The wind was on the forest,
And silence on the wold;
And darkness on the waters,
And heaven was starry cold;
When Sleep, with mystic magic,
Bade me this thing behold:
This side, an iron woodland;
That side, an iron waste;
And heaven, a tower of iron,
Wherein the wan moon paced,
Still as a phantom woman,
Ice-eyed and icy-faced.
And through the haunted tower
Of silence and of night,
My Soul and I went only,
My Soul, whose face was white,
Whose one hand signed me listen,
One bore a taper-light.
For, lo! a voice behind me
Kept sighing in my ear
The dreams my flesh accepted,
My mind refused to hear--
Of one I loved and loved not,
Whose spirit now spake near.
And, lo! a voice before me
Kept calling constantly
The hopes my mind accepted,
My flesh refused to see--
Of one I loved and loved not,
Whose spirit spake to me.
This way the one would bid me;
This way the other saith:--
Sweet is the voice behind me
Of LIFE that followeth;
And sweet the voice before me
Of LIFE whose name is DEATH.
SUNSET IN _Autumn_.
Blood-coloured oaks, that stand against a sky of gold and brass;
Gaunt slopes, on which the bleak leaves glow of brier and sassafras,
And broom-sedge strips of smoky pink and pearl-gray clumps of grass,
In which, beneath the ragged sky, the rain-pools gleam like glass.
From West to East, from wood to wood, along the forest-side,
The winds,--the sowers of the LORD,--with thunderous footsteps stride;
Their stormy hands rain acorns down; and mad leaves, wildly dyed,
Like tatters of their rushing cloaks, stream round them far and wide.
The frail leaf-cricket in the weeds rings a faint fairy bell;
And like a torch of phantom ray the milkweed's windy shell
Glimmers; while wrapped in withered dreams, the wet autumnal smell
Of loam and leaf, like some sad ghost, steals over field and dell.
The oaks against a copper sky--o'er which, like some black lake
Of DIS, dark clouds, like surges fringed with sullen fire, break--
Loom sombre as Doom's citadel above the vales, that make
A pathway to a land of mist the moon's pale feet shall take.
Now, dyed with burning carbuncle, a Limbo-litten pane,
Within its wall of storm, the West opens to hill and plain,
On which the wild geese ink themselves, a far triangled train;
And then the shuttering clouds close down--and night is here again.