Ballads for the Times (Now first collected,) Geraldine, A Modern Pyramid, Bartenus, A Thousand Lines, and other poems. By Martin F. Tupper. A new Edition, enlarged and revised |
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The Song of an Alpine Elf.
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 | Ballads for the Times |  |
The Song of an Alpine Elf.
Ha! ha! ha!—My coy JungfraIs tall and robed in snow,—
Yet at a leap to the topmost steep
I bound from the glen below;
On her dizziest peak I sit and shriek
To the winds that around me blow,
And heard from afar is my ha! ha! ha!
The wild laugh echoes so.
In the forests dun round Lauterbrunn
That line each dark ravine,
I hide me away from the garish day
Till the howling winter's e'en;
Then I jump on high through the coal-black sky,
And light on some cliff of snow
That nods to its fall like a tottering wall,
And I rock it to and fro!
My summer home is the cataract's foam
As it floats in a frothing heap,
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Or deep with the mole I sleep;
Or I ride for a freak on the lightning-streak,
Or climb till I reach in the clouds
The terrible form of the Thunder-storm,
Wrapp'd in his sable shrouds!
Often I launch the huge avalanche,
And make it my milk-white sledge,
When unappall'd to the Grindlewald
I slide from the Shrikehorn's edge;
Silent and soft to the ibex oft
I have stolen, and hurried him o'er
The precipice to the bristling ice
That smokes with his scarlet gore:
But my greatest joy is to lure and decoy
To the snow-drift's slippery brink
The hunter bold, when he's weary and cold,
And there let him suddenly sink,—
A thousand feet—dead! he dropp'd like lead,
Ha, he couldn't leap like me;
With broken back, as a felon on rack,
He hangs in a split pine-tree!
And there mid his bones, that echoed with groans,
I make me a nest of his hair;
The ribs dry and white rattle loud as in spite
When I rock in my cradle there:
Hurrah, hurrah, and ha, ha, ha!
I'm in a madman's mood,
For I'm all alone in my palace of bone
That's tapestried fair with the old man's hair
And dappled with clots of blood;
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The storm shouts high to the coalblack sky,
And the icicle sleet falls thick and fleet,
And all that I hear on the mountains drear,
And all I behold on the valleys cold,
Is Death in Solitude!
| Ballads for the Times | |