My Lyrical Life :: :: University of Virginia Library

Night after night I wakened with a start
That tore the curtain-cloud of Sleep apart,
As though I had been fettered fast by Death,
Who imaged Sleep to take away my breath.
The silence looked so ominous, the gloom
Just losing shape and feature in the room:
Had I but wakened sooner, without doubt,
I should have found some dreadful secret out!
Nothing to grapple with; nothing to see:
Yet something fearful there must somewhere be;
Some shadow of the Unapparent stole
Over me, with a shiver of the soul:
Dim horrors loomed from out each hiding-nook;
A strange life lurked in the familiar look
Of innocent things, as though upon the eve
Of issuing, terrible as its prey perceive
The Mantis in the likeness of a leaf,
Changed in a moment to a Murderous Thief.
I peered out of the window,—nothing there
But the vast heavens with all their loneness bare—
The phantom presence of Immensity
That from behind its dumb mask whispered me.

At times a noise, as though a dungeon door
Had grated, with set teeth, against the floor:
A ring of iron on the stones; a sound
As if of granite into powder ground;
A mattock and a spade at work! sad sighs
As of a wave that sobs and faints and dies.

295

And then a shudder of the house; a scrawl
As though a knife scored letters in the wall.
About the room a gush and gurgle went,
As if the water-pipe got sudden vent;
Drop after drop, I heard it plop, and ping,
Into some vessel, with metallic ring.
Yet, on these very nights there was no rain;
And then, betwixt the ear's suspense and strain,
A faint voice crying in the air or brain.

The wind would rise and wail most humanly
With a low scream of stifled agony
Over the birth of life about to be.
Through all the house its coldest wave hath rushed,
Although a moment since the night was hushed.
And ere the hurried gust had ceased to moan,
The dreaming dog would answer with its groan.

At times I seemed to waken at a call,
And rose up listening for the next footfall
Which never came, as though it could not keep
The step with that my spirit caught in sleep;
For I, in waking, must have crossed the line
Bounding the range of spirit-life from mine.
I felt the Presence on that other side
Grope where some secret door might open wide.
I knew the brain might strike the electric spark
Which should make live this phantom of the Dark.
Once as I woke I could have sworn I saw
A white face from the window-pane withdraw!
But, softly in its place the curtain slid,
Even in the unlifting of the swift eyelid.

296

Sometimes I woke with lashes wet and bright
With a strange glory of delicious light,
As though an Angel had shone my shut eyes through
And filled my soul with heaven, as Dawn with dew:
A fragrance from afar with me would stay,
And at my work my heart sang all next day.

I am no Coward; never did believe
That spirits can their hell or heaven leave
To walk by night in the old human ways.
For forty years this was my creed o' days.
Somehow the dark another tale doth tell:
We are so fearful of the Unfathomable!
The Infinite is full of whisperings;
With mortal tug the wildered spirit clings
To its known shore of firm reality,
Yet feels drawn outward—like the ebbing sea
That hugs its beach so closely and in vain—
In this vast ebb of Being to its main.

And it is eerie in the night to lie
Lonesome, all naked to the awful sky—
This secret spawning-time of hell on earth,
When mist and midnight give the toadstools birth,
And worlds of shy leaf-shadowed life steal forth,—
What time the Powers of Darkness have their day;
Our world asleep and Heaven so far away:
When in the shroud-like stillness there may be
Shapes moving round us that we do not see!

297

Our little sphere of life is darkly rimmed
In the wide universe of Being brimmed
With life perhaps inimical to us!
Nor could we live if all were luminous.
But is it certain we have lost the sight
They had of old in watches of the night,
Who heard the voices, saw the shape that stood
Before them in the Soul's similitude?
They saw with eyes of spirit—Heaven keep
The veil of flesh about me dark and deep!

What does the Darkness mutter? Is it Death
That makes the light burn bluer with his breath?
Was that a creaking of the stair? a Rat
Nibbling the wainscot? did a flittering Bat
Flap at the window? Floors will crack for sure,
But may not unseen feet be on the floor?
Spirits stand rapping at Life's outer gate,
And, if we dare not open, will they wait?
Was that the Death-Watch ticking in the wall?
One's hair with reptile-life begins to crawl.
Is there some Whispering Gallery of the ear,
In which the other world we overhear?
The very Mirror is a doorway, through
Whose dark another face may look at you!

Who knows with what those ghostly gleams are rife
In spectral semblance of our sunlit life?
What Night hath shielded from pursuing Day
In sanctuary darkness, hid away,
As Paramour of hers in some foul play?
What viewless horrors in the wind may lurk,
That fill the mind with Shadows grim and murk?
What demons may be audibly at work?

298

Maybe the voices of a sunless world
That in the eclipse of night is doomward hurled:
What groping outcasts of ignoble soul
Are working through the darkness, like the mole,
Crouching in dreams to steal on sleeping Men:
Red-handed spirits that flung life back again
To Him who gave, and hide their murder-mark
In any secret corner of the dark:
Eaves-droppers leaning listening with a grin,
To think how some small keyhole-creeping sin
Will ope the door and let the Tempter in.

What wappened wantons lurking 'twixt the lights,
May lie in wait for wanderers o' nights:
What phantom shapes forlorn may meet and march
In long procession under Night's dark arch,
Stretching their arms to us, worm-fretted, all
Hueless and featureless and weirdly tall:
What rootless strays of life are ever blown
About like floating ghosts of thistle-down,
That seek a foothold and are whirled away—
Dead leaves a-dancing—vanishing sea-spray;
Homeless, as drifted clouds are hurried past
Their heaven for ever, by the driving blast.

And now we come to think, may we not hold
Ghost-hands in ours, that turn them icy cold?
A ghostly presence whitens in the cheek,
And makes the blood run water,—wan and weak
The swooning life from out us faintly fleets,
And turns to drops at the chill touch it meets.

299

The walls of flesh are waxing all too thin
To keep the world of spirits from crowding in.
We wrap the clothes about us; but, still bare
In soul, we feel a wave of chillier air,
Like that which brings the dawn, but that's a breath
Of sweet new life, this hath the feel of death!
The spirit-spiracles all open wide,
And life seems drowning in the flooding tide;
We cannot cry, the Unseen world doth strive
To seal the mouth and bury the soul alive.
I must believe in Ghosts, lying awake
With them o' nights, when flesh will creep and quake,
And lustily one pulls the Bell of Prayer,
From this thick snow of Spirits to clear the air.

No marvel that the Birds salute the Dawn,
For all the dangers of the dark withdrawn;
Break into singing with their first free breath,
That they have swum the dim, vast sea of death,
And hymn the resurrection of the Light,
In praise to Him who kept them through the night
And cared for His least little feathered things,
Encompassed with the safety of His Wings;
While those that cannot warble, twittering tell
Of darkness passed once more, and all is well.

With what a thankful heart I often heard
The blessed cry of Morning's earliest Bird!
How eagerly watched the weird and waning Night
Turn deathly pale and pass away in light.

300

Yet, I believe that God is master still.
He reigneth; He whose lightest breath can thrill
The universe of worlds like drops of dew,
And if the Spirit-world hath broken through
It cannot be unknown, unseen by Him;
It must be with His will, not their mere whim.
And if our world of breath be set aflood,
Swimming in supra-normal neighbourhood,
There is a soul within will not be drowned,
Even though a sea of spirits surges round:
An inner infinite with power to reach
The level of its outer ocean-beach!
Therefore I trust Him; shut mine eyes and say
“Lead on, O Thou, who only know'st the way!
Father in Heaven, take my hand in Thine;
Be at my heart, and in my countenance shine.
Then, all unfearing, shall I face the gate
At which the powers of Darkness lie in wait.”