The Shadowy and the Sensory

From the valley of the shadow in Psalm 23 to the “millions of strange shadows” in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 53, from Peter Pan to the long-running radio show The Shadow, shadows have suggested metaphors for the sinister and uncanny. For the poet and critic John Hollander, “their very insubstantiality has allowed shadows to be seen … as emanations of something internal to us.” Yet, as they lengthen at the end of the day, they assert themselves like independent beings. Always attached to us, they are always out of reach.

In Erica McAlpine’s “The Hour of Long Shadows,” a mother asks her daughter, “See the shape / following you? You cannot escape / it.” But the child finds that she cannot catch hold of it, either. When she tries “to run at it,” the shadow runs faster, remaining “always two / paces ahead.” As the mother rushes to console her daughter, her shadow and the child’s merge in a dark shape growing longer and larger. The mother has intended no harm—just the opposite—but she doesn’t have to be an “evildoer” in order to overwhelm and frighten a little girl.