I
This is the tale they tell
Of an Hallowe'en;
This is the thing that befell
Me and the village belle,
Beautiful Amy Dean.
II
Did I love her? God and she,
They know and I!
Ah, she was the life of me—
Whatever else may be
Would God that I could die!
III
That Hallowe'en was dim;
The frost lay white
Under strange stars and a slim
Moon in the graveyard grim,
Pale with its slender light.
IV
They told her: "Go alone,
With never a word,
To the burial-plot's unknown
Grave with the oldest stone,
When the clock on twelve is heard.
V
"Three times around it pass,
With never a sound;
Each time a wisp of grass
And myrtle pluck; then pass
Out of the ghostly ground.
VI
"And the bridegroom that's to be,
At smiling wait,
With a face like mist to see,
With graceful gallantry
Will bow you to the gate."
VII
She laughed at this and so
Bespoke us how
To the burial-place she'd go.—
And I was glad to know,
For I'd be there to bow.
VIII
An acre from the farm
The village dead
Lay walled from sun and storm;
Old cedars, of priestly form,
Waved darkly overhead.
IX
I loved; but never could say
The words to her;
And waited, day by day,
Nursing the hope that lay
Under the doubts that were.—
X
She passed 'neath the iron arch
Of the legended ground;—
And the moon, like a twisted torch,
Burned over one lonesome larch;—
She passed with never a sound.
XI
Three times the circle traced;
Three times she bent
To the grave that the myrtle graced;
Three times—then softly faced
Homeward and slowly went.
XII
Had the moonlight changed me so?
Or fear undone
Her stepping soft and slow?
Did she see and did not know?
Or loved she another one?
XIII
Who knows?—She turned to flee
With a face so white
It haunts and will haunt me:—
The wind blew gustily:
The graveyard gate clanged tight.
XIV
Did she think it I or—what,
Clutching her dress?
Her face so wild that not
A star in a stormy spot
Shows half so much distress.
XV
I spoke; but she answered naught.
"Amy," I said,
"'Tis I!"—as her form I caught...
Then laughed like one distraught,
For the beautiful girl was dead!...
XVI
This is the tale they tell
Of that Hallowe'en;
This is the thing that befell
Me and the village belle,
Beautiful Amy Dean.

MATER DOLOROSA

The nuns sing, "Ora pro nobis;"
The casements glitter above;
And the beautiful Virgin, whose robe is
Woven of infinite love,
Infinite love and sorrow,
Prays for them there on high—
Who has most need of her prayers,—to-morrow
Shall tell them!—they or I?
Up in the hills together
We loved, where the world was true;
Our world of the whin and heather,
Our skies of a nearer blue;
A blue from which one borrows
A faith that helps one die—
O Mother, thou Mother of Sorrows,
None needs such more than I!
We lived, we loved unwedded—
Love's sin and its shame that slays!—
No ill of the years we dreaded,
No day of their coming days;
Their coming days, their many
Trials by noon and night—
And I know no land, not any
Where the sun shines half so bright.
Was he false to me, my Mother!
Or I to him, my God!—
Who gave thee right, O brother!
To take God's right and rod!
God's rod of avenging morrows—
And the life here in my side!—
O Mother, sweet Mother of Sorrows,
Would that I, too, had died!
By the wall of the Chantry kneeling
I pray, and the organ rings,
"Gloria! gloria!" pealing,
"Sancta Maria!" sings.
They will find us dead to-morrow
By the wall of their nunnery—
O Mother, thou Mother of Sorrow,
His unborn babe and me.

LOVE AS IT WAS IN THE TIME OF LOUIS XIV

I
Thrice on the lips and twice on the eyes
I kiss you or ever I kiss your bosom.—
When love is young would you have it wise,
Wise as the world goes?—No! 'tis a blossom
Lovely and wise since it's lovely; content
To live or to die as its folly pleases:
Life is a rose and the rose's scent
Is love, that grows as the rose increases.
II
If I tell you the Marquis will die, will you smile?
And laugh when he's dead?—This powder, my lily,
That seems but an innocent sweet in this phial—
Do not touch it! breathe distant!—a poison Exili
Used a life to discover. Its formula left
To a pupil (well worthy the master!), the prudent
And pious Sainte Croix. Him, of teacher bereft,
The Devil, I deem, must have taken as student.
III
Quite a dealer in death. And ours was a case
That those difficult drugs of his laboratory
Demanded. I visited; found him; his face,
Bent over a sublimate,—safe from the hoary
Light particles,—masked with a mask of fine glass.
I told him your danger, Marie, and expounded
Our passion, despair, with many an "Alas!"
He smiled while a paste in a mortar he pounded.
IV
Three fistfuls of Louis!—"He'd do it," he said.—
A delicate dust, gum, liquid and metal
Crushed, crucibled.... "Stay! tie this mask on your head.
You see, but a grain on your rose's pink petal
Has shriveled and blasted it—look, how it dries!—
A perilous pulver ... could Satan make better?...
To mix with that present of perfumes—she dies,
And who is the wiser? Or, say in a letter
V
"To the husband of her who has smiled on you since
Another grows bald?"—And he poured in a bottle
The subtlety.—"Bah! be he beggar or prince,
If he kiss but the seal the venom will throttle."—
"Well," I thought, "I will test ere I risk." Slyly drew
My dagger; approached to the bandlet, that tightly
Supported his mask, its keen point.... It was true!—
When it cracked he fell dead; he but breathed of it lightly.
VI
Your letter is sealed and is sent. You are mine!—
By now he has broken the wax.... If there flutters
Some dust in his nostrils, who, who will divine
That thus it was poisoned?—Our alchemist utters
No word!—You are happy? and I?—Oh, I feel
That I love and am loved.—The tidings comes heavy
To-night to the King; you are there; you will reel—
Will faint!—Now away to the royal levee.

Note.—In this poem, which originally appeared in a volume of mine entitled Lyrics and Idylls, published in 1890, some hypercritical critic in the New York Nation accused me of imitating Browning's The Laboratory. The truth of the matter is that the poem was written ten months before I had ever read Browning's Dramatic Lyrics, and was suggested to me by the reading of the following passage in one of E. T. W. Hoffman's (the German Poe's) stories. The passage occurs in Mademoiselle De Scuderi and is as follows: "The poisons which Sainte Croix prepared were of so subtle a nature that if the powder (called by the Parisians Poudre de Succession, or Succession Powder) were prepared with the face exposed, a single inhalation of it might cause instantaneous death. Sainte Croix therefore, when engaged in its manufacture, always wore a mask of fine glass. One day, just as he was pouring a prepared powder into a phial, his mask fell off, and inhaling the fine particles of the poison, he fell dead on the spot."

THE TROUBADOUR

He stood where all the rare voluptuous west,
Like some mad Mænad, wine-stained to the breast,
Laughed with delirious lips of ruby must,
Wherein, it seemed, the fierceness of all lust
Burnt like a feverish wine, exultant whirled
High in a golden goblet, gem-impearled.
And all the west, and all the amorous west,
Caressed his beauty, dreamed upon his breast;
And there he bloomed, a thing of rose and snows,
A passion-flower of men of snowy rose,
Beneath the casement of her old red tower,
Whereat the lady sat, as fair a flower
As ever bloomed in Provence; and the lace
Mist-like about her hair, half-hid her face
And the emotions that his singing raised,
So that he knew not if she blamed or praised.
And where the white rose, climbing over and over
Up to her wide-flung lattice, like a lover,
And stalks of lavender and fleurs-de-lis
Held honey-cups up for the violent bee,
Within her garden by the ivied wall,
Where many a fountain, falling musical,
Flamed rubies in the eve against it flung,
Like some wild nightingale the minstrel sung:—
"The passion, oh, of gently smoothing through
Long locks of brown, soft hands as lovers do!
Thy dark, deep locks, rich-jeweled as the dusk
Is scintillant with stars! Oh, frenzy rare
Of clasping slender fingers round thy hair!—
What balm, what breath of winds from summer seas!
What silken softness and what sorceries
Doth it contain!—Ah God! ah God! to lie
Wrapped strand on strand deep in thy hair and die!
Ay me, oh, ay!
"Oh, happy madness and, oh, rapturous pain,
With white hands smoothing back thy locks, to drain
Into thine eyes my soul!—Oh, perilous eyes!
As agates polished; where the thoughts that rise,
Within thy heart are imaged; thoughts that pass
As magic pictures in a witch's glass.—
What siren sweetness, wailed to lyres of gold,
What naked beauty that the Greeks of old,
God-bosomed, through the bursting foam did see,
Could sway my soul with half their mastery!
Ay, ay, ay me!
"Far o'er the sea, of old time, once a witch,
The fair Ææan, Circe, dwelt; so rich
In marvellous magic, she was like a god,
And made or unmade mortals with a nod:
Turned all her lovers into bird or brute.—
More cruel thou, who mak'st my heart a lute,
That lies before thee, hushed and sadly mute!
Who let'st it lie, yet from its soul might draw
More magic music than Acrasia,
Or Circe knew, that filled them with its bliss,
Didst thou but take me to thine arms and kiss!
Ay, ay, I wis!"
Knee-deep amid the dews, the flowers there,
Beneath the stars that now were everywhere
Flung through the perfumed heavens of angel hands,
And, linked in tangled labyrinths and bands
Of soft rose-hearted flame and glimmer, rolled
One vast immensity of mazy gold,
He sang; like some hurt creature, desolate,
Heart-aching for the loss of some wild mate
Hounded and speared to death of heartless men
In old romantic Arden waste; and then
Turned to the moon that, like a polished stone
Of precious worth, low in the heaven shone,
A pale poetic face and passed away
From the urned terrace and the fountains' spray.
And that fair lady in dim drapery,
High in the old red tower—did she sigh
To see him fading through the purple night,
His lute faint-twinkling in th' uncertain light,
Then lost amid the rose-pleached avenues,
Dark walls of ivy, hedged with low-clipped yews?
And left alone with but the whispering rush
Of fountains and the evening's hyacinth hush,
Did she complain unto the stars above,
All the lone night, of that forbidden love?
Or down the rush-strewn stairs, where arras old
Waved with her mantled passage, fold on fold,
Beyond the tower's iron-studded gate,
That snarled with rust, did she steal forth and wait
Deep in the dingled lavender and rose
For him, her troubadour?... Who knows? who knows?

MY ROMANCE

If it so befalls that the midnight hovers
In mist no moonlight breaks,
The leagues of the years my spirit covers,
And my self myself forsakes.
And I live in a land of stars and flowers,
White cliffs by a silver sea;
And the pearly points of her opal towers
From the mountains beckon me.
And I think that I know that I hear her calling
From a casement bathed with light—
Thro' music of waters in waters falling
'Mid palms from a mountain height.
And I feel that I think my love's awaited
By the romance of her charms;
That her feet are early and mine belated
In a world that chains my arms.
But I break my chains and the rest is easy—
In the shadow of the rose,
Snow-white, that blooms in her garden breezy,
We meet and no one knows.
We dream sweet dreams and kiss sweet kisses;
The world—it may live or die!
The world that forgets; that never misses
The life that has long gone by.
We speak old vows that have long been spoken,
And weep a long-gone woe,—
For you must know our hearts were broken
Hundreds of years ago.

THE EPIC

"To arms!" the battle bugles blew.
The daughter of their Chief was she,—
Lord of a thousand spears and true;—
He but a squire of low degree.
The horns of war blew up to horse:
He kissed her mouth; her face was white:
"God grant they bear thee back no corse!"
"God give I win my spurs to-night!"
The watch-towers' blazing beacons scarred
With blood-red wounds the face of night:
She heard men gallop battleward;
She saw their armor gleam with light.
"My God, deliver me and mine!
My child! my love!"—all night she prayed:
She watched the battle beacons shine;
She watched the battle beacons fade....
They brought him on a bier of spears.—
For him, the death-won spurs and name;
For her, the grief of lonely years,
And donjon walls to hide her shame.

THE MINSTREL AND THE PRINCESS

I
He had no hope to win her hand,
A harper in a loveless land,
And yet he sang of love;
And marked the blue vein of her throat
Swell with mute rage at every note:
And when he ceased she spake him then,—
"Such whining slaves are less than men!"
And anger in her dark eyes wrote
Contempt thereof.
II
He had no hope to win her hand,
A harper in a hostile land,
And yet he sang of peace;
And marked how mock'ry curled her lip
With scorn as, 'neath each finger-tip,
The chords breathed pastoral content:
Till haughtiness, that beauty lent
To beauty, sneered, "Would'st feel the whip?—
O fool, surcease!"
III
He had no hope to win her hand,
A harper in a tyrant's land,
And so he sang of war—
"Oh, fling thy harp away!" she said.
"O war, thy singers are not dead!—
Seat thee beside me; now I see
Thou art for battle, and must be
Brave as thy song.—Well hast thou pled.
My warrior!"

THE ALCALDE'S DAUGHTER

The times they had kissed and parted
That night were over a score;
Each time that the cavalier started,
Each time she would swear him o'er:—
"Thou art going to Barcelona!—
To make Naxera thy bride!
Seduce the Lady Iona!—
And thy lips have lied! have lied!
"I love thee! I love thee, thou knowest!
And thou shalt not give away
The love to my life thou owest;
And my heart commands thee stay!
"I say thou hast lied and liest!—
For—where is there war in the State?—
Thou goest, by Heaven the highest!
To choose thee a fairer mate.
"Wilt thou go to Barcelona
When thy queen in Toledo is?—
To wait on the haughty Iona,
When thou hast these lips to kiss?"
And they stood in the balcony over
The old Toledo square;
And, weeping, she took for her lover
A red rose out of her hair.
And they kissed farewell; and, higher,
The moon made amber the air;—
And she drew, for the traitor and liar,
A stiletto out of her hair....
When the night-watch lounged through the quiet
With the stir of halberds and swords,
Not a bravo was there to defy it,
Not a gallant to brave with words.
One man, at the corner's turning,
Quite dead, in a moonlight band—
In his heart a dagger burning,
And a red rose crushed in his hand.

ISHMAEL

Ishmael, the Sultan, in the Ramadan,
Amid his guards, bristling with yataghan,
And kris,—his amins, viziers wisdom-gray,
Pachas and Marabouts, betook his way
Through Mekinez. For he had read the word
That in the Koran says, "Slay! praying the Lord!
Pray! slaying the victims!" so the Sultan went
Straight to the mosque, his mind on battle bent.
In white burnoose and sea-green caftan clad
He entered ere the last muezzin had
Summoned the faithful unto prayer and let
The "Allah Akbar" from the minaret
Invite to worship. 'Neath the lamps' lit gold
The many knelt and prayed.
Upon the old
Mosaics of the mosque—whose high vault steamed
With aloes' incense—lean ecstatics dreamed
Of Allah and his Prophet, and how great
Is God, and how unstable man's estate.
Conviction on him in this chanting low
Of Koran texts, the Caliph's passion so
Exalted soared—lamped by religious awe—
Himseemed he heard God's everlasting law
'Gainst unbelievers; and himself confessed
The Faith's anointed sword; and, so impressed,
Arose and spoke. The arabesques above—
The marvellous work of oriental love—
Seemed, with new splendors of Heaven's blue and gold,
Applauding all. And, ere the gates were rolled,
Ogival, back to let the many forth,
War was declared on all the Christian Earth.
Now had his army passed the closed bazaar,
Thro' narrow streets gorged with the streams of war:
Had passed the place of tombs and reached the wall
Of Mekinez, above which,—over all
Its merloned battlements,—in long array,
Seraglios and towers, his palace gray
Could still be seen when, girt with pomp and state,
The Sultan passed the city's scolloped gate.
Two dozing beggars, each one's face a sore,
Sprawl'd in the sun the city's gate before;
A leprous cripple and a thief, whose eyes—
Burnt out with burning iron—as supplies
The law for thieves—were wounds, fly-swarmed and raw,—
Lifted shrill voices as they heard or saw;
Praised God, and bowed into the dust each face,
With words of "victory and Allah's grace
Attend our Caliph, Mouley-Ishmael!
Even at the cost of ours his day be well!"
And grimly smiling as he grimly passed,
"While Allah's glory is and still shall last—
Now by Es Sirat!—will a leper's word
And thief's avail to help us?—By my sword!—
Yea, let us see. Whatever their intent
Even as 'tis offered let their necks be bent!
'Though words be pious, evil at the soul
The prayer is naught!—So let their prayer be whole.
Better than gold is death, meseems, for these:
So by the hands of you, my Soudanese,
They die," he said; and even as he said
Rolled in the dust each writhing, withered head.
And frowning westward, as the day grew late,
Two bleeding heads stared from the city gate
'Neath this inscription for the passer-by,
"There is no virtue but in God most high."

IN MYTHIC SEAS

Beneath great saffron stars and skies, dark-blue,
Among the Cyclades, a happy two,
We sailed; and from the Siren-haunted shore,
All mystic in its mist, the soft wind bore
The Siren's song; where, on the ghostly steeps,
Strange foliage grew, deeps folding upon deeps,
That hung and beamed with blossom and with bud,
Blue-petaled, pallid, or, like urns of blood,
Dripping; or blowing from wide mouths of blooms
On our hot brows cool gales of dim perfumes.
While from the yellow stars, that splashed the skies,
O'er our light shallop brooded mysteries
Of calm and sleep, until the yellower moon
Rose, full of fire, above a dark lagoon;
And, as she rose, the nightingales, on sprays
Of heavy, Persian roses, burst in praise
Of her wild loveliness; their boisterous pain
Heard through the pillars of a ruined fane.
And round our lazy keel, that dipped to swing,
The spirits of the foam came whispering;
And from gray Neptune's coral-columned caves
The wet Oceänids rose through the waves;
With naked limbs we saw them breast the spray,
Their pearl-white bodies tempesting the way;
Their sea-green hair, tossed streaming to the breeze,
Scattering with brightness all the tumbled seas.
'Mid columned aisles, seen vaguely through the trees,
We watched the Satyrs chase the Dryades;
Heard Pan's shrill trebles and the Triton's horn
Sound from the flying foam when ruddy Morn,
With dewy eyelids, opened azure eyes,
And, blushing, rose, and left her couch of skies.
We saw the Naiad, clothed with veiling mist,
Half hidden in a bay of amethyst,
With shell-like breasts, and at her hollow ear
A shell's pink labyrinth held up to hear
Circean echoes of the Siren's strains
Imprisoned in its chords of vermeil veins:
Then, stealing wily from a grove of pines,
The Oread, in cincture of green vines;
Her cautious feet, fragrant and twinkling wet,
Set in a bed of rainy serpolet;
Her flower-red lips half-parted in surprise,
And expectation in her wondering eyes,
As in the bosk a rustling noise she hears—
A Faun, sly-eyed, with furred and pointed ears,
Who leaps upon her, as upon a dove
A great hawk pinions from the skies above.
Diana sees, and on her wooded hills
Stays her fair band, the stag-hounds' clamor stills—
A senseless statue of cold, weeping stone
Fills his embrace; the Oread is gone.
The stag-hounds bay; again they urge the chase,
While the astonished Faun's bewildered face
Paints all his wonderment, and, wondering,
He bends above the sculpture of a spring.
And so we sailed; and many a morn of balm
Led on the hours of sunny song and calm:
And it was life, to her and me, and love,
With the fair myths below, our God above,
To sail in golden sunsets and emerge
In golden morns upon a fretless surge.
But, ah! alas! the stars, that pierce the blue,
Shine not for ever; clouds must gather, too.
I knew not how it came, but in a while
I found myself cast on a desert isle,
Alone with sorrow; wan with doubt and dread;
The seas in wrath and thunder overhead;
Deep down in coral caves the one I love—
No myths below; no God, it seemed, above.

LOKÉ AND SIGYN

A daughter of Winter, Skade, a giantess,
One twisting serpent hung above his head,
So that its blistering venom, roping down,
Beat on his upturned face and tortured him.
Him had the gods of Asgard, Odin and Thor,
Weary of all his wiles and evil ways,
Followed, and after many stormy moons,
Within the land of giants overcome,
In Jotunheim, and dragged beneath the world,
Into a cave the earthquake's hands had built,
A cavern vast and terrible as that,
They tell of Hel's, whose ceiling is of snakes,
That hang, a torrent torture, yawning slime,
In whose slow stream eternal anguish wades.
And for his crimes they chained him to a rock,
His lips still sneering and his eyes all scorn,
And left him with the serpent over him,
And, gathering round him from their larvæ lairs,
Monsters, huge-warted, eyed with wells of fire.
But Sigyn, Loké's wife, stole in to him,
And sate herself beside his writhen limbs,
And held a cup of gold against the mouth
Of ceaseless poison dripping in the gloom.
Was it her voice lamenting? or the sound
Of far abysmal waters falling, falling
Down tortured labyrinths of hollow rock?
Or was't the Strömkarl? he whose hoary harp
Is heard remote; who, syllabling strange runes,
Sits gray behind the crashing cataract,
Within a grotto dim with mist and foam;
His long thin beard, white as the flying spray,
Slow-swinging in the wind and keeping time
To his wild harp's notes, murmuring, whispering
Beneath the talons of his hands of foam.
Was it the voice of Sigyn? whose sad sound
Soft from the deathless hush detached itself,
As some pale star from darkness that reveals
The heavens in its fall; or but the deeps
Of silence speaking to the deeps of night?
Sad, sad, and slow, yea slower than sad tears
That fall from blinded eyes, her sad words fell:—
"O Love! O Loké! turn on me thine eyes!
Thy motionless eyes that woe has changed to stone;
That slumber will not seal nor any dream.
Yea, I will woo her down; woo Slumber down,
From her fair far-off skies, with some old song,
The croonéd syllables of some refrain,
Sung unto childhood by the mothers of men.
Or shall I soothe thine eyes shut with my hair,
The fluttered amber of deep curls, until
They shall forget their stone stolidity,
And sleep creep in between the linéd lids
And summon memory and pain away?
"Pale, pale thy face, that seems to stain the night
With pallor; hueless as the brows of death.
So pale, that knew we Death, as mortals know,
I'd say that he, mysterious, had laid hands
Of talons on thee and had left thee so.
So still! and all the night is in my heart.
So tired! and sleep is not for thee or me,
Never again for our o'erweary limbs!
Around, the shadows crouch; vague, obscene shapes,
In horrible attitudes; and all the night,
Above, below, seems so much choking fog,
That clogs my tongue, or with devouring maw
Swallows my words and makes them sound far off,
Remote, deep down, emboweled of the Earth.
And then again it hounds them from my tongue
To sound as wildly clamorous as the hills
Sound when Earth shakes with armies; men that meet
With Berserk fury, shouting, and the hurl
And shock of iron spears on iron shields,
And all the world is one wild wave of helms,
And all the air is one wild wind of swords,
On which the wild Valkyries ride and scream.
Dread cliffs, dread chasms of rocks howl back my words
While yet they touch the tongue to grasp the thought;
And all the vermin, huddled in their holes,
Creep forth to glare and hiss them back again.
"How long! how long ago since we beheld
The rose of morning and the lily of noon,
The great red rhododendron of the eve!
How long! how long ago since we beheld
Those thoughts of God, the stars, that set their flowers
Imperishably in the fields of heaven,
And the still changing yet unchanging moon!
So long, that I unto myself seem grown,
As thou, long since, to rock; in sympathy
With all the rock above us and around.
My countenance hath won, long since, with thee,
The reflex of an alabaster black
That builds vast walls around us, and whose frown
Makes stone thy brow as mine. O woe! O woe!
And now that Idun's apples are denied,
Are not for lips of thee nor lips of me,—
The apples of gold that still keep young the gods,—
The years shall cleave this beautiful brow of thine
With myriad wrinkles; and, in time, this hair,
Brown, brown, and softer than the fur of seals,
Shall lose its lustre and instead shall lie,
A drift of winter in a winter cave,
A feeble gray seen in the glimmering gloom.
But I shall age, too, even as thou dost age.
Yet, yet we can not die; the immortal gods
Can never die! what punishment to know!
What pain to know we age yet can not die!
Death will not come except with Ragnarok.—
That thought be near! take comfort from the word,
The dark word Ragnarok, which is thyself;
Thy vast revenge; thy monster synonym;
Thy banquet of destruction. Thou, whom fate,
The Norns, reserve to war and waste the worlds
Of gods and men, with thy two henchmen huge,
The wolf and snake, the Fenris, that devours,
The Midgard, that engulfs the universe.
O joy! O joy! then shall those stars, that glue
Their blinking scales unto old Ymer's skull,—
The dome of heaven,—shudder from their spheres,
A streaming fire; and thou, O Loké, thou,
Elected annihilation, shalt arise,
To devastate the Earth and Asaheim.
And as this darkness now, this heavy night,
Clings to and chokes us till we, strangling, strive
With purple lips for light, and feel the dark
Drag freezing down the throat to swell the weight
That houses in our hearts and peoples our veins,
So shall thy hate insufferably spread
In fires of Hel, in fogs of Niflheim,
Storm-like from pole to pole, o'erwhelming all.—
The Twilight of the Gods, behold, it comes!
The Twilight of the Gods!—The root-red cock
I seem to hear crow in the halls of Hel!
The blood-red cock, whose cry shall bid thee rise!
"But, oh! thy face! paler it seemeth now
Than icy marble; and the serpent writhes
Its rustling coils and twists its livid length,
Hissing, above thee, pouring eternal pain.—
Oh, could I kiss the lips o'er which he swings!
The lips that once touched living flame to mine!
At which sweet thought, as some sick flower of drought
At dreams of dew, my lips with longing ache!
—Oh, could I gaze once more into thine eyes
Whose starry depths outstarred the midnight heavens!
Or see them laugh as golden morning laughs,
Leaving her steps in roses on the hills,
The peaks that wall the world and pierce the clouds;
The hills, where once we stood, among the pines,
The melancholy pines that plume the crags,
And rock and sing unto the still fiords
Like gaunt wild-women lullabying their babes!
Then could I die e'en as the mortals die,
And smile in dying!—But the serpent baulks
Each effort to behold, or on loved lips
To ease the torture of my soul's desire.
Thy face alone is comfort to my gaze,
Like some dim moon silvering through night and mist.
—Now from their lairs again the monsters creep;
I feel their ghastly touches, and their eyes
Draw steadily nearer, wandering will-o'-the-wisps;
The serpent strives to fang me as he swings;
And in the cup's caked gold the venom swims,
Seethes upward horribly to the horrible edge."
She ceased. And then, heard through the echoing night,
The chained god spoke, tumultuous violence
And rage in every word. His utterance seemed
Large as the thunder when it, rolling, plants,—
Heavy with earthquake and impending ruin,—
Seismic feet on everlasting seas
And mountains silent with eternal ice.
His eyes in hideous labor; and his throat,
Corded and gnarled with veins of boisterous blood,
A crag of fury; and his foaming lips,
A maelstrom of rebellious agony,
Of thwarted rage and wild, arrested wrath.
Fierce vaunter of loud hate, one mighty fist,
Convulsed with clenchment, in its gyve of ore,
Headlong for battle-launching, at the gods
Clutched mad defiance, madder blasphemy;
Yet all unhurled and vain as mists of morn,
Or foam, wind-wasted on the sterile sands
Of rainy seas, when Ran, from whistling caves,
Watching the tempest-driven dragon wreck,
Already in her miser fingers feels
The viking gold that has not yet gone down.
Then all the cave again is dumb with night.
He sees the spotted serpent writhe above;
He sees the poison streaming towards his eyes.
And now her cup is brimmed; but one more drop
Will float the filth gray o'er the venomed edge.
Into the river slowly flowing by
Swiftly she pours the vitriol torture: scarce
A tithe of time it takes, but in that time
The reptile's vomit slimes his helpless face,
Burns to the bone.... All his fierce muscles twist,
Wrenching the knotted steel that locks his limbs,
And shriek on shriek divides the solitudes.
The ocean roars; and, under toppling skies,
The mountains avalanche from pine-pierced sides
Their centuries of snow. Then all the night
Once more is filled with silence and with sighs.

WAR-SONG OF HARALD THE RED