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The Dread Voyage: Poems

Chapter 34: HOW ONE WINTER CAME IN THE LAKE REGION.
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.

HOW ONE WINTER CAME
IN THE LAKE REGION.

For weeks and weeks the autumn world stood still, Clothed in the shadow of a smoky haze; The fields were dead, the wind had lost its will, And all the lands were hushed by wood and hill, In those grey, withered days.
Behind a mist the blear sun rose and set, At night the moon would nestle in a cloud; The fisherman, a ghost, did cast his net; The lake its shores forgot to chafe and fret, And hushed its caverns loud.
Far in the smoky woods the birds were mute, Save that from blackened tree a jay would scream, Or far in swamps the lizard’s lonesome lute Would pipe in thirst, or by some gnarlèd root The tree-toad trilled his dream.
From day to day still hushed the season’s mood, The streams stayed in their runnels shrunk and dry; Suns rose aghast by wave and shore and wood, And all the world, with ominous silence, stood In weird expectancy:
When one strange night the sun like blood went down, Flooding the heavens in a ruddy hue; Red grew the lake, the sere fields parched and brown, Red grew the marshes where the creeks stole down, But never a wind-breath blew.
That night I felt the winter in my veins, A joyous tremor of the icy glow; And woke to hear the north’s wild vibrant strains, While far and wide, by withered woods and plains, Fast fell the driving snow.