University of Virginia Library

Upon a day of wind and heavy rain
A crowd was huddling in the porch at school:
As I came up I heard a voice cry out,
“Ho, ho! here comes the lad that talks with ghosts
Sitting upon the graves.” They laughed and jeered,
And gathered round me in a mocking ring,
And hurt me with their faces and their eyes.
With bitter words I smote them in my hate,
As with a weapon. A sudden blow, and wrath
Sprang upward like a flame. I struck, and blood,
Brighter than rubies, gleamed upon my hand;
And at the beauteous sight, from head to heel
A tiger's joy ran tingling through my veins,
And every finger hungered for a throat.
I burst the broken ring, and darted off
With my blood boiling, and my pulses mad.
I did not feel the rain upon my face;
With burning mouth I drank the cooling wind;—
And then, as if my limbs were touched by death,
A shudder shook me, all the rage that sprang
Like sudden fire in a deserted house
Making the windows fierce, had passed away;
And the cold rain beat heavy on me now;
The winds went through me.

At the dead of night,
Fever beset me with a troop of fiends;
They hid in every crevice of the house
And called me with the voices of my mates,
And mocked me when I came. They made me blind,
And led me out to stumble among pits,
And smote me in my blackness. Oft they hung
Me o'er the edges of the dizzy steeps,
And laughed to see me swinging in the wind;
And then a blast would whirl me like a leaf,
From my frail hold out to the peopled air,
Where dark hands plucked at me and dragged me down.
I lay in darkness 'neath a weight of chains,—
A burst of day, and lo! a mighty sea
Of upturned faces murmured, heaved, and swayed
Around to see me die. Methought I fled
Along the road of death. Methought I heard
My mother calling from the life I left,
“Come back, come back, come back unto my love!”
“Whistle the 'scaped bird from the summer woods
Back to the spoiler's hand,” I thought, and laughed,
And every cry grew fainter as I ran.
I paused upon a drear bewildered road,
Lined with dark trees, or ghosts, which only seemed
A darker gloom in gloom, and, far away,
A glare went up as of a sunken fire.
“This is the land of death, and that is hell,”
I cried, as I went on toward the glare.
I climbed a bank of gloom, and there I saw
A burning sea upon a burning shore,
A lone man sitting black against the light,
His long black shadow stretching o'er the sands,
Long as earth's sunset shades. Then all at once,
Like landscapes in the red heart of a fire,
The vision crumbled, and methought I stood
Beside an ancient and unused canal,
Choked with great stems and monstrous leaves, and filled
With olive-coloured water thick as oil.
All here and there 'twas patched and skinned with green,
The cream of idle years. Upon the green,
There blushed and glowed a dewy crimson rose,—
Some hand had thrown it scarce an hour ago.
I hurried on, that I might overtake
Whoe'er had passed that way. I stood in fear—
As a stream flows for ever past a tree,
A line of sable shapes came winding by
With downcast eyes and cloaked from head to foot.
Methought I stood for weeks, and months, and years,
And still the shapes came past. My horror grew
Until I burst the silence with a cry;
Then, as a trail of smoke is torn by winds,
The long line wavered, broke, and disappeared.