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.
