The Death of Rebecca

I’m currently working on a piece of English Lit coursework which the aim of is to compare a number of Gothic texts in whatever way we please. I must say it’s rather nice being able to pick the texts and the essay title for once! One of the novels that I decided to write my essay on is ‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier…and instead of writing the essay when i should have been, this poem about the moment we find out that Maxim murdered his late wife, was written. Hopefully you’ll all enjoy it despite how grim it all is, but what can you expect from a poem based on a Gothic novel? This poem is written with Maxim De Winter as the speaker.

The sea winds wailed around us as we stood inside the hut,

It called her to her final home, a place where she belonged.

‘fore the sun would come to rise her last moments were cut,

The act so grim, deserv├®d death, for a life time I had longed.

Rebecca’s form once beautiful began to fade to dust,

I spared her from a slower death that for her crime she should have had.

At least I know her corpse grew cold as ‘je reviens’ turned to rust,

Yet I needed not have murdered her, I needed not go mad.

The cancer ate away her flesh and revealed her deathly form,

So when the fateful bullet fired it tore through flesh and bone.

The succubus just laughed and grinned, and the lightning of the storm

Had pulled the face grotesquely to what daemons pull alone.

And so Rebecca in her death would still once more set sail,

to join a place where she belonged; the swirling depths of sea.

The horror of her soul would flee, each terrible detail,

Yet some scars run too deep to fade, like those she cast on me.