The poems of Madison Cawein | ||
89
IN THE OWL-LIGHT
I
Uplifted darkness and the owl-light breaks,Scuds the wild land, pursuing patch with patch,
As when deep daisy fields a swift wind shakes.—
How clumsily I raised the crazy latch! . . .
So.—When yon black cloud, light-absorbing, rakes
Again the moon's bald disk—
Out! and the storm will snatch
Again my hair, made lank with wind and rain
Two hours since . . . There! from the ragged plain
A great cloud-besom sweeps the beams again!—
Out! out! . . . No fear of risk? . . .
II
First, past the fellside, where the bramble-hollowWhines, wolf-like, with the wind; gaunt wind, that grieves
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Worry and mutter, shriveled as the lips
Of bent hags kissing. Then—the slope that whips
The face with brush; and where a gnarled vine slips,
Snake-like, from off a rock, that seems to wallow,—
One mass of briers,—a humpbacked hulk of hair,
A gorgon head of writhings, huge, that heaves,
When, heaped abruptly on it, flare!
Burst rain and tempest-glare.—
This passed, I follow
A thorny slip of path until
I reach the storm-scarred summit of the hill.
III
Let me not think of it!—as I go thence,—That thought I can not kill!
Ungovernable! that dogs my footsteps still,
Like something real and living; which my will
Is powerless against.—Ah! when that fence,
Dividing the dark ridges of the hill,
Is passed, shall I not then be breathless? ill
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Of ghastly things to come?—Some sterner strength
Sustain my soul!—Beyond the hill the dense
Dead wood's to pass, and then . . . that livid length
Of mooning water, spectral and immense
With sullen storm and night. . . .
There, if the ghoulish wind,—
That knows well as I know how I have sinned,—
Will cease to curse me in its hag-like spite,
Alone with all the horror of my soul,
I shall behold,
Now this way, and now that way rolled,
Lifeless, among cramped reeds, the storm has thinned,—
With wide, white eyes, metallic in the light
Of the impassive moon:—in gusty roll
Of washing ripples, webby, slippery locks
Dabbling and dark; and,—wedged between sharp rocks,—
Two rocks, two iron fangs,
Whereon the lake's mad lip, pale-foaming clangs,—
Wild-pinched and water-strangled white,
His murdered face! that mocks.
The poems of Madison Cawein | ||