The poems of Madison Cawein

Without a moon when night comes on
There is a sighing in its trees
As of sad lips that no one sees;
And the far-dwindling forest, large
Beyond fenced fields, seems shadowy drawn
Into its shadows. Faint and wan,
By the wistariaed portico
Stealing, I go
Through gardens where the weeds are rank:
Where, here and there, in clump and bank,
Spiræas rise, whose dotted blooms
Seem clustered starlight; and the four
Syringas sweet heap, powdered o'er,
Thin flower-beakers of perfumes;
And the dead flowering-almond tree,
That once was pink as her young cheek,
Now withered leans within the glooms.—
Why must I walk here? seek and seek
Her, long since gone?—Still bower on bower
The roses climb in blushing flower.—

Ah, 'mid the roses could I see
Her eyes, her sad eyes, shine like flowers,
Or like the dew that lies for hours
Within their hearts, then it might be
I might find comfort here, although
Wistful, as if reproaching me,
Her sad eyes look, saying what none may know.

II

When midnight comes it brings a moon:
A scent is strewn
Of honey and wild-thorns broadcast
Beneath the stars. When I have passed
Under dark cedars, solemn pines,
Through dodder-drowned petunias,
Corn-flower and the columbine,
To where azaleas, choked with grass,
And peonies, like great wisps, shine,
I reach banked honeysuckle vines,
Piled deep and trammeled with the gourd
And morning-glory—one wild hoard
Of rich aroma—where the seat,
The rustic bench, where oft we sat,—
Now warped and old with rain and heat,—
Still stands upon its mossy mat:

And here I rest; and then—a word
I seem to hear;
A soft word whispered in my ear;
Her voice it seems; no thing is near;
I look around:—I have but heard
The plaintive note of some lost bird
Trickle through night,—awakened where,
'Neath its thick lair of twisted twigs,
The jarring and incessant grigs
Hum:—dream-drugged so, the haunted air
Makes all my soul as heavy as
Dew-poppied grass.

III

Once when the moon rose, fair and full,—
Like some sea-seen Hesperian pool,
A splash of gold through tangling trees,—
Or like the Island beautiful
Of Avalon in haunted seas,—
There came a sighing in the trees
As of sad lips; there was no breeze,
And yet sad sighings shook the trees.
And when, all in a mystic space,
Her orb swam, amiable white,
Right in that shattered casement, by
The broken porch the creepers lace,

Born of a moonbeam and a sigh,
I saw her face,
Pale through a mist of tears; so slight,
So immaterial, ah me!
In pensiveness, and vanished grace,
'Twas like an olden melody.

IV

I know long-angled on its floors,
Where windows face the anxious east,
The moonshine pours
White squares of glitter and, at least,
Gives glimmer to its whispering halls:
Its corridors,
Sleep-tapestried, are guled with bars
Of moonlight: by its wasted walls
Crouch shadows: and,—where streaked dusts lay
Their undisturbed, deep gray
Upon its stairs,—dim, vision-footed, glide
Faint gossamer gleams, like visible sighs,
As to and fro, athwart the skies,—
Wind-swung against the moon outside,—
The twisted branches sway
Of one great tree; I stand below,
And listen now,

Hearing a murmur come and go
Through its gnarled boughs; remembering how
Shady this chestnut made her room,
And sweet, in June, with plumes of bloom;
And how the broad and gusty flues
Of the old house sang when the rain let loose
Its winds, and each flue seemed a hoarse,
Sonorous throat, filled with the storm's wild boom,
And growled carousal; goblin tunes
The hylas pipe to rainy moons
Of March; or, in the afternoons
Of summer, singing in their course,—
Where blossoms drip,—all wet of back,—
The crickets drone in avenues
Of locusts leading to the gate.
And in the dark here where I wait
Meseems I hear the silence creep
And crepitate
From hall to hall; as one in sleep
I hear, yet hear not; feel that there
Her soul walks, waking on each stair
Strange echoes; and the stealthy crack
Of old and warping floors: I seem
To follow her; and in a dream
To see, yet see not; in the black

That drapes each room, my mind informs
With shapes, that hide behind each door
And fling from closets phantom arms.

V

I see her face, as once before,
Bewildered with its terror, pressed
To the dark, polished floor; distressed,
Clasped in her blind and covering hands;
So desolate with anguish, wrenched
With wild remorse, no man could see,
Could see and turn away like me,
No man that sees and understands
Love and its mortal agony.
Again, like some automaton,
Part of that ghostly tragedy,
Myself I see, the fool who fled,
Who sneered and fled. And then again
Came stealing back. Again, with blenched
And bending face I stand, and clenched
And icy hands, and staring eyes,
Looking upon her face, as wan
As water; eyes all wide with pain;
Cramped to dilation, packed with loss:
Again I seem to lean across
The years, and hear my heart's deep groan

Above the young gold of her head,
Above that huddled heap alone,—
Her, white and dead.

VI

Yes, there is moan
Of lamentation and hushed screams
In all its crannies; and sad shades
Haunt all its rooms, the moonlight braids,
With melancholy. Slow have flown
The weary years: and I have known
An anguish and remorse far worse
Than usual life's; and live, it seems,
Because to live is but a curse. . . .

VII

There she lies buried; there! that ground
Gated with rusty iron, where
She and her stanch forefathers sleep;
So old, the turf scarce shows a mound;
So gray, you scarce distinguish there
A headstone where the ivies creep
And myrtles bloom. A wall of stone
Squares it around; a place for dreams;
A mossy spot of sorrow;—lone,
Nay, lonelier, wilder now it seems,

Though just the same: its roses waste
Their petals there as oft of yore;
Their placid petals, as before;
Pale, pensive petals: yonder some
Lie faint as puffs of foam
Within the moonlight, dimly traced
Beneath the boughs; some few are strown
On the usurping weeds, great grown
Around her tomb, on which two dead leaves lie. . . .
Here let my sick heart break and die
Amid their wiltings, on her grave,
Here in her dim, old burying-ground
The druid cedars guard around
And roses and wild thorns. Alone
She shall not lie! Ah, let me moan
My life out here where rose-leaves fall,
And rest by her who was my all!

THE ELIXIR OF LOVE

He held it possible that he
Who idolizes one that's dead,
With that strange liquid instantly
Might raise them, living red:
And so he thought, “'Tis mine at last
To live and love the love that's past;
The joy without the grief and pain.
The dead shall live and love again.”

For he had loved one till for him
Her face had grown his spirit-part:
Though dead, she seemed to him less dim
Than men in street and mart.
He labored on; for, truth to say,
In toil alone his pleasure lay,
His art, through which, sometime, he thought,
Back to his arms she would be brought.

He kept such trysts as phantoms keep,
Pale distances about his soul;
And moved like one who walks asleep,
Attaining no sure goal:

Yet blither than a younger heart
At crucible and glass retort
He labored; for his love was prism
To irisate toil's egoism.

He drained wan draughts from out a cup,
A globe of vague and flaming gold,
Held from the darkness, brimming up,
By something white and cold,
That wreathed faint fingers round its brim,
Slim flakes of foam; and, soft and dim,
Stooped out of fiery-bound abysses
To print his brow with icy kisses.

At last within his trembling hand
An ancient flask burnt, starry rose;
A liquid flame of ruby fanned,
Heart-like, with crimson throes:
And in the liquid, like a flower,
A starlike face bloomed for an hour,
Then slowly faded to a skull
With eyes that mocked the beautiful.

'Though all his life had been so strange,
Yet stranger now it seemed to be;—
What was it led him forth to range
'Mid graves and mystery?

What led him to that one, dim tomb,
Where he could read within the gloom
The name of one who lay within
With all of silence, naught of sin?

Untainted, so it seemed, and made
By death's cold kisses still more fair,
He found her; raised her; softly laid
Her raven depths of hair
Upon his shoulder: and the pearls,
Around her neck and in her curls,
Less pale were than the kingly calm
Upon his face that showed no qualm.

And through the night, beneath the moon,
Across the windy hill, the gloom
Of forests where the leaves lay strewn,
He brought her to his room:
And in the awfulness of death,
That filled her wide eyes with its breath,
He set her in a carven chair
Where the still moon could kiss her hair.

One moment then he paused to think:
Then to her lips, all drawn and dead,
His strange elixir pressed and—“Drink!
Drink life and love!” he said.

And it—it drank; the dead drank slow:
And in its eyes there came a glow:
Yet still as stone its body sate,
With eyes of hell and lips of hate.

Still as fall-frozen ice its face,
And thin its voice as drizzled rain,
When in its rotting silk and lace
It rose and lived again:
Its bosom moved not while it spake;
Nor moved its lips; and half awake
Its eyes seemed with enchanted sleep
A century long in night's old keep.

And, stooping o'er, it whispered low—
A sound like a vibrating wire,
Or like the hiss of falling snow
In flutterings faint of fire:—
“In me, behold, you see your toil!
In me your love! A thing to coil
Around your life thus!—Make entire!—
The demon of your dead desire!”

And where, before, was quietness,
Was violence of hate and evil—
Yet all its form seemed passionless,
A corpse that held a devil! . . .

But who shall say the hands were its
That made within his throat these pits?—
They found him dead; and by him, one
Who clasped him close, a skeleton.

GLORAMONE

The moonbeams on the hollies glow
Pale where she left me; and the snow
Lies bleak in moonshine on the graves,
Ribbed with each gust that shakes and waves
Ancestral cedars by her tomb. . . .

She lay so beautiful in death,
My Gloramone,—whose loveliness
Death had not dimmed with all its doom,—
That, urged by my divine distress,
I sought her sepulchre: the gloom,
The iciness that takes the breath,
The sense of fear, were not too strong
To keep me from beholding long.

I stole into its sorrow; burst,
With what I know was hand accursed,
Its seal, the gated silence of
Her old armorial tomb: but love
Had sighed sweet romance to my heart;
And here, I thought, another part

Our souls would play. I did not start
When indistinctness of pale lips
Breathed on my hair; faint finger-tips
Fluttered their starlight on my brow;
When on my eyes, I knew not whence,
Vague kisses fell: then, like a vow,
Within my heart, an aching sense
Of vampire winning. And I heard
Her name slow-syllabled—a word
Of haunting harmony—and then
Low-whispered, “Thou! at last, 'tis thou!”
And sighs of shadowy lips again.

How madly strange that this should be!
For, had she loved me here on Earth,
It had not then been marvelous
That she should now remember me,
Returning love for love, though worth
Less, yes, far less to both of us.
And so I wondered, listening there:
How was it that her soul was brought
So near to mine now, whom in life
She hated so? And everywhere
About my life I thought and thought
And found no reason why her love
Should now be mine. We were at strife
Forever here; her hatred drove

Me to despair: I cast my glove
Into the frowning face of fate,
And lost her. Yea, it was her hate
That made her Appolonio's wife.
Her hate! her lovely hate!—for of
Her naught I found unlovely;—and
I felt she did not understand
My passion, and 'twere well to wait.

And now I felt her presence near,
I, full of life; yet knew no fear
There in the sombre silence, mark.
And it was dark, yes, deadly dark:
But when I slowly drew away
The pall, death modeled with her face,—
From her fair form it fell and lay
Rich in the dust,—the shrouded place
Was glittering daggered by the spark
Of one wild ruby at her throat,
Red-arrowed as a star with throbs
Of pulsing flame. And note on note
The night seemed filled with tenuous sobs
Of fire that flickered from that stone,
That, lustrous, lay against her throat,
Large as her eyes, and shadowy.
And standing by the dead alone
I marveled not that this should be.

The essence of an hundred stars,
Of fretful crimson, through and through
Its bezels beat, when, bending down
My hot lips pressed her mouth. And scars,
Aurora-scarlet, veiny blue,
Flame-hearted, blurred the midnight; and
The vault rang; and I felt a hand
Like fire in mine. And, lo, a frown
Broke up her face as gently as
The surface of a fountain's glass
A zephyr moves, that jolts the grass
Spilling its rain-drops. When this passed,
Through song-soft slumber, binding fast,
Slow smiles dreamed outward beautiful;
And with each smile I heard the dull
Deep music of her heart, and saw,
As by some necromantic law,
Faint tremblings of a lubric light
Flush her white temples and her throat:
And each long pulse was as a note,
That, gathering, like a strong surprise
With all of happiness, made sweet
With dim carnation in wild wise
The arch of her pale lips, and beat
Like moonlight from her head to feet.
I bent and kissed her once again:
And with that kiss it seemed that pain,

Which long had ached beneath her smile
And eyelids, vanished. In a while
I saw she breathed. Then, wondrous white,
Fair as she was before she died,
She rose upon the bier; a sight
To marvel at, whose truth belied
All fiction. Yet I saw her eyes
Grow wide unto my kiss,—like skies
Of starless dawn.—And all the fire
Of that dark ruby at her throat
Around her presence seemed to float,
A mist of rose, wherein like light
She moved, or music exquisite.

What followed then I scarcely know:
All I remember is, I caught
Her hand; and from the tomb I brought
Her beautiful: and o'er the snow,
Where moonbeams on the hollies glow,
I led her. But her feet no print
Left of their nakedness, no dint,
No faintest trace in frost. I thought,
“The moonlight fills them with its glow,
So soft they fall; or 'tis the snow
Covers them o'er!—the tomb was black,
And—this strong light blinds!”—Turning back

My eyes met hers; and as I turned,
Flashing centupled facets, burned
That ruby at her throat; and I
Studied its beauty for a while:
How came it there, and when, and why?
Who set it at her throat? Again,
Was it a ruby?—Pondering,
I stood and gazed. A far, strange smile
Filled all her face, and as with pain
I seemed to hear her speak, or sing,
These words, that meant not anything,
Yet more than any words may mean:
“Thy blood it is,” she said; then sighed:
“See where thy heart's blood beateth! here
Thy heart's blood, that my lips did drain
In life; I live by still, unseen,
Long as thy passion shall remain.—
Canst thou behold and have no fear?—
Yea, if I am not dead, 'tis thou!—
Look how thy heart's blood flashes now!—
Blood of my life and soul, beat on!
Beat on! and fill my veins with dawn;
And heat the heart of me, his bride!”
And then she leaned against me, eyed
Like some white serpent, strangely still,
That binds one with its glittering stare,

That at wild stars hath gazed until
Its eyes have learned their golden glare.

And then I took her by the wrists
And drew her to me. Faintly felt
The shadow of her hair, whose mists
Were twilight-deep and dimly smelt
Of shroud and sepulchre. And she
Smiled on me with such sorcery
As well might win a soul from God
To Hell and torments. And I trod
On white enchantments and was long
A song and harp-string to a song,
Love's battle in my blood. And there,
Kissing her mouth, all unaware
The ruby loosened at her throat,
And, ere I wist, hung o'er my hand,
And on the brink I seemed to stand
Of something that cried out, “Admire
The beauty of this gem of fire,
Its witchcraft and its workmanship.”
Then from her throat it seemed to slip,
And, in the hollow of my hand,
A rosy spasm, a bubble-boat
Of living flame, it seemed to float;
A fretful fire; a heart, fierce fanned
Of red convulsions. Like a brand,

A blaze, it touched me; seemed to run
Like fever through my pulses, swift,
Of torrid poison. One by one,
Now burning ice, now freezing sun,
I felt my veins swell. Then I felt
My palm brim up and overflow
With blood that, beads of oozing glow,
Dripped, drop by drop, upon the snow,
Like holly-berries on the snow.

Then something darkly seemed to melt
Within me, and I heard a sigh
So like a moan, 'twas as if years
Of anguish bore it; and the sky
Swam near me as when seen through tears—
And she was gone. . . . In ghostly gloom
Of dark, scarred pines a crumbling tomb
Loomed like a mist. Carved in its stone,
Above the grated portal deep,
Glimmered this legend:—

“Let her sleep,
Crowned with dim death, our lovely one,
Known here on Earth as Gloramone.
Our hearts bow down by her and weep,
And one sits weeping all alone.”

THE IMAGE IN THE GLASS

I

The slow reflection of a woman's face
Grew, as by witchcraft, in the oval space
Of that strange glass on which the moon looked in:—
As cruel as death beneath the auburn hair
The dark eyes burned; and, o'er the faultless chin,—
Evil as night, yet as the daybreak fair,—
Rose-red and sensual smiled the mouth of sin.

II

The glorious throat and shoulders and, twin crests
Of snow, the splendid beauty of the breasts,
Filled soul and body with the old desire.—
Daughter of darkness! how could this thing be?
You, whom I loathed! for whom my heart's fierce fire
Had burnt to ashes of satiety!
You, who had sunk my soul in crime's red mire!

III

How came your image there? and in that room!
Where she, the all-adored, my life's sweet bloom,
Died poisoned! She, my scarcely one week's bride—
Yes, poisoned by a gift you sent to her,
Thinking her death would win me to your side.
It won me; yes! but. . . . Well, it made some stir—
By your own hand, I think, they said you died.

IV

Time passed. And then—was it the curse of crime,
That night of nights, which forced my feet to climb
To that locked bridal-room?—'Twas midnight when
A longing, like to madness, mastered me,
Compelled me to that chamber, which for ten
Long years was sealed: a dark necessity
To gaze upon—I knew not what again.

V

Love's ghost, perhaps. Or, in the curvature
Of that orbed mirror, something that might cure
The ache in me—some message, said perchance
Of her dead loveliness,—which once it glassed,—
That might repeat again my lost romance
In momentary pictures of the past,
While in its depths her image swam in trance.

VI

I did not dream to see the soulless eyes
Of you I hated; nor the lips where lies
And kisses curled: your features,—that were tuned
To all demonic,—smiling up as might
Some deep damnation! while . . . my God! I swooned! . . .
Oozed slowly out, between the breasts' dead white,
The ghastly red of that wide dagger-wound.

THE LEGEND OF THE STONE

The year was dying, and the day
Was almost dead;
The west, beneath a sombre gray,
Was sombre red:
The gravestones in the ghostly light,
That glimmered there,
Seemed phantoms, wandering wan and white,
'Mid trees half bare.

I stood beside the grave of one
Who, here in life,
Was false to me; who had undone
My child and wife:
I stood beside his grave until
The moon came up—
It seemed the dark, unhallowed hill
Lifted a cup.

No stone was there to mark his grave,
No flower to grace—
'Twas meet that weeds alone should wave
In such a place:

I stood beside his grave until
The stars swam high,
And all the night was iron-still
From sky to sky.

What cared I though strange eyes glowed bright
Within the gloom!
Though, evil blue, a witch's-light
Burnt by each tomb!
Or that each crooked thorn-tree seemed
A hag, black-cloaked!
Or that the owl above me screamed,
The raven croaked!

I cursed him: cursed him when the day
Burnt sullen red;
Had cursed him when the west was gray,
And day was dead:
And now when night made dark the pole,
Both soon and late
I cursed his body, yea, and soul,
With th' hate of hate.

Once at my side I seemed to hear
A low voice say,—
“'Twere better to forgive,—and fear
Thy God,—and pray.”

I laughed; and from pale lips of stone
On sculptured tombs
Wild laughter leapt, and then a moan
Swept through the glooms.

And then I felt a change—a force,
That seemed to seize
My body, like some fearful curse,
And, fastening, freeze
It downward, deeper than the knees,
Into the earth—
While still among the twisted trees
Rang mocking mirth.

And then I felt such fear, despair,
As lost ones feel,
When, knotted in their pitch-stiff hair,
They feel the steel
Of devils' forks lift up, through sleet
Of Hell's slant fire,
Then plunge,—as white from head to feet
I grew entire.

A voice without me, yet within,
As still as frost,
Intoned: “Thy sin is more than sin,
O damned and lost!

Behold, how God would punish thee
For this thy crime—
Thy crime of hate and blasphemy—
Through endless time!

“O'er him, whom thou wouldst not forgive,
Record what good
He did on Earth! and let him live
Loved, understood!
Be memory thine of all the worst
He did thine own!” . . .
There at the head of him I cursed
I stood—a stone.

THE RUINED MILL

On the wild South Fork of Harrod's Creek,
O'ergrown with creepers, if you should seek,
You will find an ancient water-mill
Of stone below a wooded hill.
Its weedy wheel is not less still
Than its image that sleeps in the grassy pool
Where the moccasin swims; and, slimly cool
Like streaks of light through blurs of sun,
The silver minnows and crawfish run.
So lone the place, in its sycamore
The blue crane builds; and from the shore
The shitepoke wanders about its door.
The burdock sprawls on its sill of pine;
And, in its pathway, eglantine
And blackberry tangle and intertwine;
Ox-daisies checker with pearl and gold
The bushy banks of its mill-race old;
The owl in its loft as safely lairs
As the fox in its cellar, that whelps and cares
Naught for the hunters who gallop by
With their baying hounds; the martins fly

Around its chimney and build therein;
And wasp and hornet, with murmurous din,
Plaster their nests, that none disturb,
On window-lintel and hopper-curb.

Once I stood in this old, stone mill,
Once as the day died over the hill,
And night came on; and stark and still
I met with phantoms upon its stairs;
Shadows, that took me unawares,
Eyed with fire and cowled with gloom—
Twilight phantoms, that crowded, dark,
Its dim interior, each eye a spark
Of sunset, creviced, within the room—
While a moist, chill, moldering, dead perfume
Of crumbling timbers and rotting grain,
On floors all warped with the sun and rain,
Made of the stagnant air a cell,
Round the cobwebbed rafters hung like a spell;
Making my mind, despite me, run
On thoughts of a hidden skeleton,
There in the walls; or, dripping dank,
Under the floor, 'neath a certain plank;
Glowering, grim in the mossy wet,
In its hollow eyes a dark regret.

I had entered when the evening-star
In the saffron heaven was sparkling afar,
In all its glory of light divine,
Like a diamond drowned in kingly wine;
And I stayed till the heavens hung low and gray,
And the clouds of the storm drove down and away,
Like the tattered leaves of an Autumn day;
And the wild rain beat on the rotting roof
The goblin dance of the Fiend's own hoof,
Till the spider dropped from its dusty woof;
And the thunder throbbed like a mighty heart;
And the wild wind filled each crannied part
Of the mill with moanings, that seemed to be
The voice of an ancient agony—
Till the beetle shrunk in its board of pine;—
While the lightning lit with its instant shine
The tossing terror of tree and vine. . . .
Then, all on a sudden, the storm was still—
And I saw her there, near the shattered sill,
At the window, gazing from the mill
Into the darkness under the storm;
Around her flickering hair and form
Unearthly glimmer. She seemed to lean
To the rushing waters that roared unseen:
A moment only she seemed to sway

Before me there in the lightning gray,
Then vanished utterly away:
Like a blown-out light. . . .

And was it she,
The miller's daughter who died, they say,
Who flung herself on the mill's great wheel,
Long years ago, in her heart's despair?—
Or was it a dream, a fantasy,
That the place and the moment made me feel,
And imagination imaged there?

ON FLOYD'S FORK

When the hoot of the owl comes over the hill,
At twelve o'clock when the night is still,
And pale on the pool where the creek-frogs croon,
Glimmering gray is the light o' the moon;
And under the willows, where shadows lie,
The torch of the firefly wanders by;—
They say that the miller walks here, walks here,
All covered with chaff, with his crooked staff,
And his horrible hobble and hideous laugh;
The old, lame miller hung many a year:
When the hoot of the owl comes over the hill,
He walks in the night by Harrod's mill.

When the bark of the fox sounds lone on the hill,
At twelve o'clock when the night is chill
With the autumn wind, and the waters creep
Where the starlight fails and the shadows sleep;
And under the willows, that toss and moan,
The glow-worm kindles its lanthorn lone;—

They say that a woman floats dead, floats dead,
In a weedy space that the lilies lace,
A curse in her eyes and a smile on her face;
The miller's young wife with a gash in her head:
When the bark of the fox sounds lone on the hill,
She floats in the night by Harrod's mill.

When the howl of the hound comes over the hill,
At twelve o'clock when the night is ill,
And the thunder mutters and rain-winds sob,
And the foxfire glows like the lamp of a Lob;
And under the willows, that gloom and glance,
The will-o'-the-wisps hold a devil's-dance;—
They say that that crime is reacted again.
And each cranny and chink of the mill doth wink
With the light o' hell, or the lightning's blink,
And a woman's shrieks are heard through the rain:
When the howl of the hound comes over the hill,
No man will walk by Harrod's mill.

THE WOMAN BY THE WATER

She stands within the stormy glow
Of sunset, with a face of snow,
The white embodiment of woe,
As night comes on:

She stands within the sombre glare
Of dusk, with dark neglected hair,
An apparition of despair,
When day is gone.

The haggard house within the vale
Looks spectral as a ragged sail
The Dutchman hoists against the gale
On haunted seas:

And in the garden,—one vast brake
Of dock and thistle,—snail and snake
Crawl; and the death-watch taps, awake
In rotting trees.

The stagnant stream along the night
Creeps, like a nightmare, where each white
Lily is an uneasy light,
A wisp up-tossed:

And through the cypress-trees and vines
The gray fox skulks and laps and whines;
The owl hoots; and the foxfire shines
In darkness lost.

She stands beside the stagnant stream;
Her garments drip at every seam;
She looks a shadow in a dream
Of dread and woe:

No star stares half so steadily
At earth as at the water she;
And what she sees there—it may be
The owlets know.

A STREET OF GHOSTS

The drowsy day, with half-closed eyes,
Dreams in this quaint forgotten street,
That, like some old-world wreckage lies,—
Left by the sea's receding beat,—
Far from the city's restless feet.

Abandoned pavements, that the trees'
Huge roots have wrecked; whose flagstones feel
No more the sweep of draperies;
And sunken curbs, whereon no wheel
Grinds, and no gallant's spur-bound heel.

Old houses, walled with rotting brick,
Thick-creepered, dormered, weather-vaned,—
Like withered faces, sad and sick,—
Stare from each side, all broken paned,
With battered doors the rain has stained.

And though the day be white with heat,
Their ancient yards are dim and cold;

Where now the toad makes its retreat,
'Mid flower-pots green-caked with mold,
And naught but noisome weeds unfold.

The slow gray slug and snail have trailed
Their slimy silver up and down
The beds where once the moss-rose veiled
Rich beauty; and the mushroom brown
Swells where the lily tossed its crown.

The shadowy scents, that oft are wont
To flit among the walks and boughs,
Seem ghosts of sweethearts here who haunt
And wander round each empty house,
Wrapped in the fragrance of dead vows.

And, haply, when the evening droops
Her amber eyelids in the west,
Here you may hear the swish of hoops,
Or catch the glint of hat and vest,
As two dim lovers past you pressed.

And, instant as some star's slant flame,
That scores the swarthy cheek of night,
Perhaps behold Colonial dame
And gentleman in stately white
Go glimmering down the pale moonlight.

In powder, patch, and furbelow,
Cocked hat and sword; and every one,—
Tory and Whig of long-ago,—
As real as in the days long done,
The courtly days of Washington.

BEFORE THE TOMB

The way led under cedared gloom
Where, o'er the entrance of her tomb,
The moon hung, like a cactus bloom.

I had an hour of night and thin
Sad starlight; and I set my chin
Against the grating and looked in.

A gleam, like moonlight, through a square
Of opening—I knew not where—
Shone on her coffin resting there.

And on its oval silver-plate
I read her name and age and date,
And smiled, soft-thinking on my hate.

There was no insect sound to chirr;
No wind to make a little stir:
I stood and looked and thought on her.

The gleam stole downward from her head,
Till at her feet it rested, red
On Gothic gold, whose letters said:—

“God to her love lent a weak reed
Of strength: and gave no light to lead:
Pray for her soul: for it hath need.”

There was no night-bird's twitter near;
No low, vague water I might hear
To make a small sound in the ear.

The gleam, that made a burning mark
Of each dim word, died to a spark;
Then left the tomb and coffin dark.

I had a little while to wait;
And prayed with hands against the grate,
And heart that yearned and knew too late.

There was no light below, above,
To point my soul the way thereof,—
The way of hate that led to love.

FLAMENCINE

I

It was a gipsy maiden
Within the forest green;
It was a gipsy maiden
Who shook a tambourine:
The star of eve had not the face,
The cascade's foam had not the grace
Of Flamencine.

II

Her bodice was of purple,
Her shoes of satin sheen;
Her bodice was of purple
With scarlet laid between:
The wind of eve was in the tread,
The black of night was on the head
Of Flamencine.

III

Among the dreaming vistas,
The darkling dells between,
Among the dreaming vistas
I heard her tambourine:
And far within the ghostly glade
The moonbeams and the shadows played
Round Flamencine.

IV

Among the beechen shadows
When fireflies are seen,
Among the beechen shadows
When glow-worms glimmer green,
Then down the darkness, like a light,
She dances; and the eyes are bright
Of Flamencine.

V

There lies a gipsy maiden
Within the forest green;
There lies a gipsy maiden
Beside her tambourine:
These many years I am her slave—
The violets grow upon the grave
Of Flamencine.

HILDEGARD

I

Hildegard the dæmons name
Her, who meets me on the mountain:
Her, whose hair is like the flame
Of a sunset-fevered fountain:
I can tell her by her eyes,
Dreadful eyes of bitter beryl,
Where the anguish never dies,
And the suffering soul sits sterile
In such light as ever lies
On the unsailed seas of peril.

II

How we met I never knew.
Once I turned—and there she trembled
Near me, glimmering like the dew
In the sessions of assembled
Flowers.—Hers some influence
Of soft, serpent magnetism,

Vanquishing my every sense
With essential mesmerism;
Holding me beneath the lens
Of her will's compelling prism.

III

I can not escape. She treads
Noiseless as the forest flowers
Walked on by the wind; their heads
Pavements for the mottled hours:
She is whiter than the trees
When their blossoms are unsheathing;
She is lissome as the ease
Of the lilied water wreathing;
She is subtle as the breeze
Through the summer foliage breathing.

IV

When she speaks, within my ears,
Like wild music heard in fever
Is her voice; and it appears
That my soul can never leave her:
Babylonian necromance,
Oldest witcheries,—that harrow
Yet compel,—are hers; her glance
Holds me; and my very marrow

Feels it; and I stand a-trance,
While her pupils slowly narrow.

V

Thus she binds me with her gaze,
While her white hands weigh my shoulders;
And my weak will swings and sways
To her gaze that burns and smolders.
So she draws me far away,
Under boughs where summer dallies:
Over peaks of purple day:
Far away through Eden alleys:
All the way is one long May
Till we come to her dark valleys.

VI

There black tempest treads the peaks;
Iron skies are gulfed asunder,
Whence the lightning's lava leaks,
Vomiting the hosts of thunder.
Here she kisses me till red
With my heart's blood are her kisses;
Then my soul is seized with dread,
For it knows no woman this is:
Yea, behold! it sees instead
But a milk-white snake that hisses.

ROMAUNT OF THE OAK

“I rode to death, for I fought for shame—
The lady Maurine of noble name,

“The fair and faithless!—Though life be long
Is love the wiser?—Love made song

“Of all my life; and the soul that crept
Before, arose like a star and leapt:

“Still leaps with the love that it found untrue,
That it found unworthy.—Now run me through!

“Yea, run me through! for meet and well,
And a jest for laughter of fiends in Hell,

“It is that I, who have done no wrong,
Should die by the hand of Hugh the Strong,

“Of Hugh her leman!—What else could be
When the devil was judge 'twixt thee and me?

“He splintered my lance, and my blade he broke—
Now finish me, thou, 'neath the trysting oak!”

The shield of his foeman—a heart of white
In a bath of fire—shone in the night:

The plume of his foeman, as midnight black,
Blew, as he leapt on his horse's back:

Leapt and laughed as his sword he swung,
Then galloped away with a laugh on his tongue. . . .

Who is she in the gray, wet dawn,
'Mid the forest shades like a shadow wan?

Who kneels, one hand on her straining breast,
One hand on the dead man's bosom pressed?

Her face is dim as the dead's; and cold
As his tarnished harness of steel and gold.

O Lady Maurine! O Lady Maurine!
What boots it now that regret is keen?

That his hair you smooth? that you kiss his brow,
What boots it now? what boots it now?—

She has haled him under the trysting oak,
The huge old oak that the creepers cloak.

She has stood him, gaunt in his battered arms,
In its haunted hollow.—“Be safe from storms,”

She laughed as his cloven casque she placed
On his brow, and his riven shield she braced.

Then sat and talked to the forest flowers
Through the lonely term of the day's pale hours.

And stared and whispered and smiled and wept,
As nearer and nearer the evening crept.

And lo, when the moon, like a great gold bloom
Above the sorrowful trees did loom,

She rose up sobbing, “O moon, come see
My bridegroom here in the old oak-tree!

“I have talked to the flowers all day, all day,
For never a word had he to say.

“He would not listen, he would not hear,
Though I wailed my longing into his ear.

“O moon, steal in where he stands so grim,
And tell him I love him and plead with him.

“Soften his face, that is cold and stern,
And brighten his eyes and make them burn,

“O moon, white moon, so my soul can see,
Can say that they glow with love for me!”—

When the moon had set, and the woods were dark,
The wild deer came, and stood as stark

As phantoms with eyes of flame; or fled
Like a ghostly herd of the hunted dead.

And the strix-owl called; and the werewolf snarled;
And a voice, in the boughs of the oak-tree gnarled,—

Like the whining voice of the hags that ride
To the witches' Sabboth,—crooned and cried.

And wrapped in his mantle of wind and cloud,
The storm-fiend stalked through the forest loud.

When she heard the dead man rattle and groan
As the oak was bent and its leaves were blown,

And the lightning flickered his shimmering mail,—
Through the swirl and sweep of the rain and hail,

She seemed to hear him, who seemed to call,—
“Come hither, Maurine! the wild leaves fall!

The wild leaves rustle, the wild leaves flee—
Come hither, Maurine, to the hollow tree!

“To the trysting tree, to the tree once green,
Come hither, Maurine! come hither, Maurine!” . . .

They found her closed in his armored arms—
Had he claimed his bride on that night of storms?

A REED SHAKEN WITH THE WIND

I

Not for you and me the path
Winding through the shadowless
Fields of morning's dewiness!
Where the brook that hurries hath
Laughter lighter than a boy's;
Where recurrent odors poise,
Romp-like, with irreverent tresses,
In the sun; and leaves and boughs
Build a music-haunted house
For the winds to hang their dresses,
Whisper-silken, rustling in.
Ours a path that led unto
Twilight regions gray with dew;
Where moon-vapors gathered thin
Over acres sisterless
Of all healthy beauty; where
Fungus growths made sad the air
As a phantom-felt caress:
Under darkness and strange stars,
To the sorrow-silenced bars

Of a dubious forestland,
Where the wood-scents seemed to stand,
And the sounds on either hand,
Clad like Sleep's own servitors
In the shadowy livery
Of the ancient House of Dreams,
Which before us,—fitfully,
With white intermittent gleams
Of its pale-lamped windows,—shone,
Echoing with the dim unknown.

II

To say to Hope,—Take all from me,
And grant me naught:
Take rose, and song, and melody,
And word and thought:
Then all my life make me her slave,—
Is all I crave.

To say to Time,—Be true to me,
Nor grant me less
Of loss, of grief, of memory,
Of heart's distress:
Then for her love set me a task,
Is all I ask.

III

I came to you when eve was young:
And, where the park rolled downward to
The river, and among the dew,
One vesper moment, lit and sung
A bird, your eyes said something true,
Said something to my eyes, more dear
Than song the bird poured, silver-clear.
How sweet it was to be with you!
How, with our souls, we seemed to hear
The night approaching with its stars!
How calm the moon sloped up her sphere
Of fire-filled pearl through passive bars
Of clouds that berged the tender east!
While all the dark inanimate
Of Nature woke; initiate
With th' moon's arrival, something ceased
In Nature's soul: she stood again
Another self, that seemed t' have been
Dormant, suppressed and so unseen
All day: a life, unknown and strange
And dream-suggestive, that had lain,—
Masked on with light,—within the range
Of thought, but unrevealed till now.
It was the hour of love. And you,
With downward eyes and pensive brow,

Among the moonlight and the dew,—
Although no word of love was spoken,—
Heard the sweet night's confession broken
Of something here more sweet in me:
A love, depth made inaudible,
Save to your soul, that answered well,
With eyes replying silently.

IV

Fair you are as a rose is fair,
There where the shadows dew it;
And the deeps of your brown, brown hair,
Soft as the cloud that lingers there
With the sunset's auburn through it.
Eyes of azure and throat of snow,
Tell me what my heart would know!

Every dream I dream of you
Has a love-thought in it,
And a hope, a kiss or two,
Something dear and something true,
Telling me each minute,
With three words it whispers clear
What my heart from you would hear.

V

Junetime came: the days grew kind
With increasing beauty: deep
Were the nights with rest and sleep:
Fair, with poppies intertwined
On their blond locks, went the Hours,
Sunny-hearted as the rose,
Through the buds and banded flowers,
Teaching them, how no one knows,
Freshness, color, and perfume.—
In the window of your room
Bloomed a late azalea. Pink
As an egret's rosy plumes
Shone its tender-tufted blooms.
From your care and love, I think,
Love's rose-color it did drink,
Growing rosier day by day
Through your 'tending hand's caress:
And your own dear naturalness
Had imbued it in some way.
Once you gave a blossom of it,
Smiling, to me when I left:
Need I tell you how I love it
Faded though it is now!—'Reft
Of its fragrance and its color,
Yet 'tis dearer now than then,

—As past happiness is when
Life regrets.—And dimmer, duller
Though its beauty be, when I
Look upon it, I recall
Every part of that old wall;
And the dingy window high,
Where you sat and read; and all
The fond love that made your face
A soft sunbeam in that place:
And the plant that grew this bloom
Withered here, itself long dead,
Makes a halo overhead
There again—and through my room,
Like faint whispers of perfume,
Steal the words of love then said.

VI

All of my love I send to you,
I send to you,
On thoughts, like moths, that wend to you
Out of my heart's glad garden,
O'er which, its lovely warden,
Your face, a lily seeming,
Is dreaming.

All of my life I bring to you,
I bring to you,

In deeds, like birds, that wing to you
Out of my soul's deep valley,
O'er which, most musically,
Your love, a fountain, glistens,
And listens.

My love, my life, how blessed in you!
How blessed in you!
Whose thoughts, whose deeds find rest in you
Here on my life's dark ocean,
O'er which, in heavenly motion,
Your soul, a star, abideth,
And guideth.

VII

Where the old Kentucky wound
Through the land,—its stream between
Hills of primitive forest green,—
Like a goodly belt around
Giant breasts of grandeur; with
Many an unknown Indian myth,
On the boat we steamed. The land
Like an hospitable hand
Welcomed us. Alone we sat
On the under-deck, and saw
Farm-house and plantation draw

Near and vanish. 'Neath your hat
Your young eyes laughed; and your hair,
Blown about them by the air
Of our passage, clung and curled.
Music, and the summer moon;
And the hills' great shadows hewn
Out of silence; and the tune
Of the whistle, when we whirled
Round a moonlit bend in sight of
Some lone landing heaped with hay
Or tobacco; where the light of
One dim, solitary lamp
Signaled through the evening's damp:
Then a bell; and, dusky gray,
Shuffling figures on the shore
With the cable; rugged forms
On the gang-plank; backs and arms
With their cargo bending o'er;
And the burly mate before.
Then an iron bell, and puff
Of escaping steam; and out
Where the stream is wheel-whipped rough;
Music, and a parting shout
From the shore; the pilot's bell
Beating on the deck below;
Then the steady, quivering, slow,
Smooth advance again. Until

Twinkling lights beyond us tell
Of a lock or little town
Clasped between a hill and hill,
Where the bluegrass fields slope down.—
So we went. That summer-time
Lingers with me like a rhyme
Learned for dreamy beauty of
Its old-fashioned faith and love,
In some musing moment; sith
Heart-associated with
Joy that moment's quiet bore,
And forgotten nevermore.

VIII

Three sweet things love lives upon:
Music, at whose fountain's brink
Low he stoops his face to drink;
Seeing, as the wave is drawn,
His near image rise and sink.
Three sweet things love lives upon.

Three sweet things love lives upon:
Odor, whose red roses wreathe
His bright brow that shines beneath;
Hearing, as each bloom is blown,
His soul's essence breathe and breathe.
Three sweet things love lives upon.

Three sweet things love lives upon:
Color, to whose rainbow he
Lifts his dark eyes burningly;
Feeling, as the wild hues dawn,
His high immortality.
Three sweet things love lives upon.

X

Memories of other days,—
Sad with whilom happiness,—
Rise before my musing gaze
In the twilight. . . . And your dress
Seems beside me, like a haze
Shimmering white; as when we went
'Neath the star-strewn firmament,
Love-led, with impatient feet
Down the night that, summer-sweet,
Sparkled o'er the lamp-lit street.
Every look you gave me then
Comes before my eyes again,
Making music for my heart
On that path where once for us
Roses, red and amorous,
Grew, the roses red of love:
Roses, that are dead enough
On that path now! whence oft start

Out of recollected places,
With remembered forms and faces,
Dreams of love, like figures, woven
In my life's dark tapestry,
Beckoning, ever shadowy,
To my soul still.—O'er the cloven
Gulf of time I seem to hear
Words once whispered in my ear,
Calling—as might friends long dead,
With familiar voices deep,
Call to one who lies asleep,
Comforting.—So was I led
Backward to forgotten things,
Contiguities that spread
Sudden, unremembered wings:
And across my mind's still blue,
From the nest they fledged in, flew
Dazzling shapes that passion knew.

X

Ah! over full my heart is
Of sadness and of pain:
As a rose-flower in the garden
The dull dusk fills with rain;
As a blown red rose that shivers
And bows to the wind and rain.

So give me your hands and speak me
As once in the days of yore,
When love spoke sweetly to us,
The love that speaks no more:
The sound of your voice may help him
To speak in my heart once more.

Ah! over grieved my soul is,
And tired and sick for sleep,
As a poppy-bloom that withers,
Forgotten, where reapers reap:
As a harvested poppy-flower
That dies where reapers reap.

So bend to my face and kiss me
As once in the days of yore,
When the touch of your lips was magic
That restored to life once more:
The thought of your kiss, which awakens
To life that love once more.

XI

Sitting often I have, oh!
Often have desired you so—
Yearned to kiss you as I did
When your love to me you gave,

In the moonlight, by the wave,
And a long-remembered kiss
Pressed upon your mouth that chid,
Then upon each eye's sweet lid—
That, all passion-shaken, I
With love-language will address
Each dear thing I know you by,
Picture, needle-work, or frame;
Each suggestive in the same
Perfume of past happiness:
Till, meseems, the ways we knew
Now again I tread with you
From the old-time tryst: and there
Feel the pressure of your hair
Cool and young upon my cheek,
And your breath's aroma: bare
On my arm your hand,—as weak
As a lily on a stream:—
And once more you look at me
With the sometime witchery,
And again I hear you speak;
And remembered ecstasy
Sweeps my soul again.—I seem
Dreaming. . . . Would I thus might dream
Ever! and reality
Mix itself eternally

With such visions of the past,
Where my soul still holds you fast!

XII

When day dies, lone, forsaken,
And joy is kissed asleep;
When doubt's gray eyes awaken,
And love, with music taken
From hearts with sighings shaken,
Sits in the dusk to weep:

With ghostly-lifted finger
What memory then shall rise?
Of dark regret the bringer—
To tell the sorrowing singer
Of days whose echoes linger,
Till dawn unstars the skies.

When night is gone and, beaming,
Faith journeys forth to toil;
When hope's blue eyes wake gleaming,
And life is done with dreaming
The dreams that seem but seeming
Within the world's turmoil:

Who may forget the presence
Of death that walks unseen?

Whose scythe casts shadowy crescents
Around life's glittering essence,
As lessens, slowly lessens,
The space that lies between.

XIII

Bland was that October day,
Calm and balmy as the spring,
When we went a forest way,
Under beeches, lichen-gray,
To a valleyed opening;
Where the purple aster flowered,
And, like torches, savage-held,
Red the fiery sumac towered;
And, where gum-trees sentineled
Vistas, robed in gold and garnet,
Ripe the thorny chestnut shelled
Its brown plumpness. Bee and hornet
Droned around us; low the cricket,
Tireless in the wood-rose thicket,
Tremoloed; and, to the wind
All its moon-spun silver casting,
Swung the milkweed's pod, that thinned,
Where a butterfly seemed pinned:
And its clean flame on the sod
By the fading goldenrod,

Burned the white life-everlasting.—
It was not so much the time,
Nor the place, nor way we went,
That made all our moods to rhyme,
Nor the season's sentiment,
As it was the innocent
Carefree childhood of our hearts,
Reading each expression of
Death and change as life and love:
That impression joy imparts
Unto others and retorts
On itself, which then made glad
All the sorrow of decay,
As the memory of that day
Makes this day of autumn sad.

XIV

The pungent-breathed petunias
Hang riven of the rain;
And where the tiger-lily was
Now droops a tawny stain;
While in the twilight's purple pause
Earth dreams of heaven again.

When love sits down to sigh,
Where one lies all alone

Beneath the sod's green sky—
What boots it then to try,
Or to atone?

With ragged petals round its pod
The rain-wrecked poppy dies;
And where the hectic rose did nod
A crumbled crimson lies;
While distant as the dreams of God
The stars slip in the skies.

When love lies down to sleep,
When one is dead and gone—
Within the darkness deep
What boots it then to weep?
All's said and done.

XV

Holding both your hands in mine,
Often have we sat together,
While, outside, the boisterous weather
Hung the wild wind on the pine
Like a black marauder, and
With a sudden warning hand
At the casement rapped. The night
Wrote no line or glimmer of light,

Starbeam-syllabled, within
Her dark book of death and sin,
Cloudy-chaptered tragicly.—
Looking in your eyes, ah me!
Though I knew, I did not heed
What the night wrote there for us,
Threatening and ominous:
For love helped my heart to read
Forward to unopened pages
Of a coming day, that held
More for us than all the ages
Past, that it epitomized
In one sentence; where was spelled
What our present realized
Only—all the love that was
Past and still to be for us.

XVI

'Though in the garden, gray with dew,
All life lies withering,
And there's no more to say or do,
No more to sigh or sing,
Come back with me the ways we knew
When buds were opening.

Perhaps we shall not search in vain
Within its wreck and gloom;

'Mid roses ruined of the rain
There still may live one bloom;
One flower, whose heart may still retain
The long-lost soul-perfume.

And then, perhaps, will come to us
The dreams we dreamed of yore;
And song, who spoke so beauteous,
Will speak to us once more;
And love, with eyes all amorous,
Will gaze as once before.

So 'though the yard is gray with dew,
And flowers are withering,
And there's no more to say or do,
No more to sigh or sing,
Come back with me the ways we knew
When buds were opening.

XVII

Looking on the desolate street,
Where the first snow drifts and drives,
Trodden black of hurrying feet,
Where the athlete storm-wind strives
With each tree and dangling light,—
Centres, sphered with glittering white,—

Hissing in the dancing snow . . .
Backward in my mind I go
To that tempest-haunted night
Of two autumns past, when we,
Hastening homeward, were o'ertaken
Of the storm; and 'neath a tree,
With its wild leaves tempest-shaken,
Sheltered us in that forsaken,
Sad and ancient cemetery,—
Where folk came no more to bury.—
Haggard gravestones, mossed and crumbled,
Tottered round us, or o'ertumbled
In their sunken graves; and some,
Urned and obelisked above
Iron-fenced-in tombs, stood dumb
Records of forgotten love.
And again I see the west
Yawning inward to its core
Of electric-spasmed ore,
Swiftly, without pause or rest:
And a great wind sweeps the dust
Up abandoned sidewalks; and,
In the rotting trees, the gust
Shouts again—a voice that would
Make its gaunt self understood
Moaning over Death's lean land.—
And we sat there, hand in hand;

On the granite; where we read,
By the instant skies o'erhead,
Something of one young and dead.
Yet the words begot no fear
In our souls: you leaned your cheek
Smiling on mine: very near
Were our lips: we did not speak.

XVIII

And suddenly alone I stood
With scared eyes gazing through the wood,
For some still sign of ill or good
To lead me from the solitude.

The day was at its twilighting;
One cloud o'erhead spread a vast wing
Of rosy thunder; vanishing
Behind the far hills' sullen ring.

Some stars shone timidly o'erhead;
And towards the west's cadaverous red—
Like some wild dream that haunts the dead
In limbo—the lean moon was led.

Upon the sad, debatable
Vague lands of twilight slowly fell

A silence that I knew too well,
A sorrow that I can not tell.

What way to take, what path to go,
Whether into the east's gray glow,
Or where the west burnt red and low—
What way to choose I did not know.

So, hesitating, there I stood
Lost in my soul's uncertain wood;
One sign I craved of ill or good
To lead me from its solitude.

XIX

It was autumn: and a night
Full of whispers and of mist,
With a gray moon, wanly whist,
Hanging like a phantom light
O'er the hills. We stood among
Windy fields of weed and flower,
Where the withered seed-pod hung,
And the chill leaf-cricket sung.
Melancholy was the hour
With the mystery and loneness
Of the year, that seemed to look
On its own departed face—

As our love then, in its oneness,
All its dead past did retrace,
And from that sad moment took
Presage of approaching parting.—
Sorrowful the hour and dark:
Low among the trees, now darting,
Now concealed, a lamp's pale spark—
Like a fen-fire—winked and lured
Shut among the shadows, where
All was doubtful, unassured,
Immaterial; and bare
Facts of unideal day
Changed to substance such as dreams.
And meseemed then, far away—
Farther than remotest gleams
Of the stars—lost, separated,
And estranged and out of reach,
Grew our lives away from each,
Far away as it was fated.

XX

There is no gladness in the day
Now you're away;
Dull is the morn, the noon is dull,
Once beautiful;
And when the sunset fills the skies
With dusking dyes,

With tired eyes and tired heart
I sit alone, I sigh apart,
And wish for you,
For only you.

Ah! darker now the night comes on
Since you are gone;
Sad are the stars, the moon is sad,
Once wholly glad;
And when the stars and moon are set,
And earth lies wet,
With heart's regret and soul's hard ache,
I dream alone, I lie awake,
And think of you,
Of only you.

These, who once spake me, speak no more,
Now all is o'er;
Day hath forgot the language of
Its hopes of love;
Night, whose sweet lips were burdensome
With dreams, is dumb;
Far different from what used to be
With grief and loss they speak to me,
They speak of you,
Of only you.

XXI

So it ends—the path that crept
Through a land all slumber-whist;
Where the faded moonlight slept
Like a pale antagonist.
Now the star that led me onward,—
Reassuring with its light,—
Fails and falters; dipping downward
Leaves me wandering in night,
With old doubts, like hounds unchained,
Baying at my back, in flight. . . .
So it ends. The woods attained—
Where our hearts' Desire builded
A fair temple, fire-gilded,
With Hope's marble shrine within,
(Where the lineaments of our love
Shone, with lilies clad and crowned,
Under marble reared above
Sorrow and her sister, Sin,
Columned, wreathed and ribbon-wound,)—
In the forest I have found
But a ruin! All around
Lie the shattered capitals,
And vast fragments of the walls . . .
Like a climbing cloud,—that plies,
Wind-wrecked, o'er the moon that lies

'Neath its blackness,—taking on
Gradual certainties of wan,
Soft assaults of easy white,
(Till its huge cocoon, that holds
Like a moth the moon, unfolds,
And it passes) and the skies'
Emptiness and hungry night
Claim its bulk again, while she
Rides in lonely purity:—
So I found our temple broken;
And a musing moment's space
Love, whose latest word was spoken,
Seemed to meet me face to face,
Making bright that ruined place
With a white effulgence—then
Passed, and all was dark again.

WOMAN'S PORTION

I

The leaves are shivering on the thorn,
Drearily;
And sighing wakes the sad-eyed morn,
Wearily.

I press my thin face to the pane,
Drearily;
But never will he come again.
Wearily.

The rain hath sicklied day with haze,
Drearily;
My tears run downward as I gaze,
Wearily.

The mist and morn spake unto me,
Drearily:—
“What is this thing God gives to thee,
Wearily?”

I said unto the morn and mist,
Drearily:—
“The babe unborn whom sin hath kissed,
Wearily.”

The morn and mist spake unto me,
Drearily:—
“What is this thing which thou dost see,
Wearily?”

I said unto the mist and morn,
Drearily:—
“The shame of man and woman's scorn,
Wearily.”

“He loved thee not,” they made reply,
Drearily.—
I said, “Would God had let me die!”
Wearily.

II

My hopes are as a closed-up book,
Drearily,
Upon whose clasp of love I look
Wearily.

All night the rain raved overhead,
Drearily;
All night I wept, awake in bed,
Wearily.

I heard the wind sweep wild and wide,
Drearily;
And turned upon my face and sighed
Wearily.

The wind and rain spake unto me,
Drearily:—
“What is this thing God takes from thee,
Wearily?”

I said unto the rain and wind,
Drearily:—
“The love, for which my body sinned,
Wearily.”

The rain and wind spake unto me,
Drearily:—
“What are these things that burden thee,
Wearily?”

I said unto the wind and rain,
Drearily:—
“Past joys, and dreams whose ghosts remain,
Wearily.”

“Thou lov'st him still,” they made reply,
Drearily.—
I said, “Would God that I could die!”
Wearily.

KU KLUX

We have sent him seeds of the melon's core,
And nailed a warning upon his door:
By the Ku Klux laws we can do no more.

Down in the hollow, 'mid crib and stack,
The roof of his low-porched house looms black;
Not a line of light at the door-sill's crack.

Yet arm and mount! and mask and ride!
The hounds can sense though the fox may hide!
And for a word too much men oft have died.

The clouds blow heavy toward the moon.
The edge of the storm will reach it soon.
The kildee cries and the lonesome loon.

The clouds shall flush with a wilder glare
Than the lightning makes with its angled flare,
When the Ku Klux verdict is given there.

In the pause of the thunder rolling low,
A rifle's signal—who shall know
From the wind's fierce hurl and the rain's black blow?

Only the signature, written grim
At the end of the message brought to him—
A hempen rope and a twisted limb.

So arm and mount! and mask and ride!
The hounds can sense though the fox may hide!
And for a word too much men oft have died.

AT DAWN

Far off I heard dark waters rush:
The sky was cold: the dawn broke green:
And wrapped in twilight and strange hush
The gray wind moaned between.

A voice rang through the House of Sleep,
And through its halls there went a tread;
Mysterious raiment seemed to sweep
Around one lying dead.

And then I knew that I had died,
I, who had suffered so and sinned—
And 'twas myself I stood beside
In the gray dawn and wind.

PRÆTERITA

I

Low belts of rushes ragged with the blast;
Lagoons of marish reddening with the west;
And o'er the marsh the water-fowl's unrest
While daylight dwindles and the dusk falls fast.
Set in sad walls, all mossy with the past,
An old stone gateway with a crumbling crest;
A garden where death drowses manifest;
And in gaunt yews the shadowy house at last.
Here, like an unseen spirit, silence talks
With echo and the wind in each gray room
Where melancholy slumbers with the rain:
Or, like some gentle ghost, the moonlight walks
In the dim garden, which her smile makes bloom
With all the old-time loveliness again.

II

When slow the twilight settles o'er its roof,
And from the haggard oaks unto its door
The rain comes, wild as one who rides before

His enemies that follow, hoof to hoof;
And in each window's gusty curtain-woof
The rain-wind sighs, like one who mutters o'er
Some tale of love and crime; and, on the floor,
The sunset spreads red stains as bloody proof:—
From hall to hall and haunted stair to stair,
Through all the house, a dread, that drags me to'ard
The ancient dusk of that avoided room,
Wherein she sits with ghostly golden hair,
And eyes that gaze beyond her soul's sad doom,
Waking the ghost of that old harpsichord.

IN SHADOW

I

A moth sucks at a flaming flower:
The moon beams on the old church-tower:
I watched the moth and rising moon,
One silver tip
Of glimmer, slip
Through ghostly tree-tops, deep with June,
To dream above the church an hour.

II

The gray moth on the dewy pod
Dreams; and the sleepy poppies nod
Their drugged heads in the languid breeze,
That whispers low
Of some dim woe,
And spirit-like among the trees,
Strews snowy petals on the sod.

III

My soul dreams at life's blood-red heart
Of that thou art: of thee, who art
All silence: saying something fair
As phantoms know
When moon-flowers blow
And spirits meet: the beauty rare
Of which thou, too, hast grown a part.

IV

My heart, behold, is but a bloom
A pale thought clings to by a tomb,
A tomb that holds the one I love,
All wan of cheek,
Whom, wild and weak,
My heart bows down and breaks above,
Grief-haunted in the moonlit gloom.

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-hollow
Whines, wolf-like, with the wind; gaunt wind, that grieves

Through the one sickly ash, whose withered leaves
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

With sinking sense
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.

ASHLY MERE

Come! look in the shadowy water here,
The stagnant water of Ashly Mere:
Where the stirless depths are dark but clear,
What is the thing that lies there?—
A lily-pod, half-sunk from sight?
Or spawn of the toad, all water-white?
Or ashen blur of the moon's wan light?
Or a woman's face and eyes there?

Now lean to the water a listening ear,
The haunted water of Ashly Mere:
What is the sound that you seem to hear
In the ghostly hush of the deeps there?—
A withered reed, that the ripple lips?
Or a night-bird's wing, that the surface whips?
Or the rain in a leaf that drips and drips?
Or a woman's voice that weeps there?

Now look and listen! but not too near
The lonely water of Ashly Mere!—
For so it happens this time each year
As you lean by the Mere and listen:

And the moaning voice I understand,—
For oft I have watched it draw to land,
And lift from the water a ghastly hand
And a face whose dead eyes glisten.

And this is the reason why every year
To the hideous water of Ashly Mere
I come when the woodland leaves are sear,
And the autumn moon hangs hoary:
For here by the Mere was wrought a wrong
But the old, old story is overlong—
And woman is weak and man is strong,
And the Mere's and mine is the story.

THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN

On the black road through the wood,
As I rode,
There the Headless Horseman stood,
By the dark pool in the wood,
As I rode.

From the shadow of an oak,
As I rode,
Demon steed and rider broke;
By the thunder-riven oak,
As I rode.

On the wild way through the plain,
As I rode,
At my back he whirled like rain;
On the tempest-blackened plain,
As I rode.

Four black hoofs shod red with fire,
As I rode,
Woke the wild rocks, dark and dire;
Eyes and nostrils streaming fire,
As I rode.

On the deep path through the rocks,
As I rode,
I could touch his horse's locks;
Through the echo-hurling rocks,
As I rode.

And again I looked behind,
As I rode—
Dark as night and swift as wind,
Towering, he rode behind,
As I rode.

On the steep road through the dell,
As I rode,
Far away I heard a bell,
In the church beyond the dell,
As I rode.

And my soul cried out in prayer,
As I rode—
Lo! the demon went in air,
When my soul called out in prayer,
As I rode.

THE WEREWOLF

She
Nay; still amort, my love?—Why dost thou lag?

He
The strix-owl cried.

She
Nay! 'twas yon stream that leaps
Hoarse from the black pines of the Hakel steeps;
Its moon-wild water glittering down the crag.—
Why so aghast, sweetheart? Why dost thou stop?

He
The Demon Huntsman passed with hooting horn!

She
Nay! 'twas the blind wind sweeping through the thorn
Around the ruins of the Dumburg's top.

He
My limbs are cold.

She
Come! warm thee in my arms.

He
My eyes are weary.

She
Rest, them, love, on mine.

He
I am athirst.

She
Quench, on my lips, thy thirst.—
O dear belovéd, how thy last kiss warms
My blood again!

He
Off! . . . How thy eyeballs shine!—
Thou beast! . . . thou—Ah! . . . thus do I die, accursed!

THE SEA SPIRIT

Ah me! I shall not waken soon
From dreams of such divinity!
A spirit singing 'neath the moon
To me.

Wild sea-spray driven of the storm
Is not so wildly white as she,
Who beckoned with a foam-white arm
To me.

With eyes dark green, and golden-green
Long locks, that sparkled drippingly,
Out of the green wave she did lean
To me.

And sang; till Earth and Heaven were
A far, forgotten memory;
Till more than Heaven seemed in her
To me:—

Sleep, sweeter than love's face or home,
And death's immutability,
And music of the plangent foam,
Ah me!

Sweep over her with all thy ships,
With all thy stormy tides, O sea!
The memory of immortal lips,
And me!

100

THE VAMPIRE

A lily in a twilight place?
Or moonflower in the lonely night?—
Strange beauty of a woman's face
Of wildflower-white!

The rain that hangs a star's green ray
Slim on a leaf-point's restlessness,
Is not so glimmering green and gray
As was her dress.

I drew her dark hair from her eyes,
And in their deeps beheld a while
Such shadowy moonlight as the skies
Of Hell may smile.

She held her mouth up, redly wan
And burning cold:—I bent and kissed
Such rosy snow as some wild dawn
Makes of a mist.

101

God shall not take from me that hour,
When round my neck her white arms clung!
When 'neath my lips, like some fierce flower,
Her white throat swung!

Nor words she murmured while she leaned!
Witch-words, she holds me softly by,—
The spell that binds me to a fiend
Until I die.

102

WILL-O'-THE-WISP

I

There is the calamus he stands
With frog-webbed feet and bat-winged hands;
His glow-worm garb glints goblin-wise;
And elfishly, and impishly,
Above the gleam of owlet eyes,
A death's-head cap of downy dyes
Nods out at me, and beckons me.

II

Now in the reeds his face looks white
As witch-down on a witches' night;
Now through the dark, old, haunted mill,
All eerily, all flickeringly
He flits; and with a whippoorwill
Mouth calls, and seems to syllable,
“Come follow me! oh, follow me!”

103

III

Now o'er the sluggish stream he wends,
A slim light at his fingers' ends;
The spotted spawn, the toad hath clomb,
Slips oozily, sucks slimily;
His easy footsteps seem to come—
Like bubble-gaspings of the scum—
This side of me; that side of me.

IV

There by the stagnant pool he stands,
A foxfire lamp in flickering hands;
The weeds are slimy to the tread,
And mockingly, and gloatingly,
With slanted eyes and pointed head,
He leans above a face long dead,—
The face of me! of me! of me!

104

REVISITED

It was beneath a waning moon when all the woods were sear,
And winds made eddies of the leaves that whispered far and near,
I met her on the bramble bridge we parted at last year.

At first I deemed her but a mist that faltered in that place,
An autumn mist beneath the trees the moon's thin beams did lace,
Until I neared and in the moon beheld her face to face.

The crinkle of the summer heat above the drouth-burnt leas;
The shimmer of the thistle-drift adown the silences;
The gliding of the fairy-fire between the swamp and trees:

105

All qualified her presence as a sorrow may a dream—
The vague suggestion of a self; the glimmer of a gleam;
The actual and unreal of the things that are and seem.

Where once she came with welcome and glad eyes, all loving-wise,
She passed, and gave no greeting that my heart could recognize,
With far, set face, unseeing, and sad, unremembering eyes.

It was beneath a waning moon when woods were bleak and sear,
And winds made whispers of the leaves that eddied far and near,
I met her ghost upon the bridge we parted at last year.

106

THE OLD HOUSE

Quaint and forgotten, by an unused road,
An old house stands: around its doors the dense
Rank ironweeds grow high;
The chipmunks make a highway of its fence;
And on its sunken flagstones newt and toad
As still as lichens lie.

The timid snake upon its hearth's cool sand
Sleeps undisturbed; the squirrel haunts its roof;
And in the clapboard sides
Of closets,—dim with many a spider woof,—
Like the uncertain tapping of a hand,
The beetle-borer hides.

Above its lintel, under mossy eaves,
The mud-wasps build their cells; and in the floor
Of its neglected porch
The black bees nest: through each deserted door,

107

Vague as faint, phantom footsteps, steal the leaves
And dropped cones of the larch.

But come with me when sunset's magic old
Transforms this ruin—yea! transmutes this house:
When windows, one by one,—
Like Age's eyes, that Youth's love-dreams arouse,—
Grow lairs of fire; and a mouth of gold
Its wide door towards the sun.

Or let us wait until each rain-stained room
Is carpeted with moonlight, patterned oft
With shadow'd boughs o'erhead;
And through the house the wind goes rustling soft,
As might the ghost—a whisper of perfume—
Of some sweet girl long dead.

108

THE FOREST OF DREAMS

I

Where was I last Friday night?—
Within the Forest of dark Dreams
Following the blur of a goblin light,
That led me over dreadful streams,
Whereon the scum of the spawn was spread,
And the blistered slime, in stagnant seams;
Where the weed and the moss swam black and dead,
Like a drowned girl's hair, in the ropy ooze:
And the jack-o'-lantern light that led
Flickered the foxfire trees o'erhead,
And the owl-like things at airy cruise.

II

Where was I last Friday night?—
Within the Forest of dark Dreams
Following a form of shadowy white
With my own wild face it seems.—

109

Did a raven's wing just fan my hair?
Or a web-winged bat brush by my face?
Or the hand of—something I did not dare
Look round to see in that obscene place!
Where the boughs, with their leaves a-devil's-dance,
And the thorn-tree bush, where the wind made moan,
Had more than a strange significance
Of life and of evil not their own.

III

Where was I last Friday night?—
Within the Forest of dark Dreams
Seeing the mists rise left and right,
Like the leathery fog that heaves and steams
From the rolling horror of Hell's red streams:
While the wind, that tossed in the tattered tree,
And danced alone with the last mad leaf—
Or was it the wind? . . . kept whispering me,
“Come! bury it here with its own black grief,
And its heart of fire that naught can save!”—
And there in the darkness I seemed to see
My own self digging my soul a grave.

110

THE CITY OF DARKNESS

Wide-walled it stands in heathen lands
Beside a mystic sea,
Its streets strange-trod of many a god
And templed blasphemy.

Far through the night, with light on light,
It flames beside the sea;
While overhead an unseen dread
Impends eternally.

There is a sound above, around,
Of music by the sea;
And weird and wide the torches glide
Of pagan revelry.

There is a noise as of a voice
That calls beneath the sea;
And all the deep heaves, as in sleep,
With vague expectancy.

111

Then slowly up—as in a cup
Seethes poison—swells the sea;
As through black glass, wild mass on mass,
The town glows fiery.

Red-lit it glowers, like Hell's dark towers,
Closed in the iron sea;
And monster forms in awful swarms
Wing round it cloudily.

Still overhead the unseen dread,
Whose shadow dyes the sea,
At wrath-winged wait behind its gate
Till God shall set it free.

An earthquake crash; a taloned flash—
And, lo! from sky to sea
A sworded Doom that stalks the gloom,
Crowned with Death's agony.

And where it burned, a flame inurned,
Blood-red within the sea,
The phantasm of the dread above
Sits in immensity.

112

UNDER DARK SKIES

I

Hills rolled in woods, that lair the lynx and fox;
Harsh fields, that lean before the woods' advance
As wild-men fly from hunters, tossing locks
Through which their eyes of yellow fire glance;
Great blurs of briers and lugubrious rocks,—
A bristling blackness,—with a pool beneath,
Whereo'er the wisps, like something evil, dance;
And then a house like the wrecked face of death.

II

There where the moon hangs sinister, o'er parched
And haggard thorns,—a golden battle-bow,
Or shield of bronze, old wars have scarred and scorched,—

113

What crime hath cursed it . . . who shall ever know?—
Night only! Night, with flickering flame, who torched
That moment when blood branded black its sod,
And in the pool a ghastly face sank slow
Beneath the storm and rushing fire of God.

114

REMBRANDTS

I

I shall not soon forget her and her eyes,
The haunts of hate, where suffering seemed to write
Its stealthy name, whose syllables are sighs,
In strange and starless night.

I shall not soon forget her and her face,
So quiet, yet uneasy as a dream
That stands on tip-toe in a haunted place
And listens for a scream.

She made me feel as one, alone, may feel
In some grand, ghostly mansion of old time,
The presence of a treasure, walls conceal,
And secret of a crime.

II

With lambent faces, mimicking the moon,
The water lilies lie;
Dotting the darkness of the long lagoon
As stars, the sky.

115

A face, the whiteness of a water-flower,
With pollen-golden hair,
In shadow half, half in the moonlight's glower,
Lifts slowly there.

A young girl's face, death makes mute marble of,
Turned to the moon and me,
Sad with the pathos of unspeakable love,
Floating to sea.

III

One listening bent, in dread of something coming
He can not flee nor balk—
A phantom footstep, in the ghostly gloaming,
That haunts a ruined walk.

Long has he given his whole heart's hard endeavor
To labor, dark and dawn,
Dreaming that Love still watched his toil and ever
Turned kindly eyes thereon.

Now in his life, he feels, there nears an hour,
Inevitable, alas!
When in the darkness he shall cringe and cower,
And see his dead self pass.

116

GHOSTS

Was it the strain of the waltz that, repeating
Love, so bewitched me? or only the gleam
There of the lustres, that set my heart beating,
Feeling your presence as one feels a dream?

For, on a sudden, the woman of fashion,
Soft at my side in her diamonds and lace,
Vanished, and pale with reproach or with passion,
You, my dead sweetheart, looked up in my face.

Music, the nebulous lights, and the sifting
Fragrance of women made amorous the air;
Born of these three and my thoughts you came drifting,
Clad in dim muslin, a rose in your hair.

There in the waltz, that followed the lancers,
Hard to my breast did I crush you and hold;

117

Far through the stir and the throng of the dancers
Onward I bore you as often of old.

Pale were your looks; and the rose in your tresses
Paler of hue than the dreams we have lost;—
“Who,” then I said, “is it sees or who guesses,
Here in the hall, that I dance with a ghost?”

Gone!—And the dance and the music are ended.
Gone!—And the rapture is turned into sighs.
And, on my arm, in her elegance splendid,
The woman of fashion smiles up in my eyes.

Had I forgotten? and did she remember?—
She who is dead, whom I can not forget:
She, for whose sake all my heart is an ember
Covered with ashes of dreams and regret.

118

AT MIDNIGHT

At midnight in the trysting wood
I wandered by the waterside,
When, soft as mist, before me stood
My sweetheart who had died.

But so unchanged was she, meseemed
That I had only dreamed her dead;
Glad in her eyes the lovelight gleamed;
Her lips were warm and red.

What though the stars shone shadowy through
Her form as by my side she went,
And by her feet no drop of dew
Was stirred, no blade was bent!

What though through her white loveliness
The wildflower dimmed, the moonlight paled,
Real to my touch she was; no less
Than when the earth prevailed.

She took my hand. My heart beat wild.
She kissed my mouth. I bowed my head.
Then, gazing in my eyes, she smiled:
“When did'st thou die?” she said.

119

THAT NIGHT

That night I sat listening, as in a swoon,
With half-closed eyes,
To far-off bells, low-lulling as a tune
That drifts and dies
Beneath the flowery fingers of the June
Harping to summer skies.

And then I dreamed the world I knew was gone,
And some one brought,—
Leading me far o'er sainted hill and lawn,
In heavenly thought,—
My soul where well the sources of the dawn
With dew and fire fraught.

Above me the majestic dome of night,
With star on star,
Sparkled; in which one star shone blinding bright;
Radiant as spar
That walls the halls of morning, pearly white
Around her golden car.

120

About me temples, vast in desert seas,
Columned a land
Of ruins—bones of old monstrosities
God's awful hand
Had smitten; homes of dead idolatries,
O'erwhelmed with dust and sand.

Their bestial gods, caked thick with gems and gold,
Their blasphemies
Of beauty, rent; 'mid ruined altars rolled;
Their agonies
And rites abolished; and their priests of old—
Dust on the desert breeze.

Then Syrian valleys, purple with veiling mist,
Meseemed I trailed,
Where the frail floweret, by the dewdrop kissed,
Soft-blushing, quailed;
And drowned in dingled deeps of amethyst
The moon-mad bulbul wailed.

On glimmering wolds I seemed to hear the bleat
Of folded flocks:
Then shepherds passed me, bare of head and feet;
And then an ox

121

Lowed; and, above me, swept the solemn beat
Of angel wings and locks.

A manger then I seemed to see where bent,
In adoration,
Above a babe, Men of the Orient,
Where, low of station,
His mother lay, while round them swam sweet scent
And sounds of jubilation.

And then I woke. The rose-white moon above
Bloomed on my sight;—
And in her train the stars of winter drove,
Light upon light;
While Yuletide bells rocked, pealing “peace and love”
Down all the aisles of night.

122

GRAMARYE

There are some things that entertain me more
Than men or books; and to my knowledge seem
A key of Poetry, made of magic lore
Of childhood, opening many a fabled door
Of superstition, mystery, and dream
Enchantment locked of yore.

For, when through dusking woods my pathway lies,
Often I feel old spells, as o'er me flits
The bat, like some black thought that, troubled, flies
Round some dark purpose; or before me cries
The owl that, like an evil conscience, sits,
A shadowy voice and eyes.

Then, when down blue canals of cloudy snow
The white moon oars her boat, and woods vibrate
With crickets, lo, I hear the hautboys blow

123

Of Elfland; and, when gold the fireflies glow,
See where the goblins hold a Fairy Fête
With many a lanthorn-row.

Strange growths, that ooze from long-dead logs and spread
A creamy fungus, where the snail, uncoiled,
And fat slug feed at morn, are Pixy bread
Made of the yeasted dew; the lichens red,
Beside these grown, are meat the Brownies broiled
Above a glow-worm bed.

The smears of silver on the webs that line
The knuckled roots, or stretch, white-wov'n, within
The hollow stump, are stains of Faery wine
Spilled on the cloth where Elfland sat to dine,
When night beheld them drinking, chin to chin,
Of th' moon's fermented shine.

What but their chairs the mushrooms on the lawn,
Or toadstools hidden under flower and fern,
Tagged with the dotting dew!—With knees updrawn
Far as his eyes, have I not come upon

124

Puck seated there? but scarcely round could turn
When, presto! he was gone.

And so though Science from the woods hath tracked
The Elfin; and with prosy lights of day
Unhallowed all his haunts; and, dulling, blacked
Our vision, still hath Beauty never lacked
For seers yet; who, in some wizard way,
Prove fancy real as fact.

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THE WORLD OF FAERY

I

When in the pansy-purpled stain
Of sunset one far star is seen,
Like one bright drop of rain,
Out of the forest, deep and green,
O'er me a Spirit seems to lean,
The fairest of her train.

II

The Spirit, dowered with fadeless youth
Of Lay and Legend, young as when,
Close to her side, in sooth,
She led me from the marts of men,
A child, into her world, which then
To me was true as truth.

III

Her hair is like the silken husk
That holds the corn, the gloss that glows;
Her brow is white as tusk;

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Her body is like some sweet rose,
And through her gossamer raiment shows
Like starlight closed in musk.

IV

She smiles at me; she nods at me;
And by her looks I am beguiled
Into the mystery
Of ways I knew when, as a child,
She led me 'mid her blossoms wild
Of faery fantasy.

V

The blossoms that, when night is here,
Become sweet mouths that sigh soft tales;
Or, each, a jeweled ear
Leaned to the elfin dance that trails
Down moonrayed cirques of haunted vales
To cricket song and cheer.

VI

The blossoms that, closed up all day,—
Primrose and poppy,—darkness opes,
Slowly, to free a fay,

127

Who, silken-soft, leaps forth and ropes
With rain each web that, starlit, slopes
Between each grassy spray.

VII

The blossoms from which elves are born,—
Sweet wombs of mingled scent and snow,
Whose deeps are cool as morn;
Wherein I oft have heard them blow
Their pixy trumpets, silvery low
As some bee's drowsy horn.

VIII

So was it when my childhood roamed
The woodland's dim enchanted ground,
Where every mushroom domed
Its disc for them to revel round;
Each glow-worm forged its flame,—green-drowned
In hollow snow that foamed

IX

Of lilies,—for their lantern light,
To lamp their dance beneath the moon;
Each insect of the night,—

128

That rasped its thin, vibrating tune,—
And owl that raised its sleepy croon,
Made music for their flight.

X

So is it still when twilight fills
My soul with childhood's memories
That haunt the far-off hills,
And people with dim things the trees,—
With faery forms that no man sees,
And dreams that no man kills.

XI

Then all around me sway and swing
The Puck-lights of their firefly train,
Their elfin revelling;
And in the bursting pods, that rain
Their seeds around my steps, again
I hear their footsteps ring.

XII

The faery feet that fall once more
Within my way;—and then I see,—
As oft I saw before,—
Her Spirit rise, who shimmeringly
Fills all my world with poetry,—
The Loveliness of Yore.

129

THERE ARE FAIRIES

I

There are fairies, bright of eye,
Who the wildflowers' warders are:
Ouphes, that chase the firefly,
Elves, that ride the shooting-star:
Fays, who in a cobweb lie,
Swinging on a moonbeam bar;
Or who harness bumble-bees,
Grumbling on the clover leas,
To a blossom or a breeze,
That's their fairy car.
If you care, you too may see
There are fairies.—Verily,
There are fairies.

II

There are fairies. I could swear
I have seen them busy, where
Roses loose their scented hair,
In the moonlight weaving, weaving,

130

Out of starlight and the dew,
Glinting gown and shimmering shoe;
Or, within a glow-worm lair,
From the dark earth slowly heaving
Mushrooms whiter than the moon,
On whose tops they sit and croon,
With their grig-like mandolins,
To fair fairy ladykins,
Leaning from the window-sill
Of a rose or daffodil,
Listening to their serenade
All of cricket music made.
Follow me, oh, follow me!
Ho! away to Faerie!
Where your eyes like mine may see
There are fairies.—Verily,
There are fairies.

III

There are fairies. Elves that swing
In a wild and rainbow ring
Through the air; or mount the wing
Of a bat to courier news
To the fairy King and Queen:
Fays, who stretch the gossamers
On which twilight hangs the dews;

131

Who, within the moonlight sheen,
Whisper dimly in the ears
Of the flowers words so sweet
That their hearts are turned to musk
And to honey; things that beat
In their veins of gold and blue:
Ouphes, that shepherd moths of dusk—
Soft of wing and gray of hue—
Forth to pasture on the dew.
There are fairies; verily;
Verily;
For the old owl in the tree,
Hollow tree,
He who maketh melody
For them tripping merrily,
Told it me.
There are fairies.—Verily,
There are fairies.

132

ON MIDSUMMER NIGHT

I

All the poppies, in their beds
Nodding crumpled, crimson heads;
And the larkspurs, in whose ears
Twilight hangs, like twinkling tears,
Sleepy jewels of the rain;
All the violets, that strain
Eyes of amaranthine gleam;
And the clover-blooms that dream
With pink baby-fists closed tight,—
They can hear upon this night,
Noiseless as the moon's white light,
Footsteps and the glimmering flight,
Shimmering flight,
Of the Fairies.

II

Every sturdy four-o'-clock,
In its variegated frock;
Every slender sweet-pea, too,

133

In its hood of pearly hue;
Every primrose pale that dozes
By the wall and slow uncloses
A sweet mouth of dewy dawn
In a little silken yawn,—
On this night of silvery sheen,
They can see the Fairy Queen,
On her palfrey white, I ween,
Tread dim cirques of haunted green,
Moonlit green,
With her Fairies.

III

Never a foxglove-bell, you see,
That's a cradle for a bee;
Never a lily, that's a house
Where the butterfly may drowse;
Never a rose-bud or a blossom,
That unfolds its honeyed bosom
To the moth, that nestles deep
And there sucks itself to sleep,—
But can hear and also see,
On this night of witchery,
All that world of Faerie,
All that world where airily,
Merrily,
Trip the Fairies.

134

IV

It was last Midsummer Night,
In the moon's uncertain light,
That I stood among the flowers,
And, in language unlike ours,
Heard them speaking of the Pixies,
Trolls and Gnomes and Water-Nixes;
How in this flow'r's ear a Fay
Hung a gem of rainy ray;
And round that flow'r's throat had set,
Dim, a dewdrop carcanet;
Then among the mignonette
Stretched a cobweb-hammock wet,
Dewy wet,
For the Fairies.

V

Long I watched, but never a one,
Ariel, Puck, or Oberon,
Mab, or Queen Titania—
Fairest of them all they say—
Clad in morning-glory hues,
Did I glimpse among the dews.
Only once I thought the torch
Of that elfin-rogue and arch,

135

Robin Goodfellow, afar
Flashed along a woodland bar—
Bright, a jack-o'-lantern star,
A green lamp of firefly spar,
Glow-worm spar,
Loved of Fairies.

136

THE DANCE OF THE FAIRIES

On the glimmering coppice,
From her shadowy hair,
Long, silvery poppies
Of moon-litten air
The Night hath flung there.

In the fern-fronded hollow
The fireflies stream,
Uncertainly follow,
With lanterns of gleam,
Some spirit or dream.

The forest is fragrant;
The night-hazes swirl
And trail,—through the vagrant
Deep ferns that unfurl,—
Faint footsteps of pearl.

From hill and from valley,
Where the moon is at home;
From rocks,—musically,—
Where singing streams comb
Wild tresses of foam;

137

With a ripple and twinkle
Of luminous arms,
And footfalls that tinkle
The darkness, in swarms
Of flower-like forms:

We speed to the revel
From bloom and from brier,
With locks that dishevel,
And feet, like the fire,
Winged wild with desire.

Like the wind on the mountain,
We circle and dance;
Like the foam of the fountain,
That sings of romance,
We glimmer and glance.

Swift, swift we go swinging
Down the slanted moonbeam,
In spirals faint flinging
A rainbow-rayed gleam
On sward and on stream.

You may hear, like a murmur,
The swirl of our hair;

138

Our footfall; no firmer
Than leaves on the air
When branches blow bare.

To men who are favored
In spiritual wise,
Whose hearts have not quavered
To see us, we rise
And doff all disguise.

Come away then, come hither,
In the moon-blossomed night!
Ere the star-flowers wither,
And Morning, the white,
Reaps, mows them with light.

Come hither, where singing
Sounds softer than tears,
Or kisses, sweet clinging,
Or music one hears
With memory's ears.

Come join us, whose kisses
Are waiting for you;
Come, catch at our tresses,
And dance through the dew!
Come away, and pursue!

139

Come, come to the coppice,
The violet ridge;
The torrent, whose top is
A rainbow,—a bridge
We tread like the midge.—

Come, mortal, come hither!
Come dance with your dreams,
Ere the golden spark wither
Of the glow-worm that gleams
Like a star in still streams.

140

THE CHANGELING

In the night I heard the sea;
Saw the round moon, white as wool,
Or a bloom in Faerie,
Rise above the hawthorn-tree,
White and wonderful,
Weird and wonderful.

Through the door there came to me
Breezy whispers, fragrant as
Wafts that rock the honey-bee,
Cradled sweet in Arcady,
In the bluebelled grass,
In the rose-strewn grass.

Then I saw them; suddenly;
Three red caps against the moon;—
And three voices whispered me,
“We have come to dance for thee,
Sing for thee a tune,
Sing an elfin tune.”

141

They were Fairies, Fairies three:
Nearer to my crib they drew,
Singing all the time to me,
Till mine eyes closed dreamily,
Closed, and naught I knew,
And no more I knew.

While I slept I heard the three
Whispering round my baby there,
White as moonlit ivory,
In its crib of ebony,
All my joy and care,
All my love and care.

Now I sit here, as you see,
And my heart is all bereft,
Sighing, singing wearily
To this strange thing on my knee,
This wild thing they left,
Changeling that they left.

142

THE ELF-QUEEN

You ask me why I wandered wide
When Summer sighed o'er dying June?—
To see the Fairy People ride
Beneath the moon.

Wild poppies hedged a hawthorne copse,
Where glow-worms hung dim lamps of gold;
A sudden whisper bowed their tops,
And then, behold!

Between the poppies and the mead
I saw the Fairies riding down:
One fair-faced Fairy in the lead
Crowned with a crown.

The night was ringing with their reins,
So loud the cricket hushed its song;
Bells up and down their horses' manes
Swung sweet along.

143

And whistles, that took all the wind
With music when they shook their manes;
So that the fields, before, behind,
Rang with sweet strains.

And as their bridles chiming swung,
The night seemed cured of every qualm;
And my sick heart, so wild of tongue,
Was almost calm.

The steeds they rode were fairy steeds,
Of filmy form and gossamer green;
And every elf was clad in weeds
Of silken sheen.

Above, a beam of silver light
Beat time to their wild fairy tune,
And danced and glanced,—an elfin white
Not of the moon.

They were so small the harebell's blue
Had helmeted each tiny head,
Save that fair Fay, who, tall as two,
The Fairies led.

Dark tresses floated from a tire
Of diamond sparks that snapped with light;

144

And all her white sark seemed of fire
Shimmering the night.

I would have thrown me at her feet
And told her of my grief and pain;
And she, perhaps, had helped me meet
My love again.

Alas! a cock crew far away,
A long-necked cry; and, swift as thought,
The Elf-Queen and her company
Passed into naught.

145

SONG OF THE ELF

I

Where the poppies, with their shields,
Sentinel
Forest and the harvest fields,
In the bell
Of a blossom, fair to see,
There I stall the bumblebee,
My good stud;
There I stable him and hold,
Harness him with hairy gold;
There I ease his burly back
Of the honey and its sack
Filched from bloom and bud.

II

Where the glow-worm lights its lamp,
There I lie;
Where, above the grasses damp,
Moths go by;
Now within the fussy brook,

146

Where the waters wind and crook
Round the rocks,
I go sailing down the gloom
Straddling light a wisp of broom;
Or, beneath the owlet moon,
Trip it to the cricket's tune
Tossing back my locks.

III

Ere the crowfoot on the lawn
Lifts its head,
Or the glow-worm's light be gone,
Dim and dead,
In a cobweb-hammock I
Swing between two ferns and lie
Hid away;
Where the drowsy musk-rose blows
And a sleepy runnel flows,
In the land of Faery,
There I rock, where none can see,
All the summer day.

147

AN ELF SWASHBUCKLER

Ho, my bullies, lift a tune
To Queen Mab, and, come, make merry,
By a mushroom in the moon,
White as bud of berry!

Gentlemen, come! take your grog!
Each one in his cap and mantlet:
Who refuses is a dog!—
He must lift my gantlet!

Look! my gaberdine how brave!
And my tunic, ouphen yellow!
One a bat's-wing lately gave,
And a frog its fellow.

And a moth's-head grew this fine
Feather of my beetle-bonnet;
See, my gnat-sting dagger's shine
Hath its blood still on it.

148

Faith! this ring I wear, I swear,
'Twas Queen Mab who gave it: studded,
As you see, with rubies rare—
Eyes of spiders blooded.

Doubt me, sirs, and by my blade!—
Sirrahs, a good stabbing hanger!
From a hornet's stinger made!—
You may dread my anger!

Fill the lichen pottles up,
Honey pressed from hearts of roses:
Cheek by jowl, up with each cup,
Till we hide our noses.

Good, sirs!—Marry!—'Twas the cock!—
Hey, away! the moon's lost fire!—
Ho! the cock! our dial and clock—
Hide beneath this brier!

149

ON THE EVE OF ST. JOHN

(Scandinavian)

Dizzily round,
On the elf-hills, white in the mellow moonlight,
To a sweet, unholy, ravishing sound
Of wizard voices from underground,
Their mazy dance the Elle-maids wound
On St. John's Eve.

Beautiful white,
Like a wreath of mist by the starbeams kissed,
Their frail, sweet faces bloomed out of the night,
With floating tresses of firefly light,
That puffed like foam to the left and the right,
On St. John's Eve.

Fitfully there
They danced like the daughters of starlit waters,—
But I saw what a mockery all of them were,
With their hollow bodies, when the moonlit air
Rayed out of their eyes with a glow-worm glare,
On St. John's Eve.

150

I turned my feet
To the river's banks: in the rush-flowers' ranks
I heard the Necken their songs repeat:
A music all made of the water's beat,
Of moss and of whispering winds that meet,
On St. John's Eve.

They called my name;
And I saw them there, in their beauty rare,
On the moonlit waves whence the music came,
With their harps of gold, and their locks of flame
Blown over pale brows, sans sin or blame,
On St. John's Eve.

'Twas nearing morn
When I turned me home; and a wizen'd gnome,
A Nis, all gray with flailing the corn,
And strong with the scent of byre and barn,
Scowled at me under the haunted thorn,
On St. John's Eve.

To end it all,
As I passed the hill by the ruined mill,
The hill rose up on pillars tall,
Crimson pillars that ranked a hall,
Where the Dwarfs and the Trolls were holding a ball,
On St. John's Eve.

151

One reached to me
A goblet of gold of a vintage old,
And I drank, and mixed with their mirth and glee,
And danced with them for an hour, may be.—
But they tell me now 'tis a year, you see,
Since St. John's Eve.

152

THE NIXIES

Deep down, beneath the waves,
Great emerald-curving caves
Dark-domed above it,
Dim-walled with pearl and gold
Glimmers their city old—
Hast thou heard of it?—
Where, through the long green nights, the spangling spars
Twinkle like misty stars.

Where the wind-ripple rays,
And the white water sprays
Over the rocks,
Sitting, they comb their hair;
Singing, with fingers fair
Braiding their locks;
While round their loveliness of naked limbs
The moon's gold glamour swims.

Or, on some stormy night,
Seen through the glow-worm light
Haunting the sands,

153

Thou canst behold them drift
Wild thro' the foam, and lift
Pale arms and hands;
Or, in the lightning's leap, along the lake,
Dance in the tempest's wake.

Singing: “Come join our dance!
Come, while the lightnings glance,
Or when the moon
Spills all her flowers of light
At the dark feet of night;
And soon, ah, soon,
Within our shadowy halls thou shalt forget
Earth's fever and its fret.”

154

THE WATER-FAIRY

Stars above her, stars beneath,
White she rose, as white as death,
Where the waters glassed the splendor
Of a thousand thousand stars,
Twinkling where the lilies slender
Rocked above the ripple-bars.
Slow she oared a shining shoulder
To a blossom-crested boulder.
With slim fingers, long and milky,
From the wave and water-lilies,
Up the rock she drew her silky
Beauty, wild as any rill is
Flashing from a hilly height.
Sitting, dripping in the night,
Sweet she sang unto the lilies,
Sang unto the listening lilies,
Till arose the wool-white moon
In the silken hush of heaven;
Then she wreathed her brow with seven
Lily-buds, all sweet with June;
Belted, wreathed with lilies seven,
Then again upon the boulder,

155

Dark locks on a milk-white shoulder,
Wild she sang; a wilder ditty
To the wool-white moon;
To the lilies and the moon:
Beautiful and without pity,
Sang, and sang an elfin tune;
Till a youth, who wandered far,
Saw her sitting like a star;
Heard her singing to the moon;
Found her sitting, starry white,
On the flower-crested boulder,
Dark locks on a milky shoulder,
In the low moon's lilied light,
'Neath the wool-white moon. . . .
And the creature wrapped her hair
Round his white throat, sitting there
Singing, smiled into his eyes,
While she wrapped her raven hair
Slowly round his throat; and then
Laughed and whispered to the skies,
Kissed him once and then again;
Smiled; and left him stark and strangled
In the water-lilies tangled,
Staring up, with open eyes,
At the moon with open eyes.

156

THE MORNING-GLORIES

They swing from the garden-trellis
In Ariel-airy ease;
And their aromatic honey
Is sought by the earliest bees.

The rose, it knows their secret,
And the jessamine also knows:
And the rose told me the secret,
That the jessamine told the rose.

And the jessamine said: At midnight,
Ere the red cock woke and crew,
The Fays of Queen Titania
Came here to bathe i' the dew.

And the yellow moonlight glistened
On braids of elfin hair:
And fairy feet on the flowers
Fell lighter than any air.

157

And their petticoats, gay as bubbles,
They hung up, every one,
On the morning-glory's tendrils,
Till their moonlight bath were done.

But the barn-cock crew too early,
And the Fairies fled in fear,
Leaving their petticoats, one and all,
Like blossoms hanging here.

158

THE GLADIOLES

As tall as the lily, as rich as the rose,
And deep as the bloom of the hollyhock,
They lift their blossoms in furbelows
Of flame that the warm winds rock.

And some are red as the humming-bird's throat,
And some are pied as the butterfly's wings,
And each is shaped like an elfin coat,
Or a goblin cap that swings.

Freaked with fire or red as blood,
They nod at me in my garden old,
Each flower a pixy helm or hood,
Lace-lined with fairyland gold.

For you know the goblins that come at dusk,—
Whose firefly eyes you have seen,—each one,
(When is sprinkled the dew and scattered the musk,)
Hangs here his cap when done.

159

THE TIGER-LILY

Tall in his tawny turban,
A sultan 'mid his bands,
In my garden, old and urban,
The tiger-lily stands.

The poppies there that glisten,
Whose gaudy garments glow,
Are eunuchs who guard and listen
Round his seraglio

Of roses, myrrhed and musky;
Some whiter than a dove,
And others, deep and dusky,
His odalisks of love.

Circassian-white and slender,
His dancing-girls and slaves,
To the August-lilies tender,
His haughty hand he waves.

While he watches them, nothing missing,
In her bower of bloom on high,
His favorite rose is kissing
A Bedouin butterfly.

160

THE MOTH, THE ROSE, AND THE PINK

White as snow I saw it sink
On the pungent-petaled pink
Through the moonlit dusk;
Moth? or fairy? or, who knows?—
Ghost, perhaps, of some dead rose
'Mid the roses' musk.

Then it seemed I heard a sweet
Tinkle as of elfin feet
Underneath the blooms,
Where one rose hung desolate,
Sick of heart and filled with hate,
Dead with its perfumes.

“Thou, for whom I died to-day,”
So I seemed to hear it say,
“Listen, lovely pink:
Vampire-like, unto thy heart
Now I send, through my white art,
My pale ghost to drink.”

161

GLAMOUR

With fall on fall, from wood to wood,
The brook pours mossy music down—
Or is it, in the solitude,
The murmur of a Faery town?

A town of Elfland filled with bells
And holiday of hurrying feet:
Or traffic now, whose small sound swells,
Now sinks from busy street to street.

Whose Folk I often recognize
In wingéd things that hover round,
Who to men's eyes assume disguise
When on some Faery errand bound.—

The bee, that haunts the touch-me-not,
Big-bodied, making braggart din,
Is elfin brother to that sot,
Jack Falstaff of the Boar's Head Inn.

162

The dragon-fly, whose wings of black
Are mantle for his garb of green,
Is Ancient to this other Jack,
Another Pistol, long and lean.

The butterfly, in royal tints,
Is Hal, mad Hal in cloth of gold,
Who passes these, as once that Prince
Passed his companions boon of old.

163

FAERY MORRIS

I

The winds are whist; and, hid in mist,
The moon hangs o'er the wooded height:
The bushy bee, with unkempt head,
Hath made the sunflower's disk his bed,
And sleeps half-hid from sight.
The owlet makes us melody—
Come dance with us in Faery,
Come dance with us to-night.

II

The dew is damp; the glow-worm's lamp
Blurs in the moss its tawny light:
The great gray moth sinks, half-asleep,
Where, in an elfin-laundered heap,
The lily-gowns hang white.
The crickets make us minstrelsy—
Come dance with us in Faery,
Come dance with us to-night.

164

III

With scents of heat, dew-chilled and sweet,
The new-cut hay smells by the bight:
The ghost of some dead pansy bloom
The butterfly seems, in the gloom,
Its pied wings folded tight.
The world is drowned in fantasy—
Come dance with us in Faery,
Come dance with us to-night.

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THE LITTLE PEOPLE

I

When the lily nods in slumber,
And the roses are all sleeping;
When the night hangs deep and umber,
And the stars their watch are keeping:
When the clematis uncloses
Like a hand of snowy fire;
And the golden-lipped primroses,
To the tiger-moths' desire,
Each a mouth of musk unpuckers—
Silken pouts of scented sweetness,
Which they sip with honey-suckers:—
Shod with hush and winged with fleetness,
You may see the Little People,
Round and round the drowsy steeple
Of a belfried hollyhock,—
Clad in phlox and four-o'-clock,
Gay of gown and pantaloon,—
Dancing by the glimmering moon,
Till the cock, the long-necked cock,
Crows them they must vanish soon.

166

II

When the cobweb is a cradle
For the dreaming dew to sleep in;
And each blossom is a ladle
That the perfumed rain lies deep in:
When the flaming fireflies scribble
Darkness as with lines flame-tragic,
And the night seems some dim sibyl
Speaking gold, or wording magic
Silent-syllabled and golden:
Capped with snapdragon and hooded
With the sweet-pea, vague-beholden,
You may see the Little People
Underneath the sleepy steeple
Of a towering mullein stock,
Trip it over moss and rock
To the owlet's elvish tune,
And the tree-toad's gnome-bassoon;
Till the cock, the barnyard cock,
Crows them they must vanish soon.

III

When the wind upon the water
Seems a boat of ray and ripple,
That some fairy moonbeam-daughter

167

Steers, with sails that drift and dripple;
When the sound of grig and cricket,
Ever singing, ever humming,
Seems a goblin in the thicket
On his elfin viol strumming;
When the toadstool, coned and milky,
Heaves a roof for snails to clamber,
Thistledown- and milkweed-silky,
With loose locks of jade and amber,
You may see the Little People,
Underneath the pixy steeple
Of a doméd mushroom, flock,
Quaint in wildflower vest and frock,
Whirling by the waning moon
To the whippoorwill's weird tune,
Till the cock, the far-off cock,
Crows them they must vanish soon.

168

THE SEA-KING

In green sea-caverns dim,
Deep down,
Foam-bearded,—gray and grim
Beneath his crown,—
He sits where sea-things swim
And dead men frown.
In green sea-caverns dim
Deep down.

Around him mermaids sing,
Foam-clad,
And comb long locks and cling,
And sing so sad
Their song's wild murmuring
Drives mortals mad.
Around him mermaids sing,
Foam-clad.

There vast the sea-snakes lair
And yawn;
Great bulks cloud by; and there
Huge shells and spawn,

169

Weird weeds, fantastic fair,
Drift scarlet wan.
There vast the sea-snakes lair
And yawn.

Of wrecks of ships and hulls
And bones,
Sunk gold the water dulls,
And precious stones,
Anchors, and deadmen's skulls,
He builds gaunt thrones.
Of wrecks of ships and hulls
And bones.

Men's tears are dear to him,
Deep down.
Set in the foamy rim
Of his pale crown,
Their pearléd sorrows swim
Above his frown.
Men's tears are dear to him,
Deep down.

For him no tempests sweep
And sever
The league-long waves that leap;
The sun shines never:

170

In caverns vast and deep
He sits forever.
For him no tempests sweep,
Never, ah, never.

171

THE NEREID

I

I saw one night a Nereid white
Arise from her coral caves:
Her sea-green curls were pale with pearls,
And her limbs were veiled with the waves.
Through the moonlit foam I saw her come
Up the billow-haunted shore—
And faint and sweet I heard her feet,
Foam-like, through the surf's long roar;
While ever the wind and the rolling waves
Kept time to her song of ocean caves,
That she sang to her harp of mist and moon,
Of moonbeam shell: this ocean tune:—

II

“Come follow, come follow, to caverns hollow,
That sound with the sighing sea!
Come follow me o'er the waters hoar!—
Come away, come away with me!
Come follow, oh, follow, to grottoes hollow,
And caves that are ocean-whist,

172

Where the sea-weeds twine and the star-fish shine,
And the rosy corals twist.

“Come follow me home on the wandering foam,
That rolls my world above!
My bosom shall bear thee safely where
The Sea-nymphs dream of love.
They will lie at thy feet and thy heart shall beat
To the music of their sighs;
They will lean to thy face and, like stars, thou shalt trace
Their radiant, love-lit eyes.

“Come away, come away! where, under the spray,
The haliötis glows,
The nautilus gleams and the sponge-grove dreams,
And the crimson dulse like sunset streams,
And the coral-forest grows.
Come away to my caves, my emerald caves,
From the moon and the sun deep hid!
Forget the world, down under the waves,—
The world of man that sighs and slaves,—
Forget the world, there under the waves,
In the arms of a Nereid!”

173

THE MERMAID

The moon in the east was glowing
When I sought the moaning sea;
The winds from the sea were blowing,
And they brought strange dreams to me.

The waves at my feet were breaking;
The stars in the sky were wan;
And I watched a white mist making
For the shore and glimmering on.

And was it a sound of wailing
That the sea-wind bore to me?
Did I hear a footstep trailing?
Or was it a wave of the sea?

The night hung pale above me
Upon her starry throne,
And a voice said, “Youth, come love me!
For my heart for thee makes moan.”

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And out of the mist came slipping
A mermaid, tall and fair;
Her limbs with sea-dew dripping,
And moonlight in her hair.

Her locks, with the salt sea dripping,
She wrung with a snowy hand;
Her gown hung, thinly clipping
Her breasts the sea-wind fanned.

Amort from the sea came speeding
This creature samite-clad;
And my heart for her was bleeding,
But its beating I forbade.

On the strand where the sand was rocking
She stood and sang an air;
And the winds in her hair kept locking
Their fingers cool and bare.

Soft in her arms did she fold me,
And evermore she moaned,
While her love and her grief she told me,
And the ocean sighed and groaned.

But I stilled my heart's wild beating,
For I knew her love was dim;

175

Oh, cold, oh, cold was my greeting,
Though my love burnt in each limb.

To her bosom white she pressed me
With arms of foam and mist;
With her arms and her lips caressed me,
And smiled in my eyes and kissed.

But ever I kept repeating,
“A mermaid false is she!”
And cold, oh, cold was my greeting,
Though the heart beat wild in me.

To my ears she laid her sighing
Sweet mouth, like a rosy shell;
Her arms round my neck were lying,
And her bosom rose and fell.

With her kisses soft did she woo me,
But I hushed my heart's wild beat;
With her lips and her eyes did she sue me,
But met in my own defeat.

With the cloud of her sea-dipped tresses
She veiled her beautiful face—
And, oh, how I longed for her kisses,
And sighed for her soft embrace!

176

But out in the mist she went wailing
When dawn besilvered the night,
Her robes of samite trailing
The foam-flowers, sad and white.

Like a spirit lost went sighing
In the twilight over the sea;
And it seemed the night was crying—
Or was it the heart in me?

Then she turned to me and, weeping,
Faded into the night;
And I saw the wild waves leaping
Under the haunted height.

I heard a far-off sobbing,
A sound of agony—
Oh, was it the ocean throbbing?
Or was it the heart in me?

But I hushed my heart's wild beating,
With “a mermaid false is she!”
While ever I kept repeating,
“Would she'd return to me!”

Oh, heart, so full of yearning
For a loveliness that's gone,
A beauty unreturning,
Be still! or break with dawn!

177

CHILDREN O' THE MOON

I

To-night, perhaps, after the rain is done,
Led by a moonbeam or the flickering torch
The firefly flares, amid the loneliness,
The hereditary loneliness of the trees,
I, too, may see,—as sees the star that peeps
Through interlacing boughs, the toadstools heave
Their white roofs through the ferns, like goblin huts,
An elfin town; and, squatting on their tops,
Punch-bellied things, peak-kneed, their knees updrawn
To perpendicular eyes of glow-worm flame,
And arms akimbo i' the light o' the moon,
Watching the dew-drops tag the toadstools' rims,
Or from the mushroom roll the orbéd rain:
Or, where the tall weed drips and spunkwood smells
Make musk the underwoods, slim woodland imps,—

178

Snail-eyed, frog-footed,—oust the sleeping bees
From rocking cradles of the wild flowers' bells
Belfrying, with foxglove-purple, a moonbeam space.

II

On the road in the April wood,
Under the oaks I stopped and stood,
Watching the mole that stealthily heaved
The soft loose clay of its barrow:
The oaks above were auburn-leaved;
And near me bloomed the yarrow;
When down from a leaf a gray snail fell,
Its long stilt-eyes thrust out of its shell:
And I thought, “This color is worn of the fays,
Whose fashion runs to dimmish grays:
A snail-brown tunic each elfin eunuch
Wears in the harem the Elf King keeps:
And a snail-gray gown each fairy clown
Dons when the elf dance whirls and leaps
In the light of the moon on the upland down.
A snail-shell house for his ouphen spouse
Each elfin builds by the snail-white moon,
Where his fairykin love he boards and beds,
Under the dandelion's wisp-white heads,
Where ever he pipes his cricket tune.

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III

The sphinx-moth, clothed in downy hues,
In woolly whites and fawns and blues,
Goes fluttering through the evening dews.

Above the nicotiana's blooms'
Narcotic horns it waves its plumes,
Made drowsy with the drugged perfumes.

It seems some Fairy Queen who goes
'Mid trumpets lifted in long rows
Of white whereon the Elfworld blows.

Attendant and triumphant strains
Of fragrance, greeting her who reigns,
Who takes the air in fairy lanes
Of flowers, that the moonlight stains.

180

A MOTIVE IN GOLD AND GRAY

I

To-night he sees their star bead, dewy bright,
Deep in the pansy, eve hath made for it,
Low in the west—a placid purple lit
At its far edge with warm auroral light:
Love's planet hangs above a cedared height;
And there in shadow, like gold music writ
Of dusk's dark fingers, scale-like fireflies flit
Now up, now down the balmy bars of night.
How different from that eve a year ago!
Which was a stormy flower in the hair
Of dolorous day, whose sombre eyes looked blurred
Into night's sibyl face, and saw the woe
Of parting here, and imaged a despair,
As now a hope caught from a homing word.

II

She came unto him—as the springtime does
Unto the land where all lies dead and cold,
Until her rosary of days is told

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And beauty, prayer-like, blossoms where death was.—
Nature divined her coming; yea, the dusk
Seemed thinking of that happiness: behold,
No cloud it had to blot its marigold
Moon—great and golden—o'er the slopes of musk;
Whereon earth's voice made music; tree and stream
Lilting the same low lullaby again,
To coax the wind, who romped among the hills
All day—a tired child—to sleep and dream:
When through the moonlight of the locust-lane
She came, as spring comes through her daffodils.

III

White as a lily molded of Earth's milk
That eve the moon bloomed in a hyacinth sky;
Soft in the gleaming glens the wind went by,
Faint as a phantom clothed in unseen silk:
Bright as a Naiad's limbs, from shine to shade
The runnel twinkled through the shaken brier;
Above the hills one long cloud, pulsed with fire,
Flashed like a great enchantment-welded blade.
And when the western sky seemed some weird land,

182

And night a witch's spell, at whose command
One sloping star fell green from heav'n; and deep
The warm rose opened, for the moth to sleep;
Then she, consenting, laid her hands in his,
And lifted up her lips for their first kiss.

IV

There where they part the porch's steps are strewn
With wind-dropped petals of the purple vine;
Athwart the porch the shadow of a pine
Cleaves the white moonlight; and, like some calm rune
Heaven says to Earth, shines the majestic moon;
And now a meteor draws a lilac line
Across the welkin, as if God would sign
The perfect poem of this night of June.
The wood-wind stirs the flowering chestnut-tree,
Whose curving blossoms strew the glimmering grass
Like crescents that wind-wrinkled waters glass;
And, like a moonstone in a frill of flame,
The dewdrop trembles in the peony,
As in a lover's heart his sweetheart's name.

183

V

In after years shall she stand here again,
In heart regretful? and with lonely sighs
Think on that night of love, and realize
Whose was the fault whence grew the parting pain?
And, in her soul, persuading still in vain,
Shall doubt take shape, and all its old surmise
Bid darker phantoms of remorse arise
Trailing the raiment of a dead disdain?
Masks, unto whom shall her avowal yearn
With looks clairvoyant, seeing how each is
A different form with eyes and lips that burn
Into her heart with love's last look and kiss?—
And, ere they pass, shall she behold them turn
To her a face which evermore is his?

VI

In after years shall he remember how
Dawn had no breeze sweet as her murmured name?
And day no sunlight that availed the same
As her bright smile or beauty of her brow?
Nor had the conscious twilight's golds and grays
Her soul's allurement, that was free from blame,—

184

Nor dusk's advances, soft with starry flame,
More young bewitchment than her own sweet ways.—
Then as the night with moonlight and perfume,
And dew and darkness, qualifies the whole
Dim world with glamour, shall the past with dreams—
That were the love-theme of their lives—illume
The present with remembered hours, with gleams,
Long lost to him, that bring them soul to soul?

VII

No! not for her and him that part—the Might-
Have-Been's sad consolation! where had bent,
Haply, in prayer and patience penitent,
Both, though apart, before no blown-out light.
The otherwise of fate for them, when white
The lilacs bloom again, and, innocent,
Spring comes with beauty for her testament,
Singing the praises of the day and night.
When orchards blossom and the distant hill
Is pale with haw-trees as a ridge with mist,
The moon shall see him where a watch he keeps
By her young form that lieth white and still,
With lidded eyes and passive wrist on wrist,
While by her side he bows himself and weeps.

185

VIII

What pain for him to see the blooms appear
Of haw and dogwood in the spring again;
The primrose dragging with its weight of rain,
And hill-sloped orchards swarming far and near.
To see the old fields, that her steps made dear,
Grow green with deepening plenty of the grain,
Yet feel how this excess of life is vain,—
How vain to him!—since she no more is here.
What though the woodland bourgeon, water flow,
Like a rejoicing harp, beneath the boughs!
The cat-bird and the oriole arouse
Day with the impulsive music of their love!
Beneath the graveyard sod she will not know,
Nor what his heart is all too conscious of!

IX

How bless'd is he who, gazing in the tomb,
Can yet behold beneath the investing mask
Of mockery,—whose horror seems to ask
Sphinx-riddles of the soul within the gloom,—
Upon dead lips no dust of Love's dead bloom;
And in dead hands no shards of Faith's rent flask;

186

But Hope, who still stands at her starry task,
Weaving the web of promise on her loom!
Thrice bless'd! who, 'though he hear the tomb proclaim
How all is Death's and Life Death's other name,
Can yet reply: “O Grave, these things are yours!
But that is left which life indeed assures—
Love, through whose touch I shall arise the same!
Love, of whose self was wrought the universe!”

187

INTIMATIONS

I

Is it uneasy moonlight,
On the restless field, that stirs?
Or wild white meadow-blossoms
The night-wind bends and blurs?

Is it the dolorous water,
That sobs in the wood and sighs?
Or heart of an ancient oak-tree,
That breaks and, sighing, dies?

The wind is vague with the shadows
That wander in No-Man's-Land;
The water is dark with the voices
That weep on the Unknown's strand.

O ghosts of the winds that call me!
O ghosts of the whispering waves!
Sad as forgotten flowers
That die upon nameless graves!

188

What is this thing you tell me
In tongues of a twilight race,
Of death, with the vanished features,
Mantled, of my own face?

II

The old enigmas of the deathless dawns,
And riddles of the all immortal eves,—
That still o'er Delphic lawns
Speak as the gods spoke through oracular leaves—
I read with new-born eyes,
Remembering how, a slave,
They buried me, a living sacrifice,
Once in a dead king's grave.

Or, crowned with hyacinth and helichrys,
How, towards the altar in the marble gloom,—
Hearing the magadis
Dirge through the pale amaracine perfume,—
'Mid chanting priests I trod,
With never a sigh or pause,
To give my life to pacify a god,
And save my country's cause.

Again: Cyrenian roses on wild hair,
And oil and purple smeared on breasts and cheeks,

189

How, with mad torches there,—
Reddening the cedars of Cithæron's peaks,—
With gesture and fierce glance,
Lascivious Mænad bands
Once drew and slew me in the Pyrrhic dance
With Bacchanalian hands.

III

The music now that lays
Dim lips against my ears,
Some far-off thing it says,—
Unto my soul,—of years
Long passed into the haze
Of tears.

Meseems before me are
The dark eyes of a queen,
A queen of Istakhar:
I seem to see her lean
More lovely than a star
Of mien.

A slave, I stand before
Her jeweled throne; I kneel,
And, in a song, once more
My love for her reveal;

190

How once I did adore
I feel.

Again her dark eyes gleam;
Again her red lips smile;
And in her face the beam
Of love that knows no guile;
And so she seems to dream
A while.

Out of her deep hair then
A rose she takes—and I
Am made a god 'mid men!
Her rose, that here did lie
When I, in th' wild-beasts' den,
Did die.

IV

Old paintings on its wainscots,
And, in its oaken hall,
Old arras; and the twilight
Of sorrow over all.

Old grandeur on its stairways;
And in its haunted rooms
Old souvenirs of greatness,
And ghosts of dead perfumes.

191

The winds are phantom voices
Around its carven doors;
The moonbeams, specter footsteps
Upon its polished floors.

Old cedars build around it
A solitude of sighs;
And the old hours pass through it
With immemorial eyes.

But more than this I know not;
Nor where the house may be;
Nor what its ancient secret
And ancient grief to me.

It seems my soul remembers,—
Of which this house is part,—
Once, in a former lifetime,
'Twas here I broke my heart.

V

In eons of the senses,
My spirit knew of yore,
I found the Isle of Circe
And felt her magic lore;
And still the soul remembers
What I was once before.

192

She gave me flowers to smell of
That wizard branches bore,
Of weird and wondrous beauty,
Whose stems dripped human gore—
Their scent when I remember
I know that world once more.

She gave me fruits to eat of
That grew beside the shore,
Of necromantic ripeness,
With human flesh at core—
Their taste when I remember
I know that life once more.

And then, behold! a serpent,
That glides my face before,
With eyes of tears and fire
That glare me o'er and o'er—
I look into its eyeballs,
And know myself once more.

VI

I have looked in the eyes of Poesy,
And sat in Song's high place;
And the beautiful Spirits of Music
Have spoken me face to face;

193

Yet here in my soul there is sorrow
They never can name or trace.

I have walked with the glamour Gladness,
And dreamed with the shadow Sleep;
And the presences, Love and Knowledge,
Have smiled in my heart's red keep;
Yet here in my soul there is sorrow
For the depth of their gaze too deep.

The love and the hope God grants me,
The beauty that lures me on,
And the dreams of folly and wisdom
That thoughts of the spirit don,
Are but masks of an ancient sorrow
Of a life long dead and gone.

Was it sin? or a crime forgotten?
Of a love that loved too well?
That sat on a throne of fire
A thousand years in Hell?
That the soul with its nameless sorrow
Remembers but can not tell?

194

SELF AND SOUL

It came to me in my sleep,
And I rose in my sleep and went
Out in the night to weep,
Out where the trees were bent.
With my soul, it seemed, I stood
Alone in a wind-swept wood.

And my soul said, gazing at me,
“I will show you another land
Different from that you see,”
And took into hers my hand.—
We passed from the wood to a heath
As starved as the ribs of Death.

There, every leaf and the grass
Was a thorn or a thistle hoar,
The rocks rose mass on mass,
Black bones on an iron moor.
And my soul said, looking at me,
“The past of your life you see.”

195

And a swineherd passed with his swine,
Deformed, with the face of an owl;
Two eyes of a wolfish shine
Burned under his eyebrows foul.
And my soul said, “This is the Lust,
That soils my beauty with dust.”

Then a goose-wife hobbled by,
On a crutch, with the devil's geese,
A-mumbling that God is a lie,
And cursing the world without cease.
And my soul said, “This is Unfaith
Who maketh me that which she saith.”

Then we came to a garden, close
To a hollow of graves and tombs;
A garden as red as a rose,
Hung over of obscene glooms;
The heart of each rose was a spark
That smouldered or glared in the dark.

And I was aware of a girl
With a wild-rose face, who came,
With a mouth like a shell's split pearl,
Rose-clad in a robe of flame;
And she plucked the roses and gave,
And I was her veriest slave.

196

She vanished. My lips would have kissed
The flowers she gave me with sighs,
But they writhed from my hands and hissed,
In their hearts were a serpent's eyes.
And my soul said, “Pleasure is she.
The joys of the flesh you see.”

Then I bowed with a heart too weary,
That longed to rest, to sleep;
And it seemed in the darkness dreary
I heard my sad heart weep;
And my soul to the silence say,—
“O God! for the break of day!”

197

THE OLD HOUSE BY THE MERE

Five rotting gables look upon
A garden rank with flowers and weeds;
Old iron gates on posts of stone,
From which the grass-grown roadway leads.
Five rotting gable-points appear
Above bleak yews and cedars sad,
Beneath which lies the sleepy mere
In lazy lilies clad.

At morn the slender dragon-fly,
A living ray of light, darts past;
The burly bee comes charging by
Winding a surly blast.
At noon amid the fervid leaves
The insects quarrel, harsh and hot;
In bitter briers the spider weaves
A web with silver shot.

At eve the hermit cricket rears
A plaintive prayer, and creaks and creaks;
The bat, like some wing'd elfin, veers
Beneath the sunset's streaks.

198

The caterpillar gnaws the leaf;
The mottled toad croaks drowsily;
And then the owl, like some dark grief,
Cries in the old beech-tree.

At night the blistering dew comes down
And lies as white as autumn frost
Upon the green, upon the brown—
You'd think each bush a ghost.
The crescent moon sheathes its white sword
Within a cloud; and, gray with fear,
One large blue star keeps stealthy guard
Above the house and mere.

The livid lilies rotting lie
On oozy beds of weltering leaves;
The will-o'-wisps go flickering by,—
And then the water heaves,
And, like some monstrous blossom there,
A maiden's corpse with staring eyes,
And naked breast and raven hair,
Slow in the mere doth rise.

And when the clock of some far town
Knells midnight, in that house of sins,
In haunted chambers, up and down,
The dance of death begins;

199

And stiff, stiff silks sweep, rustling,
And stately satins none may see;
And then soft sounds of music ring
In wildest melody.

And through the halls the demon dance
Whirls onward; and dark corridors
Resound with song and feet that glance
Along the falling floors.
Then suddenly, as if in fear,
The music ends, the dance is done;
And booming over house and mere
A far-off clock strikes one.

200

IN AN OLD GARDEN

The autumn glory fades
Upon the withered trees;
And over all the dead leaves fall
And whisper in the breeze.

The violets are dead,
And dead the hollyhocks,
That hang like rags by the wind-crushed flags
And tiger-lily stocks.

The wild gourd clambers free
Where the clematis was wont;
Where nenuphars bloomed thick as stars
Rank weeds fill up the fount.

Yet, as in dreams, I hear
A tinkling mandolin
In the dark-blue light of a fragrant night
Float in and out and in.

201

Till the dewy vine, that climbs
To a casement's lattice, sways;
And behind the vine, like stars that shine,
Two dark eyes gleam and gaze.

And now a perfume comes,
A swift Favonian gust;
And the shrivelled grass, where it doth pass,
Bows worshiping to the dust.

I seem to see her drift
From tree to moonlit tree,
In her jewelled shawl divinely tall,
A mist of drapery.

And one awaits her there
By the broken Psyche old;
And there they stand, pale hand in hand,
Her thin wrists hooped with gold.

But a wind sweeps overhead,
And the frosty leaves are strewn—
And nothing is there but a bough, blown bare,
And the light of the ghostly moon.

202

THE HAUNTED ROOM

Its casements, diamond-disked with glass,
Look down upon a terrace old,
Where urns, unkempt with ragged grass,
Foam o'er with hoary cold.
The snow rounds out each stair of stone;
The frozen fount is hooped with pearl;
Down desolate walks, like phantoms blown,
Thin, powdery snow-wreaths whirl.

And to each rose-tree's stem, that bends
With silvery snow-combs, glued with frost,
It seems each summer rosebud sends
Its airy, scentless ghost.
A stiff Elizabethan pile,
With bleakness chattering in its panes,
Where, rumbling down each chimney-file,
The mad wind shakes his reins.

203

Lone in the northern angle, dim
With immemorial dust, it lies;
Where each gaunt casement's stony rim
Stares eyelike at the skies.
Drear in the old pile's oldest wing,
Hung round with mouldering arras, where
Tall, shadowy Tristrams fight and sing
For shadowy Isolts fair.

Beside a crumbling cabinet
A tarnished lute lies on the floor;
A talon-footed chair is set,
Grotesquely, near the door.
A carven, testered bedstead stands
With rusty silks draped all about;
And, like a moon in murky lands,
A mirror glimmers out.

Neglected, locked that chamber, where
In dropping arras dimly clings
The drowsy moth; and, frightened there,
The lost wind sighs and sings
Adown the roomy flue, and takes
And swings the ghostly mirror till
It seems some unseen hand that shakes
Its frame then leaves it still.

204

A starving mouse forever gnaws
Behind a panel; and the vines,
That on the casement tap like claws,
Lattice the floor with lines.—
I have been there when blades of light
Stabbed each dull, stained, and dusty pane;
Once I was there at dead of night—
I dream of it again. . . .

She grew upon my vision as
Heat grows that haunts the summer day;
In taffetas, like glimmering glass,
She stood there dim and gray.
And will-o'-wisp-like jewels bound
Faint points of light round neck and wrist;
And round her slender waist was wound
A zone of silver mist.

And icy as some winter land
Her pale, still face; o'er which the night
Hung of her raven hair; her hand
Was beautiful and white.
Before the mirror moaningly
She wrung her hands and palely pressed
Her brow.—And did I dream, or see,
That blood was on her breast?

205

And then she vanished.—Like a breath,
That o'er the limpid glass had passed,
Her presence passed; and cold as death
She left me and aghast.
Yes, I've been there when spears of light
Pierced thro' each stained and sunlit pane;
Once I was there at dead of night—
I dream of it again.

206

THE MIRROR

An ancient mirror hangs
Within an ancient Hall;
In a lonely room where th' arrased gloom
Scowls from the pictured wall.

A mystic mirror, framed
In ebon, wildly carved,
That seems to stare on the shadows there,
Like something lean and starved.

A mirror, where one sees
In the broad, good light of day,
Like crimson torches, at the window arches,
Red roses swing and sway.

And a part o' the garth is seen,
With its quaint stone-dial plate,
That, gray and old, green-stained with mold,
Stands near the lioned gate.

207

These it reflects all day,
And at night one star of blue,
That the nightingale, where the rose is pale,
Lifts its passionate love-song to.

The nightbird sings below;
The stars hang bright above;
And the roses soon in the sultry moon
Shall palpitate with love.

The nightbird sobs below;
The roses blow and bloom;
Through mullioned panes the moonlight rains
In the dim, unholy room.

Grim ancestors that stare,—
Stiff, starched and haughty,—down
From the oaken wall of the noble hall,
Put on a sterner frown.

The old, hoarse castle-clock
Coughs midnight overhead—
And the rose is wan and the bird is gone
When walk the shrouded dead.

Then from their frames, it seems,
The portraits' shadows flit;

208

By the mirror there they stand and stare
And weep or sigh to it.

In rare rich ermine, earls
And knights in gold and vair,
With a rapiered throng of courtiers long
Pass with a stately stare.

With jewels and perfumes,
In powder, ruff, and lace,
Tall ladies pass by the looking-glass
Each sighing at her face.

What secret does it hide,
This mirror, gaunt and tall,
In this lonely room, where th' arrased gloom
Scowls from the pictured wall?

209

THE HALL OF DARKNESS

Within her veins it beats
And burns within her brain,
As year by year more sad and sear
Grow barren hill and plain.

Ah! over young is she
Who bears within her breast
More pain and woe than women know,
And all of love's unrest.

Seven towers of shaggy rock
Rise black to ragged skies,
From out a fen where bones of men
Stare with their empty eyes.

Eternal sunset pours,
Around its warlock towers,—
From out its urn of beams that burn,—
Long fire-cloudy flowers.

210

On bat-like turrets high,
And owlet battlements,
Huge condors dream and vultures scream
As at the battle's scents.

Within the banquet-hall,
A bride, rich-robed and pale,
She sits at board with men o' the sword
Cased all in silver mail.

Their visors barred are drawn;
Their hands are gauntletéd;
And one, behold! in glittering gold
Sits at the table's head.

Wild music echoes through
The hollow-sounding air—
It seems, at least, a wedding feast
With richness everywhere.

Wild music oozes from
The ceiling, groined with white
Pure pearl, and floors, like mythic shores,
Of limpid chrysolite.

Silent they sit at feast,
And she, whom he sits near,—

211

He in gold mail,—why is she pale,
As one with grief and fear?

The heav'ns grow slaughter-red,
Grow blood-red west and east;
Seven casements high that frame the sky
Flare on the blood-red feast.

Gaunt torches tall they seem,
Red revel-torches seven;—
And then, behold! the hour is tolled;
A great bell strikes eleven.

Silence.—The light, that makes
Each plate a splash of fire,—
Gold-splintered,—dims; and softer swims
The music of each lyre.

Grave Silence, like a king,
At that strange feast has place;
Grave Silence still as God's own will
Within the deeps of space.

She leans to him in gold,
And to him seems to say—
“The night grows late, my love! Why wait?
Ah God! would it were day!

212

“Would it were day, ah God!
How long is it till dawn?—
Why wear this mask?—Undo thy casque!
The midnight hour comes on!”

Silent he sits, severe;
Then one sonorous tower,
Owl-swarmed, that looms in glaring glooms,
Tolls slow the midnight hour.

Three strokes; the knights arise,
The silence from them flung,
Like waves that mock some hoarse sea-rock,
Wild laughter moves each tongue.

Six strokes; and wailing out
The music hoots away;
The fiery glimmer of heaven grows dimmer,
The red turns ghostly gray.

Nine strokes; and, dropping mold,
The crumbling Hall is lead;
The plate is rust; the feast is dust;
The banqueters are dead.

Twelve strokes pound out and roll;
The vast Hall heaves and waves

213

With things that crawl from floor and wall—
Spawn of a thousand graves.

Then rattling in the night
His golden visor slips—
In rotting mail a death's-head pale
Kisses her loathing lips.

Then over all a voice
Crying above the strife—
“Death is the Groom: this Hall, the Tomb:
The Bride, behold, is Life!”

214

WHAT DREAMS MAY COME

I have lain for an hour or twain
Awake, and the tempest is beating
On the roof and the sleet on the pane,
And the winds are three enemies meeting;
And I listen and hear it again,
My name, in the silence, repeating.

Then dumbness of death; and, moon-gray,
In the darkness a light like a bubble,
From which, like a single white ray,
Comes a woman in loveliness double;
Her face is the breaking of day,
Her eyes are the night and its trouble.

I move not; she lies with her lips
At mine; and I feel she is drawing
My life from my heart to their tips,
My heart where the horror is gnawing;
My life in a hundred slow sips,
My soul with her gaze overawing.

215

She binds me with merciless eyes;
She drinks of my blood; and I hear it
Drain up with a shudder and rise
To the lips, like a serpent's, that steer it;
And she lies, and she laughs as she lies,
Saying, “Lo! thy affinitized spirit.”

I pray—and a gate, as of swords,—
'Mid torments and tortures huge-grated,
Clangs iron deep under; and words
Are heard as of sins that awaited
A fiend who lashed into their hordes,
And a demon who lacerated.

I pray—and lie clammy and stark,
As a something mounts higher and higher,
Up, out of damnation and dark,
With hobbling of hoofs that is dire;
A devil, whose breath is a spark,
Whose face is of filth and of fire.

“To thy body's corruption! thy grave!
Thy hell! from which thou hast stolen!”
He snarls; and the night, like a wave,
Engulfs them with darkness wild swollen.—
Can it be that in sleep I'm a slave
Of a thing neither flesh nor eidolon?

216

THAT HOUR

When she was dead, a voice—she knew not whose—
Said to her: “Soul that fell,
To cheer thee there in Hell,
Of all thy life's lost happiness now choose.

“Ask what thou wilt, thou, who hast walked 'mid flowers
And songs the easy way
Of pleasure day by day,
Ask what thou wilt of all thy lived-out hours.”

And then she thought: “Oh, shall it be when there,
A blameless maiden, I,
Dreaming, watched love draw nigh,
And felt his kiss rose-sweet on mouth and hair?

217

“Or shall it be when, that white night, his fingers
Smoothed from my brow the curls,
And fell, like unstrung pearls,
His words of passionate love whose memory lingers?

“Or shall it be when over earth and sea
I heard the sweet unrest
Within his ardent breast,
His heart that beat alone for me, for me?

“Or shall it be when, in his belting arms,
Soul gazed on kindred soul,
And love had won the goal
Of his desire, and his were all my charms?

“No! no! not these! that hour he left me lost!
Stunned, fallen and despised
Before the world he prized,
When—God forgive me!—when I loved him most!”

218

EPILOGUE

Beyond the moon, within a land of mist,
Lies the dim Garden of all Dead Desires,
Walled round with morning's clouded amethyst,
And haunted of the sunset's shadowy fires;
There all lost things we loved hold ghostly tryst—
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.

Sad are the stars that day and night exist
Above the Garden of all Dead Desires;
And sad the roses that within it twist
Deep bow'rs; and sad the wind that through it quires;
But sadder far are they who there hold tryst—
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.

There, like a dove upon the twilight's wrist,—
Soft in the Garden of all Dead Desires,—

219

Sleep broods; and there, where never a serpent hissed,
On the wan willows music hangs her lyres,
Æolian dials by which phantoms tryst—
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.

There you shall hear low voices; kisses kissed,
Faint in the Garden of all Dead Desires,
By lips the anguish of vain song makes whist;
And meet with shapes that art's despair attires;
And gaze in eyes where all sweet sorrows tryst—
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.

Thither we go, dreamer and realist,
Bound for the Garden of all Dead Desires,
Where we shall find, perhaps, all Life hath missed,
All Life hath longed for when the soul aspires;
All Earth's elusive loveliness at tryst—
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.

University of Virginia Library

[POEMS OF MYSTERY]

PROEM

HAUNTED

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

THE ELIXIR OF LOVE

GLORAMONE

THE IMAGE IN THE GLASS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

THE LEGEND OF THE STONE

THE RUINED MILL

ON FLOYD'S FORK

THE WOMAN BY THE WATER

A STREET OF GHOSTS

BEFORE THE TOMB

FLAMENCINE

I

II

III

IV

V

HILDEGARD

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

ROMAUNT OF THE OAK

A REED SHAKEN WITH THE WIND

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

X

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

WOMAN'S PORTION

I

II

KU KLUX

AT DAWN

PRÆTERITA

I

II

IN SHADOW

I

II

III

IV

IN THE OWL-LIGHT

I

II

III

ASHLY MERE