night in question was mercifully just an anxiety dream. I was scheduled to meet someone somewhere. I was nervous because either they were running late or I was in the wrong place. Everything was misty and the air was humid, thick, and hot. Spanish moss dangled from the branches of the trees that rose from the black water around me. I heard a full-throated chorus of frogs (“brekekekex koax koax”); and there was the sound of a train chuffing and whistling mournfully in the distance.
To my left was a wrought-iron lamp post. A butterfly flame flickered in its translucent globe. To my right, at the other end of the bench, was a thin old man in a seersucker suit with a fat carnation in his lapel. He wore a straw boater at a jaunty angle.
“Well…” he said in a Dixie drawl.—This pissed me off because I knew he was going to engage me in conversation, and I didn’t have so much as a newspaper to snap open and interpose between us.
Then he spoke in that slack-jawed, folksy, “Honest Abe”, “frost on the pumpkin” kinda way that sets my teeth on edge. “Looks like the marshlights is gettin’ cleverer and cleverer these days,” he said and pointed up at the lamp.
When I looked up, the globe was illuminated by what had suddenly become a single electric bulb. A dull tangerine glow clung to the tungsten filaments.
“It’s not a marshlight,” I said. “We’re in a swamp. A marsh is a sunken grassland; a swamp is a sunken forest.” I’m apparently a pedantic bitch, even in my sleep.
“Well,” he said, rising. “That won’t matter none, when the marshlights takes you off to where you don’t expect to go to now, will it?”
I woke up in a rage and tried to force myself back to sleep, so that I could object to the ungrammatical torrent of words that had come out of the old fart’s gibbering pale lips. But as I regained consciousness, I felt sudden relief. I was no longer anxious! The marshlights had indeed led me off to someplace I didn’t expect to go to—an untroubled state of wakefulness.
I decided to file away in my mind (for future use) the image in the dream of a lamp post in the…swamp?
I was going to use that as the title: Lamp Post in the Swamp. I ran it by a friend who advised against it: “It sounds like you’re claiming to be a shining beacon in a swamp of bad writing?”
“You’re right,” I said. “How about ‘Lamp Post in the Marsh’?”
“Better!” he said.
And so it was, and so it became.
Year: 1997. Place: New Haven, Connecticut. The Internet was still in its pioneering days. I had the incredibly unoriginal idea of creating an online fantasy-horror magazine. It would be called “Swamp Light.” It never materialized. I was too busy pursuing my graduate studies in medieval science and mathematics. (Don’t ask.)
After joining Substack, I discovered that the name “Swamp Light”—and apparently every metaphorical variation of the concept—was taken. Interestingly (howbeit oddly), I’d originally hit upon the idea of using “swamp light” as a title within the context of reading through Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. I still have the edition I owned at that time (Chandos Classics, Frederick Warne & Company: London, circa 1890) and there’s still a little ink tick that I made when I found the passage. In the chapter on Dryden, Johnson ridicules one of the poets more extravagant and hilariously silly images:
Then, gently as a happy lover's sigh, Like wandering meteors through the air we'll fly.
“The Great Cham” remarks laconically: “That is, they shall mount above like falling stars, or else they shall skip like two Jacks with lanthorns, or Will with a wisp, and Madge with a candle.”
Before the term was appropriated as a Halloween decoration, a “Jack” (i.e. an average “Joe”) “of the lantern” was a male spectre who waved a lantern in the distance to lure the unwary to their doom—whether in a swamp, a marsh, or a peat bog. If you want to read a ghost story that effectively captures the creepiness of this image, check out “The Signal-Man” by Charles Dickens.
I’ve never been able to figure out whether “Madge with a candle” was an invention of Johnson’s or was as common an expression in 18th century England as jack-o’-lantern, will-o’-the-wisp, or ignis fatuus. I’m assuming that, in the passage above, it’s intended as a female version of the jack-o’-lantern; only with a candle instead of a lanthorn. (If anyone can point me to a resource that would clear up this mystery, I’d be grateful.)
As for the spelling, “Lamp Post” (two words) instead of “Lamppost” (one), this was a personal preference. I don’t like the inelegant gemination of the letter P. I should be used to it, since I’m part Moravian and German speakers are adept at squishing, not only consonants, but oodles and oodles of nouns together to form a single word (“Schifffahrtsgesellschaft” still makes me wince). “Lamppost in the Marsh” looked weird to me. I could also have spelled it with one P; “lampost,” but that, too, made me grimace. Whenever I see it in writing, I read it as a “lamp” situated on the “ost” or “east” side of something.
I thought at first that—in lieu of explaining why I chose the name I did for this Substack publication—I could write a short fable as a preview of the kinds of stories I hoped to share with you here on Substack; and I could write it in the vein I use when spinning fairy tales. But I decided not to do that. Then I thought, why not write a brief two- or three-paragraph essay explaining how I came up with the publication’s name? But I didn’t like that idea either.
In the end, I opted to banish the phrase “Lamp Post in the Marsh” to the masthead and leave it up to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions as to what the phrase meant and whether any of the stories that I post here bear any resemblance to the allegorical ghost lights and ignes fatui of myth and legend.
Where Does the Name “Lamp Post in the Marsh” Come From?
"Madge 'n' candle" is the female equivalent of "Jack 'o Lantern." The phrase was first mentioned in a pamphlet by poet Tom Brown in 1688. (Brown, Thomas. "The Reasons of Mr. Bayes' changing his Religion." London: S.T., 1688.)
And off we go...decided to back up and see what lies in the depths of your archive.