Thanks to Robert for this poem, which is somehow both creepy and beautiful at once.

I was interested in tmorin's comment about the lulling quality of the poem making the ending bearable for a young listener. Maybe that's exactly what incantation does for us, the spell of the driving, forward-moving song allowing us to look at something dreadful while protecting us from it at the same time.

Is Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz: a contemporary(ish) version of this? In that poem, a father's drunken roughhousing is sung by a boy now old enough to know his father was dangerous and untrustworthy. But the poem employs the tight rhymes and repetitions of the villanelle, which somehow allows the poem to be both scary and enchanting at the same time.