You melancholy fogs of winter roll
Your pestilential sorrow o'er my soul,
And swathe my heart with your long winding-sheet,
And drench the livid leaves beneath my feet,
While far away upon the heaven's bounds,
Under the sleeping plain's wet wadding, sounds
A tired, lamenting angelus that dies
With faint, frail echoes in the empty skies,
So lonely, poor, and timid that a rook,
Hid in a hollow archstone's dripping nook,
Hearing it sob, awakens and replies,
Sickening the woeful hush with ghastly cries,
Then suddenly grows silent, in the dread
That in the belfry tower the bell is dead.