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The Dread Voyage: Poems

Chapter 17: THE WERE-WOLVES.
By Wilfred Campbell
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Poetry

About This Book

The collection gathers lyrical and narrative poems that move between storm-borne sea voyages, winter and seasonal landscapes, and intimate meditations on love, guilt, death, and memory. Imagery is vivid and elemental—wind, ice, waves, and night recur—while voices shift from elegiac solitude to dramatic confession. Several pieces use dreamlike and mythic resonance to explore fate and remorse; others observe rural and shoreline scenes with tonal shifts from awe to foreboding. The sequence alternates compressed narrative episodes and reflective lyrics, creating an atmosphere of haunting inevitability and contemplative mourning.

THE WERE-WOLVES.

They hasten, still they hasten, From the even to the dawn; And their tired eyes gleam and glisten Under north skies white and wan. Each panter in the darkness Is a demon-haunted soul, The shadowy, phantom were-wolves, Who circle round the Pole.
Their tongues are crimson flaming, Their haunted blue eyes gleam, And they strain them to the utmost O’er frozen lake and stream; Their cry one note of agony, That is neither yelp nor bark, These panters of the northern waste, Who hound them to the dark.
You may hear their hurried breathing, You may see their fleeting forms, At the pallid polar midnight, When the north is gathering storms; When the arctic frosts are flaming, And the ice-field thunders roll; These demon-haunted were-wolves, Who circle round the Pole.
They hasten, still they hasten, Across the northern night, Filled with a frighted madness, A horror of the light; Forever and forever, Like leaves before the wind, They leave the wan, white gleaming Of the dawning far behind.
Their only peace is darkness, Their rest to hasten on Into the heart of midnight, Forever from the dawn. Across far phantom ice-floes The eye of night may mark These horror-haunted were-wolves Who hound them to the dark.
All through this hideous journey, They are the souls of men Who in the far dark-ages Made Europe one black fen. They fled from courts and convents, And bound their mortal dust With demon wolfish girdles Of human hate and lust.
These who could have been god-like, Chose, each a loathsome beast, Amid the heart’s foul graveyards, On putrid thoughts to feast; But the great God who made them Gave each a human soul, And so ’mid night forever They circle round the Pole.
A praying for the blackness, A longing for the night, For each is doomed forever By a horror of the light; And far in the heart of midnight, Where their shadowy flight is hurled, They feel with pain the dawning That creeps in round the world.
Under the northern midnight, The white, glint ice upon, They hasten, still they hasten, With their horror of the dawn; Forever and forever, Into the night away They hasten, still they hasten Unto the judgment day.