The noisy dark was deaf and blind,
Still the strange spirit strayed or stood,
And I could only hear the wind
Go roaring through the riven wood.
‘Art thou the fate for some wild heart,
That scorned his cavern’s curve and bars,
That leaped the bounds of time and art,
And lost thee lingering near the stars?’
It was so still I heard my thought,
Even the wind was very still,
The desolate deeper silence brought
The lynx-moan from the lonely hill.
‘Art thou the thing I might have been,
If all the dead had known control,
Risen through the ages’ trembling sheen,
A mirage of my desert soul?’
The wind rushed down the roof in wrath,
Then shrieked and held its breath and stood,
Like one who finds beside his path,
A dead girl in the marish wood.
‘Or have I ceased, as those who die
And leave the broken word unsaid,
Art thou the spirit ministry
That hovers round the newly dead?’
The auroras rose in solitude,
And wanly paled within the room,
The window showed an ebon rood,
Upon the blanched and ashen gloom.
I heard a voice within the dark,
That answered not my idle word,
I could not choose but pause and hark,
It was so magically stirred.
It grew within the quiet hour,
With the rose shadows on the wall,
It had a touch of ancient power,
A wild and elemental fall;
Its rapture had a dreaming close:
The dawn grew slowly on the wold,
Spreading in fragile veils of rose,
In tender lines of lemon-gold.