This is the low-doored house among funereal trees,
Where one May dusk they brought Louise,
With music slow,
And sobbing low,
The old slaves crooning eerily.
She died asleep and weeping wearily.
She had a poppy-strange disease;
A beauty that was more than carnal,
How durst they leave her in the charnel?
She might be sleeping eerily!
Hush! They have locked her in the tomb,
Among the silences and wilting bloom;
Life's melody of voices drifts away--
Mistaken!
Was it an owlet in the thorns that moaned?
The churchyard moonlight turns ash-gray--
Hush! Pale Louise!
The dead must not awaken.
Something a twittering cry is uttering.
Is that a bird there on her breast,
Lost in the fragrant gloom,
Wakening to morning twilight in the tomb?
No bird--it is her folded hands a-fluttering!
I think I should have died to see her rise
Among the withered wreaths
And spider-cluttered palls
Of her dead uncles' funerals,
While streams of horror fed the blue lakes of her eyes.
I known I would have died to see her rise.
_Over the fields a voice calls from the tomb,_
_Pleading and pleading drearily,_
_But all the slaves have fled_
_And left her talking to her coffined dead,_
_And whimpering eerily._
_The young birds die_
_To see old hands thrust from the window-slit,_
_Clutching the light in handfuls of despair;_
_Stark fear has stroked the color from her hair,_
_While from the window comes_
_The babbled whisper of her prayer._
_Night is like spiders in her mouth;_
_By day they spin a film across her eyes._
_Now night; now day--_
_The birds come back;_
_It is another year:_
_The withering voice they fear_
_Has nothing more to say._
But yet once more
Her kinsmen came
With nodding plume and pall
And music slow,
And, sobbing low,
They fluttered back the door, and lo!--
She leaned against the slit-window
Her web-like, bony hands against the wall,
And all about her, like a summer cloud
Rippled her leprous hair,
One bleached and shuddering shroud.